. . . so I could write this poem . . .
How did I come to poetry in the first place? Well, I’m not one of those poets who claims to have been writing poems since I was in the womb. However, I have been possessed by a creative spirit and curiosity since I was a child, taking great pride in my Mickey Mouse coloring books, my Lego houses, and my Play-Doh sculptures. On the other hand, I was also a whiz at math and the sciences. Truly a left-brained, right-brained person, I scored exactly the same on the analytical and verbal sections of every standardized test I ever took. But we were a relatively poor working-class family simply trying to survive; the arts were certainly not dinner conversation. What’s more, there was a cultural divide: my parents didn’t even know who the Rolling Stones or Mary Tyler Moore were, for example, much less Robert Frost. That was part of the story I was born into and the reason why a life in the arts was just outside the realm of possibility. Like many immigrants, my parents strongly encouraged me to pursue a sound, financially rewarding career to ensure I’d have a better life than they had had. So, on the advice of my father, I chose civil engineering, believing that someday, somehow I’d explore my other side, though I didn’t imagine it would ever be through poetry.
After graduating with honors, I established my civil engineering career, making my family—and myself—proud. By my mid-twenties, however, I felt accomplished and confident enough to begin exploring those creative impulses that had lain dormant. I entertained thoughts of becoming a painter or applying to graduate school for architecture but never followed through. Nothing felt quite right. Nothing stuck.
Then the unexpected happened. In the course of my engineering duties at the offices of my employer, C3TS, I began writing inch-thick reports, proposals, and lengthy letters to clients and permitting agencies. Consequently, I started paying very close attention to the way language worked to organize my thoughts, argue a point, or create a persona, noticing the subtle yet important differences between writing “but” instead of “however” or “therefore” instead of “consequently.” I discovered that language had to be engineered in a way, just like the bridges and roads I was designing. It had to be concise, accurate, effective, and precise—the same terms one might use to describe a poem.
Eventually I couldn’t resist the urge to pick up a pen and explore writing for my own personal expression, merely as a creative outlet at first. My earliest poems weren’t very good, but they weren’t terrible either, according to the friends and former writing instructors with whom I shared my work. Somehow—perhaps because I felt I had nothing to lose—I was never bashful about showing my poems to others. Encouraged, the more I wrote and read poems, the more my fascination with language grew.
One night, while pondering “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, I noticed my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner and suddenly became aware of the violence of her hands chopping onions and bell peppers, the dull glint of that same old knife she’d used since I was a child, the faded tomato-sauce stains on her apron, and the smell of olive oil sizzling through the house. In that instant, time seemed to stop, and I grasped the power of imagery to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, into poetry, into a poem where my mother was not just my mother and a wheelbarrow was not just a wheelbarrow.
It was another of those life-changing moments—the moment I got poetry as a real, living thing and decided to pursue the art more seriously, though with only a vague sense of what becoming a real poet meant. So I took the next step and enrolled in a series of creative writing courses at a community college in Miami. There I began formally understanding the discipline of the craft behind the magic of the art. And as I engaged with more seasoned poets, I became more seasoned and serious myself. Eventually I applied and was accepted to the master’s program in creative writing at Florida International University, though I continued working full-time as an engineer. I graduated from the creative writing program the same year I passed my engineering board exam, meaning I got my poetic license and my engineering license at the same time! Richard Blanco, PE, which stood for Professional Engineer as well as Poet Engineer, as I was playfully dubbed by my coworkers. In retrospect, I now consider the irony of how my cultural circumstances led me to engineering, yet engineering led me to write poetry that explored my cultural circumstances. Which came first: the engineer or the poet?
. . . the empty desks of twenty children . . .
Sorting out my cultural contradictions and yearnings and what it meant, by contrast, to be—or not to be—an American became an obsession, the central themes of my poems since graduate school and to this day. I would say I had been writing about America long before I got the assignment from the Presidential Inaugural Committee. As such, at first I felt somewhat comfortable and cautiously confident about writing the inaugural poem. After all, it was the same assignment as the one from years before: Write a poem about America. Or so I thought.
Ready to work the very first day after I got the call, I relocated my laptop and printer from my office to the kitchen table downstairs, as I usually do whenever I tackle a big writing project. Changing my environment helps stimulate creativity, even if it means simply changing the view in the window from the pond at the front of our house to the saw-tooth profile of the White Mountains that grace the windows of my kitchen and living room. My dog, Joey, followed me downstairs, sleeping all day by the fireplace, as did my two cats, Buddha and Sammy, joining me at the table, their tails tick-tocking the minutes, then hours away as I stared at a blank screen.
