Cross Campus

Inaugural Poet Speaks on “Being American” to Lawrence High Crowd

“Mami, we are Americanos now.” Richard Blanco squeezed his mother’s hand moments before he was greeted by Joe Biden and Barack Obama as he arrived on the podium as the first Hispanic, openly gay poet to deliver the nation’s inaugural poem this past January.

“America is coming out of the cultural closet,” he said when presenting to the Pentucket region. Blanco spoke to students from Lawrence and Andover at the Lawrence High School Performing Arts Center on Tuesday.

Blanco, 45, brought humor and honesty to his talk about growing up in what he called a cultural purgatory between the diverse “real America” and an imagined world presented through the television screen and history books, which he, as the first in his family to speak English, brought home to his Cuban mother, father and brother.

“The big questions are, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where am I from?’ And these are universal questions. You could have grown up in the same town as your great-grandfather was born, but that question is universal. There is a human drive to answer the question, ‘Where do I belong?’”

Blanco said he rejected his Cuban culture as a teenager. As he grew up, however, his poetry inspired in him a love of his heritage.

“Watching my cousins come here reminded me of my experiences. When I saw them, I fell in love with the country all over again,” he said. He took his cousin Roxana, who had been in America for just three months, to New York City with his mother. When his mom suggested, “take her to the Statue of Liberty,” Blanco bristled. “That’s so old-fashioned. That’s so 1800s.” But the result was a moment that lead to a touching poem about the unique experience of becoming American.

A chord that struck with many of the Lawrence students who come from similar closely-knit families was the obvious pride he took in his family, especially his parents.

He introduced his poem “Papa’s Bridge,” written when his father was in the hospital, intertwining memories of his father and his career as an engineer and using bridges as a metaphor. Students hushed as he read the poem and were touched by the story of his last memories with his father.

He said, “Engineering made me a poet. I had learn to write really effectively.” When he read “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, he said, “I realized what poetry is. The simplest things in life, the most extraordinary things in life—poetry captures that.”

Students loved when he admitted,“Spanish was my worst subject.” He explained that didn’t speak the academic Spanish the teacher spoke. His language was connected to his culture, as he spoke Spanish at home and learned English during the day.

Many students were reassured when he admitted how difficult the writing process is for him. “It’s scary. If you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right. It’s scary trying to dig deep into yourself.”

He continued, “It takes a lot of emotional work and time. Curiosity us what motivates me. It’s like when you’re playing a guitar, trying to find the right chord and when you find it, you get back to rhythm and make something out of it. It might not be a great song, but you’ve started.”

He talked about the challenge of writing the inaugural poem, titled “One Today.”

“Richard, do you love America, honestly?” he recalled asking himself as he wrote the poem. His breakthrough moment came when he was standing in his kitchen in Maine, watching the emotional response to the Sandy Hook shooting. He saw people of all races hugging each other and coming together. Then he told himself, “Only in America that happens.”

“I realize I am American really more so because there really weren’t two worlds. It’s really one story, and we all share it.” That shared experience, he said, is the spirit of the American people.

He talked about Robert Frost, a graduate of Lawrence High, who wrote John Kennedy’s Inaugural Poem. “It’s amazing to think what Frost’s poem meant to me as a Latino gay man. It speaks to our ability to always change. The Pilgrims were exiles, immigrants. We are the same, I am a person of Cuban descent. I am an American. Period.”