Richard Blanco Resources and Photograph

Richard Blanco, photo c. by Xanath Caraza

Poets especially are awaiting the poetry moment during the presidential inauguration Monday, Jan. 21, which is also Martin Luther King's birthday. Those who are familiar with Richard Blanco, his poetry, and his commitment to his art know that it will be outstanding. Since the announcement Jan. 8 that he would be the chosen poet, many links are now available. Also, Xanath Cáraza invited him to Kansas City for The Writers Place, Letras Latinas, and UMKC events. Thanks to her for this great photo. Here is the link to that visit and other Richard Blanco links:

Xánath Caraza recaps University of Missouri-Kansas City visit by Richard Blanco and Fred Arroyo 9.17.12. Both writers talk about code switching. Great photographs of the event and reading.

http://latinopoetryreview.blogspot.com/2012_09_01_archive.html

Richard Blanco’s own website begins with this anecdote: “. . . a woman once asked me to share something about myself that no one would know directly from reading my bio or my work. Somewhat embarrassed, I told the audience about my poetry dance -- a little Michael Jackson-inspired shtick I do around the house in my pajamas when I am high from a good-poem day.”  http://www.richard-blanco.com/ 

PBS News Hour Interview  1.18.13. 5 min. Richard Blanco speaks about the challenge of examining his own work in preparation for writing the occasional inauguration poem. He reads the poem “Betting on America,” about the Miss America pageant on TV when he was a kid. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2013/01/friday-on-the-newshour-inaugural-poet-richard-blanco.html

Bill Moyers blog, article, interview, a YouTube version of “Betting on America.” http://billmoyers.com/2013/01/11/richard-blanco-announced-as-inaugural-poet/

New York Times announcement , Jan. 8, 2013, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, which begins: “From the moment Barack Obama burst onto the political scene, the poet Richard Blanco, son of Cuban exiles, says he felt ‘a spiritual connection’ with the man who would become the nation’s 44th president.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/books/richard-blanco-2013-inaugural-poet.html?_r=0

Poetry Foundation website has bio, sample poems, photo. Also, there is an interview, “Richard Blanco on Being Chosen as the Nation's Fifth Inaugural Poet," by Ruth Graham. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/245312   Inaugural 'sle

To the People

 

 

RICHARD BLANCO REVELS IN MEMORY, STORY, LYRICISM

Photo by Denise Low 2012

The choice of Richard Blanco as 2013 presidential inauguration poet illustrates the deep field of fine poets in America today. Blanco has three books out, all from university presses, not major publishers. University of Pittsburgh Press published Looking for The Gulf Motel (2012), and he toured recently reading from this book. One stop was Kansas City’s The Writer’s Place on Sept. 16 where I saw him (and bought his book). He was reading with fiction writer Fred Arroyo, and that Sunday afternoon readings was a highlight of the autumn.

His second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead (Camino del Sol) from the University of Arizona Press (2005), won the PEN/Beyond Margins Aware; and City of a Hundred Fires (Cienfuegos) won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (1995).

Blanco engages his readers with his intimate voice. Ripples of memory wash through narratives, along with familiar scenery and images. The result is an apparently effortless voice-over that could narrate a biographical documentary. The vivid writing simulates a cinematic mode. Here is the first stanza of his recent book’s title poem:

 LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL

Marco Island, Florida

 There should be nothing here I don't remember . . .

 The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship's wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.
My brother and I should still be pretending
we don't know our parents, embarrassing us
as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk
loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen
loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging
with enough mangos to last the entire week,
our espresso pot, the pressure cooker--and
a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.
All because we can't afford to eat out, not even
on vacation, only two hours from our home
in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled
by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,
where I should still be for the first time watching
the sun set instead of rise over the ocean. . . .

 The poem continues for four stanzas with the refrain “There should be nothing here I don’t remember.” Blanco uses the conditional mood “should” throughout the poem, which works well in Spanish but usually not so well in English. He translates this effectively, so that by the end of the poem, his memories are both present and past: “I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was/and pretend for a moment, nothing is lost.” Blanco successfully melds his two cultures (his parents are Cuban) as well as his two languages.

Paradox is one of the major themes in this poet’s works. “The Name I Wanted” is an autobiographical monologue about his choice of the name “Richard” over “Ricardo”: “Ricardo De Jesus Blanco, I dub thee myself/Sir Richard Jesus White.”

He also navigates his queer identity in “Queer Theory: According to My Grandmother.” He learns from her “You can’t wear cologne or puka shells/and I better not catch you in clogs.” Rules of conventional masculine behavior are clear in the mind of his abuela, but she loves him in her own way: “you will not look like a goddamn queer,/ I’ve seen you . . . / even if you are one.” His grandmother accepts his orientation in her own way, as she accepts the Miss America contest in “Betting on America”: Grandmother plays the bookie in that family scenario. In “Thicker Than Country,” he revels in the contradictions of “A Cuban like me living in Maine?”

He told New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg about the conservatism of Cuban culture: “’It’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay.’”

Blanco is multi-talented—he has an engineering degree as well as an M.F.A. in poetry from Florida International University. Blanco’s website is:  http://www.richard-blanco.com/  Here is an NPR interview/reading with Blanco: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1038124 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151316800518419&set=a.168455698418.118948.575073418&type=1&relevant_count=1&ref=nf#!/photo.php?fbid=10151316800518419&set=a.168455698418.118948.575073418&type=1&permPage=1

NY Times article with Elizabeth Alexander on Writing Occasional Poetry

Occasional poetry is simply poetry written for an event or occasion. My grandmother Carrie Strittmatter Dotson wrote a Christmas poem every year. Here is the link to an article about poet Elizabeth Alexander's thoughts about writing an occasional poem for Barack Obama's inauguration:

NY Times: "Mr. Obama’s inauguration, on Jan. 20, calls for an 'occasional poem,' written to commemorate a specific event. This is not precisely what Ms. Alexander does, but she is preparing for the challenge.

“'Writing an occasional poem has to attend to the moment itself,' she said in an interview, 'but what you hope for, as an artist, is to create something that has integrity and life that goes beyond the moment.'”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/us/politics/21poet.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=elizabeth%20alexander&st=cse

Poet Elizlabeth Alexander to Read at Inauguration

Elizabeth Alexander will be the fourth poet to read at a presidential inauguration. The others are: Robert Frost (1961, Kennedy); Maya Angelou (1993, Clinton); and Miller Williams (1997, Clinton).

She was born in New York City, grew up in D.C., and was educated at Yale (BA), Boston University (MA), and University of Pennsylvania (PhD).

Here is the biography from her home page: http://www.elizabethalexander.net/home.htmlAlexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and professor at Yale University. She is the author of four books of poems, The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, and American Sublime, which was one of three finalists for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. She is also a scholar of African-American literature and culture and recently published a collection of essays, The Black Interior. She has read her work across the U.S. and in Europe, the Caribbean, and South America, and her poetry, short stories, and critical prose have been published in dozens of periodicals and anthologies. She has received many grants and honors, most recently the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954,” and the 2007 Jackson Prize for Poetry, awarded by Poets and Writers. She is a professor at Yale University, and for the academic year 2007-2008 she is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

In this poem, Alexander addresses students of poetry--all of us, if we count speech as poetry. She refers to Sterling Brown, a professor at Howard University and Harlem Renaissance poet. This poem asserts that "I," within poetry, is always a dramatic creation. She asks writers to look beyond cliches to find an authentic "human voice."

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

c. Elizabeth Alexander, from American Sublime (Minneapolis: Gray Wolf, 2005).