Fifth Inaugural Poet
John F. Kennedy started the trend with renown Robert Frost, Bill Clinton picked the Harlem poet Maya Angelou, and Obama continues the trend as he has picked Richard Blanco (his first inaugural poet was Elizabeth Alexander) to write an original poem for his ceremonial swearing-in on the Capitol steps on January 21, the day after he takes the official oath at the White House.
Mr. Blanco, 44, was chosen because he is an exile from Cuba, gay, and his “America is very similar to the president’s America,” according to Liz Balmaseda, a writer. Blanco, the son of Cuban exiles, said his kinship with the President springs from his own feeling of straddling different worlds; he is Latino and gay. He also was picked, according to Addie Whisenant the inaugural committee’s spokeswoman, because the poet’s “deeply personal poems are rooted in the idea of what it means to be an American.”
After learning of his honor on December 12th, Blanco went about drafting three poems. The Obama team will pick one “occasional poem” to be read at the inaugural ceremony. “The challenge, says Blanco, is “how to be me in the poem, to have a voice that’s still intimate but yet can encompass a multitude of what America is.” In announcing Bianco as his choice, Obama said the poet will celebrate “the strength of the American people and our nation’s great diversity” and tie in with President Obama’s inaugural theme “Our People, Our Future.”
No “hack,” He
In 1997, Blanco won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, for his first collection, “City of Hundred Fires,” which was an outgrowth of his graduate thesis at Florida International University. City was published the next year by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
His second book, Directions to the Beach of the Dead (University of Arizona Press, 2005) has a similar theme: exploration of his Cuban heritage. He was the 2005 winner of the 2006 PEN/American Center Beyond Margins Award.
Mr. Blanco’s most recent collection “Looking for the Gulf Motel,” published last year, incorporates, like his memoir, his life as a gay man in the very conservative Cuban culture. Said the author, “it’s trying to understand how I fit between negotiating the world, between being mainstream gay and being Cuban gay.”
He has taught writing at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, and Georgetown University and American University in Washington and contributed to many literary journals. He has done poetry readings for such places as the Maine Museum of Art in Bangor whose Director, George Kinghorn, knew Richard when he lived in Florida.
Engineering Background
Richard who grew up in Miami has lived in Bethel, Maine since 2008. He is on the Town Board in Bethel as he is a registered professional engineer and holds a BS in Civil Engineering, 1991. . He is now writing full-time, but at one time had a day job as an engineer.
Blanco, a self-described “whiz at math,” helped design bridges, road improvements and an architectural site plan for City Hall in South Miami. His degree, like his master’s degree in fine arts and creative writing, comes from Florida International University.
Richard Blanco Makes History
Blanco is the first immigrant, the first Latino, and the first gay man to be named as the Inaugural Poet, one of the most honored positions for a poet.