For All of Us, One Today

by Richard Blanco

  In the end, all these conversations and feedback gave me the courage and confidence to move forward with “One Today” and also confirmed what I intuitively had not wanted to admit to myself about “Mother Country”: it was too autobiographical for an occasional poem. Though it was a good poem and fit the spirit of the occasion, it didn’t fit the purpose of the inauguration as well as “One Today.” Also, I realized that for years I had subconsciously believed my work had been well received mostly because of my subject matter as a child of exiles, focused on issues of cultural identity, displacement, and a proverbial search for home.

  But I discovered that it wasn’t what I wrote about but how I wrote about it that made my poems my poems, namely, the density of imagery and lushness of language that are signatures of my work. Once that clicked, I knew the task at hand was to revise “One Today” along those lines, not by virtue of altering the subject matter but by infusing it with those same qualities and breathing my voice into it. And—as Sandra Cisneros advised—it was important that I approach the poem with the same loving tone as if I were speaking about (or to) my mother.

  I returned to the first draft of “One Today,” ready to work on it with renewed enthusiasm and vigor. But by then I only had one week to turn in the final version, which I’d have to read to hundreds of thousands of people and millions more watching on TV all over the world! Like many poets, I usually put poems away for weeks, months, sometimes years before returning to them. The distance allows for fresh perspective, new insights, and renewed inspiration. But without the luxury of that distance and time, my critical skills became clouded. It became difficult to distinguish exactly what was working from what was not working in the poem, difficult to make editorial decisions with the same ease and confidence that I usually do when not under such intense pressure.

  There is a popular misconception that poetry—perhaps all art—happens out of sheer genius or inspiration, and that all artists work alone. That hasn’t been my experience. Most writers I know rely on someone they can trust with their work, which essentially implies someone we can also trust with our lives. Luckily, I found both a long time ago in Nikki Moustaki, a brilliant author and poet in her own right, and also my best friend for more than twenty years. I reached out to her, as I have many times before, needing her input more than ever given the circumstances. Here are some suggestions, she wrote after reading my first draft of the poem. Take these in the spirit in which they are intended, with love and wanting you to be YOU. We dove into discussions about the poem through e-mails and telephone calls that drifted well into the early hours. My editorial skills resurfaced and my confidence grew as I looked over the poem, fine-tuning its images and metaphors, pruning language, and scrutinizing every line, word, and sound. Working together through several drafts of “One Today,” it dawned on me that our teamwork was itself a reflection of the poem’s very message of unity and togetherness.

  All of us as vital as the one light

  we move through . . .

  What do I love about America? That was the question that eventually yielded the very first draft of “One Today.” My initial answer was simply, The spirit of its people. And I had begun writing the poem on that impulse, trusting that it and the creative process would lead me to discover something magical. Indeed, much of the creative process happens unconsciously, and I’m always amazed by the way unconscious feelings surface in poems, leading to a new or refined understanding of ourselves. How they always seem to teach me something about myself and my world that I hadn’t really acknowledged before. And how they often affect the reader in the same way. During the revision process, as I took a microscopic view of the poem, I began to uncover the many conscious and subconscious experiences—past and present—that had influenced and informed its images, themes, and construction.

  Most significant, I discovered that the inspiration for “One Today” harkened back to the story I was born into: the story of the close-knit community of Cuban exiles that instilled in me a deep sense of mutual respect, compassion, and oneness. I remembered my brother and me spending almost every weekend with our parents’ haciendo visitas—visiting relatives and their old friends from Cuba, especially the elderly or less fortunate than us who had just emigrated. My mother would show up with a homemade flan or a home-sewn blouse, sometimes a garbage bag full of toys or clothes my brother and I had outgrown, and sometimes just a can of Cuban coffee she had found on sale. My father would bring his tool box, ready to replace a leaky faucet, install a new door lock, or fix a broken chair.

  And there were those who helped us: When we emigrated from Spain to New York City, my tía Olga and tío Armando had already set up an apartment for us in their building with two months’ rent prepaid and a job for my father working at a bomb factory. Three months and four days after we arrived in the United States, my father wrote a letter in his poor English thanking the welfare and social services departments for their help and letting them know we would no longer be needing assistance. I stole a carboncopy of that letter from my mother’s keepsake box; it’s now one of my treasured mementos. Every now and then, when I am organizing my office closet or riffling through it looking for something I’ve lost, I find the letter and am struck again by my parents’ courage and dignity.

  The same spirit of my exile community was rekindled when Mark and I moved nearly five years ago to Bethel, Maine, a small rural town of about 2,500 residents. I had expected to become enchanted by its quaintness—and I did. But more so, I was charmed by its townspeople, who, from the start, went out of their way to make the two gay guys from Miami (as we were known affectionately) feel welcomed—albeit in the most polite and reserved manner typical of New Englanders. Apple pies and housewarming gifts appeared on our porch from Cheri, our real estate agent; Pok Sun inducted us into the coveted chopstick club at her Korean restaurant; Susan and Mike made sure we didn’t miss a single summer barbeque or dinner party in town. Perhaps I was still clinging to that television-brand America, but as months turned into years, I began to feel right at home in Bethel, fulfilled by the simple pleasures of walking down our Main Street and waving hello to friends with a smile, spending fifteen minutes talking (and gossiping) in the post office, or running into friends at a restaurant and putting tables together to break bread.

