Poetry Project: Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco was chosen as the 2013 Inaugural poet by Barack Obama. Overnight, Richard Blanco went from a well-published individual poet to a public representative of the gay and Cuban-American community. Blanco’s inaugural poem, “One Today,” emphasizes the planet, the movement of the sun, the breath, the work, the families, and the stories of Americans to create an image of unity in diversity. But Blanco's use of poetry to create bridges between persons, cultures, geographies, and ways of being began much earlier, as revealed through ten of his poems that appeared in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (Univ. of Arizona Press 2007). I will examine three of them here--"Mother Picking Produce," "What is Not Mine," and "In Defense of Livorno." In these poems, through precise detail, naming things in clear accessible language, and honoring the simple acts of life, Blanco creates a bridge between the reader and the writer.

"Mother Picking Produce" portrays the poet's mother as she is examining fruit at the market in a poem of seven tercets and a final stanza of a single line. Each stanza ends with punctuation, creating the effect of a succession of cameo images. In the first one, the poet describes her hands interacting with the produce -- she "scratches," "presses," "polishes." He contrasts the weathered appearance of her hands in this colorful setting with photographs of slender fingers in black and white photographs, thus bridging the present and the past. The sight of his mother's hands evokes "the folklore of her childhood,"the fruits she once picked directly from a tree rather than selecting in a produce market. He portrays her ability to choose the best fruits as a "skill," suggesting the wisdom she has accumulated over time by performing such daily actions, "humble duties," "habits of living that keep a life a life." In the final image the mother holds up a cluster of grapes and asks her son what he thinks. The poet gives two answers, one as a poet and the other as a son. He thinks of "a new poem about her" and an image of the grapes as "dusty rubies in her hands." What he says is "they look sweet, very sweet." This ending suggests the gap that exists between what we think and what we say, but also the gap between poetry and direct conversation with the subject of the poem. "Mother Picking Produce" creates a bridge across this gap by including both thought and direct speech. The final line emphasizes what he says.

In "What is Not Mine," the poet addresses his absent host. The poem responds to a brief note scribbled by his host on the back of an envelope, "Please/wait for me, I'll be right back." In a single 21-line stanza of four sentences, the poet describes the interior of the empty home he has "borrowed for two days." So much here is unknown, still unexplored: "upside-down cups I haven't drunk from, stacks of plates like faces I've never met." Yet the description hints at intimacies, too: "books in rows like an audience/ that has watched us undress." But the poem remains ambiguous about his relationship with his host, even as he evokes the intimacy of sharing another's space, especially in his or her absence./ The poem ends with a pained image of the coming separation: "I must return/ to what's mine, not wanting to, but having to/ become who I was, before I was here, unsure/ of just how the bare branches can bear winter." The warmth of the silent interior is heightened by the January weather outside; in the final metaphor the poet compares himself to a tree in winter as he contemplates returning to his home.

"In Defense of Livorno" is a prose poem written in Italy in praise of an obscure town he passed through on his way to the tourist destinations of Tuscany and Pisa.

(Finished blog will contain a discussion of "In Defense of Livorno" and a conclusion that brings together the themes in these poems, reaching back to the thesis.)