{"id":2813,"date":"2018-08-10T10:39:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T14:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/?p=2813"},"modified":"2018-08-27T13:25:07","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T17:25:07","slug":"interview-with-richard-blanco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/2018\/08\/10\/interview-with-richard-blanco\/","title":{"rendered":"Conversation with Richard Blanco"},"content":{"rendered":"

Poet Richard Blanco was the Artist in Residence at the Lunder Institute in the spring. Michael D. Burke, Professor of English at Colby, sat down with him and talked about his career, occasional poems, and teaching poetry. Below is an excerpt of the interview. You could read the full interview on the Lunder Institute’s website:\u00a0https:\/\/www.colby.edu\/lunderinstitute\/artists-in-residence\/richard-blanco\/interview-with-richard-blanco\/<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Micky Bedell.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Burke: How does one get to be selected the Inaugural Poet? There\u2019s nothing that poets submit.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Blanco: No, there\u2019s no application process. There\u2019s no shortlisting. There\u2019s no committee. You just get a call early one day from the White House saying you\u2019ve been selected. It\u2019s kind of a little secretive. I\u2019ve had an opportunity to sit with the President and almost asked him, but I think the White House kind of likes to remain with that mystique, like \u201cThis is the poet we selected.\u201d And I prefer to remain with my romantic version of him sitting in the Oval Office, absorbed in my poetry, and canceling his meetings with Putin. (Laughs). What I will say is this: in conversations with him, I get a sense that if you look at President Obama\u2019s biography as a person who grew up questioning his place in America\u2014in terms of his cultural identity, in terms of his race\u2014that\u2019s mostly what I write about: what is home? What is my place in America? What is the American Dream, and do I belong to that? Does it belong to me? And that\u2019s certainly a connection that I felt with him outside of politics. He is in a way a quintessential American Dream story.<\/p>\n

MB: So they sought you out? That\u2019s even cooler than applying!<\/strong><\/p>\n

RB: Yeah, it\u2019s like winning the lottery without buying a ticket!<\/p>\n

MB:<\/strong> I assumed that it had been a committee\u2014that you had to submit work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

RB: No, they just pick you out. The only thing we ever heard was that one of the representatives for my mother in Miami\u2014he told us that someone reached out and asked us about our family. That was about the only thing we ever heard back.<\/p>\n

MB: So what was your journey as a poet like before that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

RB: Well, it\u2019s not the usual journey, I think. I came to poetry through the backdoor. I\u2019m a civil engineer, a practicing civil engineer all my life, and it was actually when I was working in my engineering office that I started falling in love with language. Engineering, in a way, paved the road for poetry because there was so much writing involved: writing reports, studies, letters; all sorts of oral and written communication skills. And I started excelling at my job because of my writing. The guy that writes the proposal gets the $40 million job, and a proposal\u2019s nothing but a narrative, using words to tell a story\u2014to articulate a vision for the project. That\u2019s actually the person that excels in an engineering office. I should say, though, that I was always the left-brain\/right-brain kid, so I loved everything. But as the child of a working class, immigrant family, the arts weren\u2019t really in the realm of possibility. It wasn\u2019t something that was encouraged or even known how to encourage, so I picked sort of a traditional career at a public institution. And when I was falling in love with, and thinking about, language, I was thinking \u201cHey, what else can I do with this? What\u2019s the weirdest thing I can do? Let\u2019s write poetry!\u201d And I started doodling poetry\u2014really bad poems. You know, \u201crhyme-y\u201d poems. I still thought a poem had to do with daffodils or something from \u201c101 Famous Poems\u201d or those outdated anthologies from high school. Of course, I was about 25 or 26, so it was kind of a quick learning curve eventually. I went and took a couple classes at community college, and then I eventually applied to an MFA program at my alma mater<\/em>. It went sort of like clockwork from there: I got my first book published, second, third, all while I was working as an engineer. I took a hiatus for about five years and taught at Connecticut State, American, and Georgetown, then went back to engineering. But that\u2019s where I was, I had a nice balance: I had my poetry, I had my workshop gigs, I did a few speaking engagements, and then everything changed. By that I mean everything<\/em>. Not only in terms of my career but in terms of the things I\u2019m thinking and writing about. In terms of the things I\u2019ve started to care about and stumbled upon in terms of my mission. In fact, that\u2019s part of why I\u2019m here at Colby: what can I do to make poetry more public? What is the civic role of the poet? How can poetry be made more relevant in the lives of students and the community? How can the arts, in general, do that? Because, again, I was one of those kids who was denied the arts or didn\u2019t have access to the arts. And I love that about the Museum\u2019s mission: how much outreach it does, how much it tries to work about community and realizes that the institution is here for us all. That\u2019s also part of why I\u2019m here, aesthetically and what I write about: poetry that deals with civic issues, poetry of social conscience, poetry that deals more with social justice, things that I never really thought I would write about. And yet, they\u2019re the same question I\u2019ve always had about \u201cWhat is home? What is America? Do I belong here?\u201d Just sort of in a larger spectrum of not just the poetry of \u201cme\u201d but the poetry of \u201cus,\u201d the poetry of \u201cwe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Poet Richard Blanco was the Artist in Residence at the Lunder Institute in the spring. Michael D. Burke, Professor of English at Colby, sat down with him and talked about<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9289,"featured_media":2816,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101975],"tags":[358475,99394,142802,358464,267,414767],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/files\/2018\/08\/RichardBlancoClass-4-e1533914133254.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3U3TZ-Jn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2821,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions\/2821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/thelantern\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}