Poet Richard Blanco speaks at the U.S. Capitol in Washington during the
inauguration for President Barack Obama, left, and Vice President Joe
Biden right. Blanco describes writing the inaugural poem in his new
book, “For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey.” A
Cuban-American who grew up in Miami, Blanco says he was he was forced to
re-examine his relationship with his adopted country in the weeks
leading up to the inauguration.
MIAMI, FLORIDA (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — The Miami neighborhood where inaugural
poet Richard Blanco grew up, in many ways, resembles Cuba his family
left behind. Down the street, a man sells avocados from a small table.
His favorite bakery, a few blocks north, serves guava pastries and cafe
con leche.
As a child and even as an adult, this was home. But
it wasn't necessarily what he imagined as America. "There's always a
little part of you as an immigrant that goes, 'Well, I'm not really
American,'" Blanco said in an interview Monday with The Associated Press
at his mother's home in Miami. "There's that other little boy on TV or
some place I haven't been yet."
That feeling of displacement has been at the crux of his poetry. When
it came to writing the poem for the 2013 inauguration of Barack Obama,
however, he was forced to re-examine his own relationship with America
and what it meant to be American. Blanco was born 45 years ago in Spain
to Cuban immigrants who moved to the United States when he was an
infant.
The experience of writing the poem, Blanco said,
was transformative. "I finally realized that my story, my mother's
stories, all those millions of stories of faces that were looking at me
at the podium, that is America," said Blanco, the nation's first Latino
and openly gay inaugural poet. "I finally realized that I'm not the
other."
Blanco describes the writing the inaugural poem and
two others — and the journey he has embarked on since — in a book, "For
All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey," recently published
by Beacon Press.
Tasked with writing three poems in three weeks,
Blanco said he struggled initially on the direction to take. He doesn't
know how or why he was chosen though he knew the White House committee's
choice was symbolic. He had published three critically acclaimed poetry
books but was only modestly known at the time.
He read the work of other inaugural poets such as
Maya Angelou and Robert Frost and of others, like Elizabeth Bishop and
Pablo Neruda. But by the third day, anxiety began to set in. During
mental breaks, he watched reruns of favorite shows like "Bewitched" and
the "Brady Bunch," characters who encapsulated his fascination with
yesteryear America.
Then came the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary
that left 26 people dead, 20 of them children. "The tragedy opened a new
emotional and creative pathway for me," writes Blanco, who now lives in
Maine. "Writing the inaugural poem wasn't the same assignment anymore. I
suddenly understood that as a Cuban-American, I hadn't explored my
American side of the hyphen as much as my Cuban side."
He began asking questions, probing his relationship
with America: Was this his country? What is the American dream? What
was his place in America? The result were three works: "What We Know of
Country," which explores the childlike vision he grew up with of America
and the more nuanced one he had come to embrace as an adult; "Mother
Country," an autobiographical piece describing his mother's loss of
country and discovery of a new one; and "One Today," which describes the
mosaic of America, united under "one sky, our sky," and chosen by the
White House to be read at the inauguration.
Standing at the podium on that frigid January
morning, he said, he felt that the questions he'd been asking were
finally resolved, surrounded by politicians, his mother, artists like
James Taylor and Beyonce, and the faces of so many Americans who would
write him afterward.
"It was such a powerful feeling to be embraced my
America in a way I hadn't expected," Blanco said. "I think I finally
feel, as I like to say, I discovered home was right here all the time.
Home was in my backyard so to speak."
The year since has confirmed that conviction.
Blanco travels the country, delivering speeches and readings everywhere
from Boston after the marathon bombing, to the Fragrance Foundation
Awards and the Northeast Association of Transportation Engineers (Blanco
himself has worked throughout his adult life as an engineer while also
writing poetry and teaching).
As Blanco says, "The weirder the venue, the more I
like doing it." "I'm excited to explore America and not so much from a
first person anymore, but sort of a 'we' voice, which is what the
inaugural poem was doing," he said.
Part of his motivation now, he said, is to rekindle
the connection he saw Americans experience with poetry when he read at
the inauguration. "A lot of what I've heard back from the inauguration
is these faces of surprise," Blanco said. "They're so entrenched still
in America (with) this idea that a poem has to be indecipherable and
rhyme and be beyond comprehension for it to be a poem. And people are
like, is that a poem?"
But if Blanco spoke of Americans united under "one
today" in his poem, it's also been one of the most divisive years in
memory. Congress remains polarized. The government shut down for the
first time in 17 years. And the public has increasingly lost its faith
in its elected officials.
"I don't think what we've gone through in the last
few years is a great example of being one today," Blanco said. "But
sometimes all of that needs to come out of the wash to get there."
Coming back to Miami from his travels and home with his partner in
Bethel, Maine, he said, is like returning to "the womb." Photographs of
Blanco and his brother, some in the faded pastel hues of decades past,
line the wall of a hallway in his mother's duplex.
"It isn't where you're born that matters, it's
where you choose to die — that's your country," Blanco quotes his mother
in one of the three poems he wrote. That, Blanco says, is the
conclusion he has reached, too.
Follow Christine Armario on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cearmario .
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