[music] welcome to between the covers summer series with a spotlight on south florida writers i'm ann bubcock and with me is miami-dade poet laureate richard blanco he was the country's fifth inaugural poet and he read his moving poem one today at president barack obama's second inauguration his latest collection explores gun violence racism lgbtq issues immigration among other things the title is how to love a country richard blanco welcome thank you for being here great to be here okay so i went to your official web page and your bio says this about you made in cuba assembled in spain imported to the usa so i love that and tell me about your background and how those experiences molded what your poetry is today sure sure so yeah it's a very a very succinct way of giving your money so my initial my genesis into the world so my mother left cuba seven months pregnant i was born in madrid and 45 days after my birth we emigrated once again uh to united states and uh first to new york and then to miami so by the time i was 45 days old i belonged to three countries and yet none had lived in four four class cities world-class cities so to speak um and so i think as i look back on my writing i realized that the question of home place belonging identity country all those related words uh we're gonna figure in very very big in my work um you know they say that in some ways a poet is writing one poem all their life and uh and what that means of course is that the body of work always sort of comes back to to a central obsession or something really at the core of the writer and for me that is that question of home um which is like asking what is love a big word that involves a lot that has many facets but also keeps on changing over time as one changes as once as one's experiences um inform what that word means i want to look at a sense of place your latest collection is called how to love a country and once again serious subjects the pulse nightclub mass shooting racism for most of us simply dark issues and yet your poetry is hopeful so explain that to me well i think it i think it still it comes from my immigrant experience um um i gotta say that book is a very different book for me it's an outlier but it's also an outgrowth of having served as presidential inaugural poet which is such a public moment for poetry right you get and you're asked to write a poem for this country and um before that my work was more focused on more of the autobiographical you know my identity as a cuban american as a gay man how does that fit into the narrative of america what is america um can i love america does america love me back so uh when it came to write this book i i started sort of diving deep into that narrative and seeing not only how i may belong to it but how how the question of home and country is isn't so many it's in so many minds in this country um that was one of the things that happened after the inauguration was people writing letters and emails to me telling me they they finally felt part of this country because of what i represented at the inauguration the hopeful side comes from um from again sort of i mean i'm an immigrant by 45 days but really for my family and my immigrant community uh you know so much that they sacrificed and gave up for uh for the sake of the american dream for uh belief in this country's promises of of equality and of justice and of um prosperity and so my mother and especially has never let that go and so whenever uh they're eternal optimists in terms you know they went through so much sacrifice and trouble this is too big to fail so they're always looking at the positive end of things and i think it in general it's something that when i teach latinx history some people call there is sort of a latinx optimism um which is ironic because immigrants aren't always perceived in this day and age as patriotic or american in that sense and we are actually because of that very nature we don't take we don't take those things for granted and and we're always looking at them um from that perspective so well said uh tell me about that moment that you learned that you were going to be barack obama's inaugural poet what was that like um well um i was driving i was driving home from a uh an event in new york a reading in new york back to my home in maine back then and um i just took the call i thought it was a prank call i thought it was i thought a friend of mine i thought a friend of mine brian had put somebody up to it because it's you know it's completely unexpected you're not shortlisted you don't apply for this um so um my initial response was serve that and then i pulled over aside the road and and texted i mean uh googled who the person that had called and uh there it was presidential inaugural committee so surprisingly my initial reaction wasn't one of complete dread of having to write a poem for the entire country uh it was really overwhelming again getting back to this narrative of incredible sense of gratitude uh knowing that that moment was only possible because of the sacrifices and decisions that my parents had made and my and my grandparents of pursuing the american dream their insistence on education um we were very working class family in miami and we didn't turn on the air conditioning just so we could have we could go to parochial school save money to be able to get a little bit of a better education so it really felt this really interesting moment of you know one feels usually that you've written the story of your life but you don't realize by the time you're born you actually sort of coming in the fifth act that's so much of what happened before you that you're a continuation of the story that began long before you and it was this this really wonderful feeling and in fact my mother was the person that i took to sit with me right next to me in at the inauguration of the platform because in many ways this was her story as much as it was mine you are miami-dade's first poet laureate so what does that mean to you well it's very special in many reasons obviously grew up grew up in miami and and now live part time in miami as well as in maine it's my home city i've ran away from it twice i've come back to for my toys we all have that that kind of relationship with the place we grew up in but um you know it's just it's just extra special to be honored by the very community the very city that made me a poet in many ways right so much of my poetry is about the landscapes both physical and natural and emotional landscapes of having um you know coming coming of age in miami i didn't leave miami till i was 30. plus i want it gives me an opportunity as i said we were working class time and i didn't have i didn't have a lot of access to the arts or humanities so it gives me an opportunity to um to again use poetry in a more public way and hopefully i want to work with underserved communities um and especially underserved uh schools where the arts have been less and less funded and just have them have them have exposure moments with poetry let them let poetry be part of their lives much earlier than it was in mind um because they think it can make it can make a difference in our lives not necessarily make poets out of other of them but just give them another lens with which to look at the world and especially the complex world that we're living in now so first sort of so many so many personal connections and so many wonderful um um sort of it's kind of a coming home gift in some ways a coming home gift well said richard blanco thank you so much for sharing your time with me my pleasure and thank you so much the book is how to love a country that is richard blanco's poetry collection i'm anne boccock i hope you can join me on the next between the covers and you can listen to where podcasts go between the covers wherever you get your podcasts [music] bye