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Before graduating college, Marilyn Hacker married a high school friend: science fiction writer Samuel Delany.
The marriage didn't last, though: Soon after, Hacker revealed she was a lesbian, while Delany made known he was gay.
This was just one story shared by Hacker, an award-winning poet, translator and editor, as she read selections from her new book, "Desesperanto," at the Zimmerli Art Museum Wednesday.
She discussed life experiences that shaped her work.
After her marriage, she eventually went back to school and earned a bachelor's degree in Romance languages.
Hacker and Delany separated soon after their marriage began and both came out of the closet. They became vocal advocates of queer rights.
Delany writes of their relationship in his autobiography, "The Motion of Light in Water."
In the ensuing years, Hacker developed her poetry,
Hacker - who is also a teacher, cancer survivor and lesbian activist - spoke as part of the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series.
Hacker composes poetry in a style called literary formalism, but also writes in conventional forms, including sonnets and ballads.
But within that category of poetry, she is a neo-formalist, meaning that she deals with contemporary issues and the modern human experience in her work, while still paying close attention to precision and form.
This is significant because most contemporary poets tend to write in free verse.
The strictness with which Hacker abides by poetic models, however, doesn't limit the range of her subject matter. Nor does it create a barrier between her and her readers.
Rather, as English department chair Richard Miller said at a dinner prior to the event, it's "enabling to work within a framework."
Brent H. Edwards, associate professor of English, introduced Hacker as not only a poet with "dizzying virtuosity," but also as "one of the great American city poets."
Her work was published in several prominent literary magazines, and she served as editor of the Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994.
Her work has earned her an array of awards, including the Lamda Literary Award, The Nation's Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Poet's Prize and the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review.
At the reading, Hacker read a variety of poems. Some were infused with jazz and imagery of lower Manhattan.
Two warmly recalled the life of Janis Joplin and Hacker's admiration of the late singer. She concluded the program with a poem called "Elegy for a Soldier," about the late writer and political activist June Jordan.
"I write the way that's most interesting to me, and other people write the way that's most interesting to them," she said.
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