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Marilyn Hacker has
compared to Legna Rodriguez

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to another bicultural poet.

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Elizabeth Bishop writing
that Rodriguez is

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quote equally adept with
fixed forms whose containment

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liberates volatile subject.

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Legna Rodriguez was born in
Havana and came to the US

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at the age of nine when in the
midst of the Cuban Revolution,

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she was evacuated to the
US as part of Operation

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before operation Peter pan.

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Her consciousness--
consciousness of exile

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was linguistic from
the start in one poem,

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in her new book garden of exile.

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She recalls reading her as Jane
in her new Midwestern school

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and confidently
pronouncing it, Honey.

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And that exquisite
linguistic consciousness

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remains in more
closely informing

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the poems for instance
deconstructing.

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The patriarchal
stereotype of all she

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reminds us that Eva spelled
backwards is my way.

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The poems in gardening of
are rich and descriptive

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carry the reader into what
Marilyn Hacker has called

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the double sense of enduring
and profound displacement,

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and of carrying our only home
from wherever we drop anchor.

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These are the traces in
Rodriguez's own praise

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of the heat and
Leander of memory.

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Will you welcome
please, a vibrant writer

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a poet of pleasure--

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[APPLAUSE]

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