  When the news of my selection was made public on January 8, Bethel lived up to my small-town ideal. Jewel, a yodeling champ and folk artist extraordinaire, sweetened our lives with homemade macaroons. Holly gave Mark and me free “make-overs” and began selling copies of my books at her beauty salon. Julie eased our stress with free massages. The proprietors of the Bethel Inn, Mame and Allen, set up a room free of charge for my interviews with National Public Radio and the New York Times. Mark’s business partners at the lab told him to take off all the time he needed to help me, and his office assistants (Tara, Bailey, Willow, and Sarah) also helped with phone calls and all sorts of miscellaneous tasks. All this generosity let Mark continue managing logistics, freeing up my time to keep working on “One Today.” In fact, it was living proof of the central themes of unity and support that had taken root in the poem. Flash forward to my homecoming celebration, organized by the community on my forty-fifth birthday: a six-foot-long cake, a reading at the auditorium with six hundred attendees, a lifetime ski pass, and the naming of a ski run after “One Today.”

  In Miami there was a similar outpouring. I received dozens of heartwarming messages of congratulations from proud friends, relatives, former professors, and engineering coworkers. My mother’s neighbors thought she had won the lottery when the news vans swarmed her house. Suddenly my baby pictures and photos of our family vacations, birthday parties, and weddings flashed on every news channel, as well as interviews of my mother and brother telling our story. A wave of nostalgia came over me, even as I continued working on “One Today.” I wanted to hop on a flight and return to the city where most of my life had unfolded: childhood summers with my grandparents in South Beach amid the
then-crumbling Art Deco hotels; years later, the nights of my youth at those same hotels, renovated into nightclubs where I learned to dance salsa; the countless number of stops for shots of Cuban coffee and guava pastelitos at cafeterías dotting every street of the city, the same streets and neighborhoods I renovated as an engineer. Flash forward to my Miami homecoming: 1,400 people in attendance at the Arsht Center of the Performing Arts for my poetry reading, where I was presented with the keys to the city and a proclamation marking February 22 as Richard Blanco Day in Miami-Dade County.

  Clad with pines or flanked by palm trees, edged by snow-capped mountains or sea-green shores, Bethel and the Miami I grew up in are similar communities in heart and spirit. Miami was the city of my story, and Bethel was the American counterpart of the story I had been foolishly searching for on old TV sitcoms. There was a real America after all, just not the one I had imagined. Although worlds apart, both my nostalgic memories of my Miami and my present-day Bethel came together through the writing of “One Today.” I realized that both communities held several essential things in common for me: respect for the importance of each individual, compassion for one another, and, most important, a deep, abiding sense of dignity and unity.

  My poetic sensibilities understood these as the most endearing and enduring qualities of the American spirit. “One Today” became an extension of those values and fundamental beliefs that I wished America to reconnect with as a nation-village, especially in light of so much strife and political division in recent years. In my mind, the purpose of being the inaugural poet and of my poem was to transcend politics and envision a new relationship between all Americans. I wanted America to embrace itself, so to speak, and recognize—no, feel—how we are all an essential part of one whole, if only for those few minutes when I would stand at the podium. Finally I grasped the underlying tension I had been searching for in the poem: namely, the wishing for, the striving for the ideal of being or becoming one, not just for a day, but every day. I came to understand the poem as a kind of prayer, an invocation, with an appeal to our higher selves at its emotional center.

  . . . equations to solve, history to question,

  or atoms imagined . . .

  Many other artistic revelations and decisions happened while sitting with America at my kitchen table in Bethel working on the poem, sometimes until dawn. In fact, the very first line, One sun rose on us today . . . , struck me as I gazed out the kitchen window, watching the sun brushing the tips of the hemlocks that buttress my house. It was the same sun of forty years before, when I had wanted to believe it was no bigger than a sunflower; the same sun peek-a-booing through the palm trees in Miami since I was a child; the same sun my soul had taken in countless times rising over the ocean. One sun prompted the images of one sky, one wind, one ground, and one moon. These became the armature of “One Today,” tapping into the transcendent power of nature as a common human denominator that connects all our individual stories. One of the great challenges of writing an occasional poem is how to be intimate and conversational while also being grand and Whitmanesque. The natural imagery became a stand-in for the grandness of the poem, in contrast to the intimate details of real people going about their daily lives. The poem began to alternate, breathe, zoom in and out between these two modes.

  Another challenge that emerged was establishing the poem’s boundaries: Was it possible to have a poem that harkened back to the landing of the Pilgrims and moved forward through hundreds of years of history? No, I decided, thinking such a poem would be too diluted or else it would have to be a two-hundred-page epic. I made a conscious choice to keep the focus of “One Today” on a contemporary setting—a snapshot of the country at our present moment, of which I was a part.

