Getting to know inaugural poet Richard Blanco

Looking forward to the presidential inauguration this morning and hearing the poem from Richard Blanco – the gay, and very handsome inaugural poet.

If you want to learn more about him, Blanco has written a fascinating column for CNN.

Here are some excerpts:

As my official bio reads, I was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States — meaning my mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of my family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid, where I was born. Less than two months later, we emigrated once more and settled in New York City, then eventually in Miami, where I was raised and educated.

By the time I was 45 days old, I belonged to three countries. My first newborn photo appears on my U.S. alien registration card. As an adult, I see this as a foreshadowing of what would eventually obsess my writing and my psyche: the negotiation of identity.

My sexual identity was something I also had to negotiate. The antagonist in my coming-out story was my grandmother, a woman as xenophobic as she was homophobic. Anything she perceived as culturally “weird,” she also labeled as “faggotry” — “mariconería.” This included my playing with toys like G.I. Joes and action figures of super heroes (Wonder Woman being my favorite). Convinced that I was queer — she had good intuition, I guess — she was verbally and psychologically abusive because she was also convinced she could make me a “real” man.

She scared me into a closet so deep and dark that the idea of living as a gay man was completely, like a career in arts, out of the realm of possibilities. And so, like many gay men of my generation, I led a straight life, and was even engaged twice to be married, until I came out in my mid-20s.

Being named poet laureate for the inauguration personally validates and stitches together several ideals against which I have long measured America, since the days of watching “My Three Sons” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns. For one, the essence of the American dream: how a little Cuban-American kid on the margins of mainstream America could grow up with confidence, have the opportunity to become an engineer thanks to the hard work of his parents who could barely speak English, and then go on, choosing to become a poet who is now asked to speak to, for and about the entire nation.

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Blanco was also recently interview by PBS’ Jeffrey Brown. He talks about his poetry and even reads some of it.