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Title: Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0-393-05418-7 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A History Lesson
Comment: Though Desesperanto is rather challenging (with every other poem requiring the use of either a French-English dictionary or Google), Marilyn Hacker's use of everyday places and real scenarios draws the reader into her world. Before finishing some poems, such as "On the Stairway", one is almost forced to look up certain things (in this case, Violette Leduc). Desesperanto is not just an interactive history lesson. The book serves as Hacker's stepping-stone toward opening the readers' eyes to the lives of writers-- from quests for equality to the perfect little restaurant. Muriel Rukeyser to June Jordan to Violette Leduc, Desesperanto is a wake-up call for every writer, and reader, as to how a poet is as a person, not just as a figurehead.
Rating: 3
Summary: Study your French
Comment: Marilyn Hacker's collection of poems, Desesperanto, is a blend of American subjects and French flair. The poetry collection is a look into the woman herself. Her thoughts, concerns in the world, and her sorrow of the friends that she has lost in the recent years. The poems here are very thought provoking and insightful. They are designed to challenge the reader to go a step beyond the passive reading most are accustomed to. Hacker's use of the French language is designed to add melody and rhythm to the poems, while forcing the reader to run and find a French-to-English dictionary. I'm not sure if this is a book I would choose for beginning poetry classes. It is a work that I would recommend for advance poetry fans and perhaps a women's literature course.
My personal favorite out of the collection is "English 182." The poem explores the emotions of an English professor (Hacker) attempting to gain some sense of her students. The speaker singles out a young African-American student that never participates in class discussions and eventually plagiarizes a paper. The speaker responds by reaching out to the student, by attempting to teach on African-American female poets.
The poem reaches out to me as a Black student because I have often felt isolated in all White classes, learning about figures that I cannot relate to. Despite the fact that the speaker does teach about Black women, it can be very difficult to speak up in a class where you are the only minority. It is my experience that many professors often feel that Black Students should feel obligated to speak out in class. They feel that if there is little representation of the Black race in the class, those few students should feel compelled to speak up for the entire population. Rather than feeling obligated to speak, my of these students retreat into their own shell when faced with the task of being the only Black in class. Hacker does a great job exploring the issues of failure with the poem. I would love to see her tap into theme of insufficient minority representation in the university setting.
Rating: 5
Summary: Read the Book
Comment: I'm glad there are some blank pages in the back of this book because it gives me a place to jot notes. What's happened around this book since it's publication-silence-(i.e. so few reviews) is part and partial/symptomatic of what the poet decries in her first poem-a prologue to the rest of the book-as the "abandoned dissident discourse" brought on by "leaden words like 'Homeland.'"
Are reviewers too lazy, too busy, too afraid to take on the challenges a book like this puts forth? This book asks that we do our homework or that we be as well read, as engaged in the real world of current and past politics and policies as the author is. The book calls for each reader to write his/her own reader's guide (much as Hacker's earlier poem "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found" demanded: "Make your own footnotes; it will do you good.")
Hacker's aim, in part, is to make us aware of the people, the public people, who populate her text, people such as June Jordon, Muriel Rukeyser, Audre Lorde, Neruda, Venus Khoury-Ghata, Hayden Carruth, all of them politically engaged poets who considered themselves charged, as poets, with the duty to speak out against the ills of the world around them. As Hacker does.
Poetry is for an elite few! Poof! This poetry is available to anyone who takes the time to read it-to shut off CNN, "Friends" and FOX News and delight in the sounds that cascade and roll over us and give us what the best poetry has forever: delight to the ear because of its musical/verbal genius, its use of assonance, consonance, rhyme of every kind, alliteration. The poems deliver the kind of pleasure successfully completing a jigsaw puzzle does and at the same time hit home with their portrayal of human experiences that most of us have lived through: the loss of a loved one to cancer, the experience of being jilted by a lover, the fear of death, the fear of life as we know it today in the "homeland."
Read it and think. Read it and look up the proper names. Read it and weep. Read it and carry on.
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Title: Squares and Courtyards: Poems by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0393320952 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979: Presentation Piece, Separations, Taking Notice by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 039332432X Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Selected Poems: 1965-1990 by Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 0393313492 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1995 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: She Says: Bilingual Edition by Venus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker ISBN: 1555973833 Publisher: Graywolf Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Poetry as Survival by Gregory Orr ISBN: 0820324280 Publisher: University of Georgia Press Pub. Date: 29 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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