  This triggered yet another challenge: how to make the poem mine, that is, how to invest myself personally and be vulnerable in the poem, rather than appear distant and preachy? This is why I decided to include specific autobiographical references to my mother and father, and also a moment when I refer to myself as the living poet behind the voice of the poem, all with the intention of creating an honest, emotional bond between the audience, the poem, and me, making their stories, my story, our story. This same intent prompted me to also include more subtle nods in the poem relating to my life as an engineer, as a gay man, and as a Latino.

  In the end, there was no doubt in my mind that “One Today” was the perfect choice for an inaugural poem, one I could proudly read about and for America. Meeting my deadline, January 14, 2013, at noon, I e-mailed the final version of “One Today” to the inaugural committee. They forwarded it to the White House for final review and approval. Surprisingly, within an hour I heard back from the committee with news that the White House had signed off on my final submission with the words They love it. I wasn’t asked to change a single word or comma. This delighted me, of course, especially thinking that perhaps President Obama himself had read and approved the poem. Was it he who loved it?

  Regardless, “One Today” was done. For the first time in over a month I was able to take a deep breath and rest. To recharge, I returned to my regular small-town routine for a few days: taking Joey for long walks in the park, catching up on gossip at the post office and grocery store, and getting together for dinner to celebrate with friends—finally.

  . . . as these words break from my lips

  But there was one more very important thing left to do: practice the delivery of the poem. Surprisingly, the inaugural committee didn’t coach me in any way or ask me to recite the poem for them beforehand. They completely trusted me, but I knew I had to practice—and I did in a most unusual and unexpected way.

  A few weeks prior to the inauguration, my brother and nephews had visited us during the holidays and made a snowman that was still “alive” in the field below our deck. One morning I woke up to find Mark on the deck setting my reading folder and a photo of President Obama atop a makeshift podium he fashioned out of a cardboard box. Read to the snowman, he insisted. You should rehearse outside. Feel what it’s going to feel like.

  At first I thought it was a silly idea and that perhaps Mark was cracking under the stress. But then it occurred to me that at the inauguration I would indeed have to read into an immense open space before hundreds of thousands. It would be a good idea to envision that moment and get a sense of reading outdoors, especially in the cold. If I could handle the Maine winter with ten-degree highs, surely DC wouldn’t be a problem. One sun rose on us today . . . I began, feeling the stare of the snowman’s stony eyes—he was a tough audience! I shifted my gaze toward the sun—my sunflower—afloat over the Presidential Range (how ironic) of the White Mountains in the distance. I spoke into the wind breezing through the pine trees, aimed my words up to the blank blue sky, and heard them fall over the ground frozen with all its surprises for spring, as if standing inside the very poem I had written when the first blush of the moon’s face appeared.

  My greatest fear, of course, was that I’d stumble over the words while I was at the podium. So I memorized the poem during the days before we left for Washington. Like a madman, I read it out loud in the shower and while driving into town, mumbled it to myself while jogging on the treadmill and walking down the grocery store aisles. More than merely memorizing, I was rehearsing the poem’s performance as if it were a song to be sung, internalizing it physiologically: the timing of my breaths, the cadences, the sound of each syllable, until the poem was embodied in me. Poetry was born in the oral tradition, something I have always strived to honor, believing that reciting a poem should create an experience for the listener unique from that of simply reading the poem on the page.

  The delivery of “One Today” was especially important as a poem that would be heard before it would ever be read. I had about five minutes—one chance—to captivate Americans and connect with them. As such, I continued to revise the poem like a musician, reworking phrases that sounded off-key or felt too convoluted for the ear, marking dramatic pauses and underlining words
like notes I wanted to hold.

  After rehearsing the poem for about a week, I knew it was time to put it away, let it rest for a while, and trust it as I trusted that the snow would melt even as I watched it fall outside my window that January. Believe in it as much as I believed the bulbs Mark had planted would break through the wet earth into pink and yellow tulips come spring.

  . . . alongside us, on our way . . .

  Mark and I had lived in Washington, DC, for over three years, from 2001 to 2004, so the city was still somewhat familiar when we arrived. This was comforting in no small way, but even more comforting was the village that traveled to the capital with me and had been with me emotionally and spiritually since I first received the news. Mark arranged for us to all stay in the same hotel: my good friend Nikki, acting as my social-media guru; Alison Granucci, my agent from Blue Flower Arts speakers’ agency and also a kind of godmother, offering spirited words and joining me in impromptu dances in my hotel room; Meredith Beattie, a natural-born leader with a rare combination of chutzpah and love, representing City Year, a national school-mentorship program I planned to partner with; my cousin Sergio Baradat, a brilliant artist who would design the cover and interior illustrations for this book, as well as an elegant broadside of the poem; David Naranjo, my publicist, who offered his expertise and energy to help us navigate the media frenzy; and, of course, my mother, brother, and mother-in-law.