Marilyn Hacker has compared to Legna Rodriguez
to another bicultural poet.
Elizabeth Bishop writing that Rodriguez is
quote equally adept with fixed forms whose containment
liberates volatile subject.
Legna Rodriguez was born in Havana and came to the US
at the age of nine when in the midst of the Cuban Revolution,
she was evacuated to the US as part of Operation
before operation Peter pan.
Her consciousness-- consciousness of exile
was linguistic from the start in one poem,
in her new book garden of exile.
She recalls reading her as Jane in her new Midwestern school
and confidently pronouncing it, Honey.
And that exquisite linguistic consciousness
remains in more closely informing
the poems for instance deconstructing.
The patriarchal stereotype of all she
reminds us that Eva spelled backwards is my way.
The poems in gardening of are rich and descriptive
carry the reader into what Marilyn Hacker has called
the double sense of enduring and profound displacement,
and of carrying our only home from wherever we drop anchor.
These are the traces in Rodriguez's own praise
of the heat and Leander of memory.
Will you welcome please, a vibrant writer
a poet of pleasure--
[APPLAUSE]