I spent the next two days in a creative incubation period, reading and thinking about the assignment, its possibilities and potential pitfalls as I waited for the muse to strike. Naturally, I first turned to the inaugural poems by Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, and Elizabeth Alexander, studying their respective approaches and how each fulfilled the assignment. Suddenly, in the company of such great poets, I felt part of a continuum, wanting to honor them with humility and grace by offering my voice, adding to the story they had told in their poems—the story of our country. I was entranced by Angelou’s use of symbols—the rock, the tree, the river—as a form of shorthand that spoke through the power of nature, and impressed by Alexander’s images and catalog of people going about their morning. I mused over the America represented in Frost’s poem in contrast to the present-day America I had to speak to. All these elements would eventually influence the writing of “One Today.”
For further inspiration, I turned to poets I had long admired for the emotional accessibility of their voices that spoke plain and true. Among these, some old favorites: Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hass, Philip Levine, Pablo Neruda, Sandra Cisneros, Adam Zagajewski, Martín Espada, Billy Collins, and Campbell McGrath, my mentor and former professor. All these voices have been essential to the cultivation of my own voice throughout the years. I also paged through poems of some newer favorites who have touched my soul: Rachel McKibbens, Ada Limón, and Marlena Mörling. And I riffled through the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry but was surprised to find so few poems (outside of Whitman’s and Ginsberg’s) that had taken on the subject of America with the breadth and scope I thought necessary for the occasion. Then again, I wasn’t surprised: the occasional poem has never been front and center in American poetry. I came to accept the inaugural poem as its own genre, practically. But still, no breakthrough in the writing.
During the incubation period I also considered my many hats as the first gay, first immigrant, and first Latino inaugural poet, initially feeling a self-imposed pressure or temptation to write poems that would have some political charge. But I soon decided that my selection was enough of a statement. It would be redundant or much too obvious to write a poem that spoke directly to what I already represented as a person. And besides, my work has never been characterized as political. It would have been out of character—disingenuous—for me. Leave the politics to the politicians—that’s their genre, not mine, I thought. I came to understand my role—the his
torical role of the inaugural poet—as visionary and the poem as a vision of what could be (celebratory, uplifting, hopeful), reaching for our highest aspirations as a country and a people. Yet I also knew I had to fold in some kind of tension and hard truth—not come across as a greeting-card poet. But, still, inspiration would not strike.
By the third day, anxiety really began to set in as I faced the reality of my assignment: three poems in three weeks, one of which would arguably be the most important poem of my writing life—and then having to read it to millions on the world stage! I started meditating daily, trying to let go of my apprehensions and surrender to the muse. I called upon my spiritual ancestors for help and guidance. And I worked through a lot of false starts and drafts of poems I chose to abandon. During mental breaks and at lunchtime, or at moments when I was at my wit’s end and had to disconnect, I’d watch recorded episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bewitched, and, my favorite, The Brady Bunch—as I always have, still addicted to that yesteryear version of America. Then the news of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary broke—another one of those moments I instantly knew would live inside me—inside us—forever.
Marcia Brady’s maudlin tears over her broken nose against the tears on the speechless faces of parents who’d lost their children; Mary Tyler Moore’s constant good cheer against President Obama’s grief-stricken countenance during the memorial service; Samantha Stevens’s perfect house in Connecticut and her magical powers against the powerless reality of Sandy Hook—all these sharp contrasts triggered a turning point in my connection with America and a creative breakthrough. Just days before I had spent an entire day with students at a middle school in Connecticut, reading and talking about poetry, lighting up the faces of children like the faces of the children at Sandy Hook. It affected me more than any other American tragedy in my lifetime. And I realized that, in addition to my parents’ story, there was another story I had been born into—the story of America—one I had not yet fully explored or embraced in my writing or my life. Not the imaginary America on TV but the real, real American family I felt I belonged to through the Sandy Hook tragedy, those parents and children that our entire country wanted to hold and comfort. I knew then, without question, that I would do my best to honor and remember them forever in my inaugural poem.
The tragedy opened a new emotional and creative pathway for me. 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. There had always been some small part of me that didn’t really feel American. The true American boy seemed like someone else, not me exactly. Perhaps I had subscribed to the mindset of my exile community, which saw their lives here only as temporary; America was home, but not a permanent one. Just as my parents wanted to return to their island paradise, perhaps all along I had wanted to return to the paradise of that America I had idealized since grade school, though both were just as imaginary, just as unreachable. I began asking questions of myself and our country that I had never before dared to ask or explore. The three inaugural poems I would eventually write, including “One Today,” were, in one way or another, inspired responses to those questions I asked myself.
