SOURCE: Finch, Annie. “Marilyn Hacker: An Interview on Form.” American Poetry Review 25, no. 3 (May-June 1996): 23-7.

In the following interview, Hacker discusses issues of poetic form in her own work and in the verse of other poets of the past and present.

I interviewed Marilyn Hacker at the 1994 AWP conference in Tempe, Arizona, a few hours after we had joined Carolyn Kizer, Marilyn Nelson (Waniek), and Kathleene West for a panel on the subject of “Formalism in Contemporary Women's Poetry,” moderated by Julie Fay. The panel marked the publication of the anthology A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women by Story Line Press. The panel and the anthology are referred to during the interview.

—Annie Finch

[Finch]: Judith Barrington has written that traditional poetic forms have a different meaning for poets who are isolated or disenfranchised than for other poets. Do you have any thoughts on...