Cubanamerican Obama’s ‘inaugural poet’
By the Progreso Weekly staff
Richard Blanco, a gay 44-year-old Cubanamerican, was chosen by President Barack Obama to read a poem during the presidential inauguration on January 21.
“Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to his life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background,” Blanco told The New York Times in an interview at his home in Bethel, Maine, where he lives with his partner.
“There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some ways that when I’m writing about my family, I’m writing about him,” he said.
Blanco was “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain and imported to the United States,” says his official biography, “which means that his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of his family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid, where he was born. Forty-five days later, the family moved again and settled in New York. Eventually, they went to Miami, where he grew up and was educated.”
The family legend, says The Times, is that Blanco (Richard, not Ricardo) was named after President Richard Nixon, “who took a very hard stand against Fidel Castro.”
His parents offered him three professions from which to choose: doctor, lawyer or engineer. Since he was “a whiz at math,” said the Times, he chose engineering and designed roads, bridges and buildings in Miami.
During the third decade of his life, he began to wonder about his “identity and cultural negotiations and who am I, where do I belong, what is this stuff about Cuba my parents keep talking about?” White decided to study creative writing and took classes at Florida International University.
The result was a lot of poems and books. Among the latter: “City of a Hundred Fires”, “Directions to the Beach of the Dead”, “Looking for the Gulf Motel”.
The complete list of his creations and his biography appear on his website:
http://www.richard-blanco.com/richard-blanco-poet/
The White House selected him as “Inauguration Poet” on December 12. Since then, he has written three poems, of which Obama will choose one for the opening ceremony in Washington.
“The challenge is how I can be me in the poem,” he told the Times, “how to have a voice that is intimate but that can encompass the multitude of people that shape America.”
The inauguration’s theme “Our People, Our Future” resonates in his heart, Blanco told the New York daily. He wants to write about the common sense of all Americans, “the salt-of-the-earth sense that I think all Americans have, of hard work, we can work it out together, that incredible American spirit that after 200-plus years is still there.”
To read the original New York Times article, click here.
To listen to an interview with Richard Blanco which appearned on National Public Radio, click here.