One ground. Our ground . . .
Do I truly love America? It was a question I had to answer honestly if I was going to write an honest poem. I began thinking of my relationship with America and how it had evolved through different phases, just as my consciousness of love had evolved, especially with my partner, Mark. I saw parallels between a loving human relationship and the love we hold for our country. This was the genesis of the first poem, “What We Know of Country,” which begins as young love begins, with a certain childlike innocence, the perception of the beloved—of country—as flawless. For me, that meant believing the fairy-tale version of Thanksgiving with the much-too-kind-hearted Pilgrims and their gold-buckled shoes, an obsession of mine since childhood, and recalling my fascination with “My country ’tis of thee” and the national anthem, thinking it addressed Latinos like us in the opening line: “O, José can you see . . .”
That innocence eventually expanded into a broader sense of nationality and community, a feeling of belonging to something larger, just as when love evolves from the I to the we and so forth through various stages of understanding, until the romantic illusions I had held about our country ruptured and I faced the historical truths, no longer looking at America through red-white-and-blue-colored lenses. But eventually, as with a relationship, there came a time to forgive and accept that neither love nor country is perfect. Through the process of writing “What We Know of Country,” I discovered that yes, I truly loved America, but not with a blind love or blind patriotism. Rather, with a love that’s much like loving another person, a love that demands effort, asks us to give and take and forgive and constantly examine promises spoken and unspoken.
WHAT WE KNOW OF COUNTRY
Let me take you back into those picture books
from grade school days where pilgrims landed
in tall hats and those gold-buckled shoes I wanted
so badly, where men in white wigs stood tall
in velvet-curtained rooms, feathers in their hands
inking words buzzing off the pages like hummingbirds
right into your heart’s ear: Life, Liberty, Happiness
for We, the people singing of shining seas crossed
under spacious skies to a God-blessed land when
a song and a book was all we knew of country.
Maybe you forgot the capital of Vermont
or Iowa, but surely you remember your eyes
on the map memorizing far away cities and towns
you could hardly pronounce, nor scarcely believe
that vastness, that body of land that belonged to you,
and you to it: spine of the Rockies, blue eyes
of Great Lakes, shoulders of endless coastlines,
curvy hips of untold harbors, rivers like the lines
of your palms traced with wonder beginning
to end, and the tiny dot of your heart marking
proudly where you lived—when what we knew
of country was what we discovered on a map.
We all wanted to live in that house—the one
dreamed up on television with cushy sofas
and crystal candy dishes, where mothers served
perfectly roasted turkeys with instant stuffing,
where children had allowances and perfect teeth,
where fathers drove teal-blue cars with silver fins
to that country club you’d surely belong to
someday. The gunfire and blood of wars beamed
down into your bedroom, but you fell asleep;
men from the moon landed on your rooftop
with empty promises from space, but fantasy
was all we wanted to know of country.
You didn’t want to change the channel, but
you did—remember? You parted the shades,
let light shine on the carpets stained with lies
you’d missed, saw the dust of secrets settled
over the photos, and the house began to creak,
slowly fall apart around you, alone for years
at the kitchen table, the last to know, shouting
at your reflection in the windows: How could you,
America? with no answer you could imagine
for all you knew of country was your rage.
But home was home, so you dusted off
the secrets, cleaned up the lies, nailed down
the creaky floor boards, and started a fire.
You sat with books you had never opened,
listened to the songs you had never played,
pulled out the old map from a dark drawer,
and redrew it with more colors, fewer lines.
You stoked the fire, burning on until finally Okay,
nothing’s pe
rfect, you understood, I forgive you,
you said—and forgiveness became your country.
You stayed, I stayed, we stayed for the boys
when they came back as men, some without
legs, for the fall of the Challenger and Towers
as they fainted from the sky, for the Big Easy’s
brave stranded on rooftops like flightless birds,
for the sea that swelled against the north until
we swept every grain of sand back to shore,
for the lighting of twenty candles for twenty
children, feeling perhaps what we’ve always felt:
to know a country takes all we know of love.
Some days better than others, but never easy:
every morning of every year, of every century
our promise to wake up, stumble downstairs
with our raging hope, sit at the kitchen table
again, still blurry-eyed, still tired, and say: Listen,
we need to talk—that’s what we know of country.
LO QUE SABEMOS DE LA PATRIA
Acuérdate de esos libros de cuentos
de los días de primaria en los que los peregrinos llegaban
For All of Us, One Today Page 2
