Reina Maria Rodriguez

The sea doesn't have to be a wall

Kristin Dykstra
Photograph taken by Havana poet Marcelo Morales on August 14, 2015. It depicts poet Richard Blanco with an enthusiastic crowd on the occasion of the reopening of the United States Embassy in Havana, Cuba. Courtesy of Marcelo Morales.

At the function dedicated to reopening the US Embassy in Havana, Richard Blanco read from a poem that declared: “No one is other, to the other, to the sea, whether / on hemmed island or vast continent, remember.”[2] His poem, “Matters of the Sea,” projects optimism about unity and renewal — or is it didacticism? — diplomacy? All of the above? 

December 1, 2016

Kitsch

Rodríguez home, "la azotea," 2013. K Dykstra.
Rodríguez home, "la azotea," 2013. K Dykstra.

Catch and Release – an English phrase – is the title of a poetry collection composed in Spanish by Reina María Rodríguez.[1]  Throughout this book Rodríguez makes repeated reference to objects and occurrences that fall short of desires.  Her pattern of representing shortfall became a conscious element as she completed the composition of the book.

July 8, 2015

Geometries of everything / 'Galiano St. Variety'

Photo/text detail, Variedades de Galiano pp82-83
Photo/text detail, Variedades de Galiano pp82-83

In 2001 Reina María Rodríguez talked to me about the range of her writing:

What matters to me [. ..] is incorporating everything. In other words, not differentiating between literature and the life that I’m living. I think that conserving it there as the work… it’s like capital accumulated toward our possibility of really achieving a powerful state. Not greater, but broader, a passion or a form. Because in each of my books, what has always mattered is the human form of existence itself. Existing and seeing what is happening.

June 30, 2015
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