Thank you so much, Tyler.
And before I get started, I would like to thank Tyler Meier
and ask all of your support for him,
and all of the wonderful staff in the Poetry
Center, those who support us, our donors, everyone.
It's a marvelous place and it's a privilege
to be here with them so help me thank them.
And it's also a great privilege for me
to have this opportunity to introduce Marilyn Hacker.
Of Marilyn Hacker's poetry, the UK newspaper, The Guardian,
notes and I quote, "Hacker convinces us
of the authenticity of a world as it
exists in language through mastery, delight, desire,
passion, and wit.
The wit is sexual and rakish, the passion humane
and dense, the delight is the mastery
that is both formal, yet acrobatically
flexible and free-spirited, often breathtaking."
Hacker's poetry is distinguished by her masterful use
of poetic forms that transcend geography and time, villanelle,
ghazal, renga, or a sonnet cycle.
To these classic forms, she brings
a strikingly contemporary voice, and through them
meditates on decidedly contemporary concerns,
such as AIDS, gay marriage, geopolitics,
and modern city life.
In the New York Times, David Orr recognized Hacker's most
recent book, A Stranger's Mirror,
here to find, New and Selected Poems,
as one of the best poetry books published in 2015, calling
Hacker, and I love this quote, "a swashbuckling wielder
of poetry's most challenging forms."
She is one of our most important and accomplished translators
from the French, and more recently from Arabic.
In his 2009 citation for the PEN award for poetry
and translation, judge Lawrence Venuti recognizes
Hacker's translations of Marie Étienne's King of a Hundred
Horsemen, as follows, and I quote again,
"Hacker's rendering keeps pace with Étienne's metamorphic
French, finding analogous registers and styles,
but she also exploits the heterogeneous resources
of English to release a stream of surprising effects,
each verbal choice becoming an interpretive move that captures
and enriches its French counterpart," end quote.
The essence of translation.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of 15 books of poems including A
Stranger's Mirror, 2015, Names, 2010, Desesperanto, 2003,
an essay collection called Unauthorized Voices, 2010,
and 13 collections of translations of French
and Francophone poets, including Emmanuel Moses, Marie Étienne,
Venus Khoury-Ghata, Habib Tengour, and Rachida Madani.
Diaspo/Renga a collaborative sequence
written with the Palestinian-American poet Deema
Shehabi, was published by Holland Park Press in 2014.
Her awards include the National Book Award,
the Lenore Marshall prize, two Lambda Literary Awards,
the 2009 PEN award for poetry and translation,
the 2010 PEN-Faulkner award, and the international Argana prize
for poetry from the Beit as-Shir/House of Poetry
in Morocco in 2011.
It's amazing.
She is a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Please do help me welcome, and let us
all delight in this opportunity to engage
with the "flexible, free-spirited, swashbuckling
mastery of Marilyn Hacker."