For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey - Softcover

Blanco, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807033804 ISBN 13: 9780807033807

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2013

Synopsis

For All of Us, One Today is a fluid, poetic story anchored by Richard Blanco’s experiences as the inaugural poet in 2013, and beyond. In this brief and evocative narrative, he shares for the first time his journey as a Latino immigrant and openly gay man discovering a new, emotional understanding of what it means to be an American. He tells the story of the call from the White House committee and all the exhilaration and upheaval of the days that followed. He reveals the inspiration and challenges behind the creation of the inaugural poem, “One Today,” as well as two other poems commissioned for the occasion (“Mother Country” and “What We Know of Country”), published here for the first time ever, alongside translations of all three of those poems into his native Spanish. Finally, Blanco reflects on his life-changing role as a public voice since the inauguration, his spiritual embrace of Americans everywhere, and his vision for poetry’s new role in our nation’s consciousness. Like the inaugural poem itself, For All of Us, One Today speaks to what makes this country and its people great, marking a historic moment of hope and promise in our evolving American landscape.

In 2017, U2 is featuring “One Today” during their Joshua Tree tour throughout the United States and Europe. The poem was projected on the stage screens as people entered the stadium to reflect and discuss America and the American experience.

2014 International Latino Awards Winner: Best Biography – Spanish or Bilingual

About this title

About the Author

Selected by President Obama to be the fifth inaugural poet in history, Richard Blanco joined the ranks of such luminary poets as Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams, and Elizabeth Alexander. Standing as the youngest, first Latino, first immigrant, and first openly gay person to serve in such a role, he read his inaugural poem, “One Today,” as an honorary participant in the official ceremony on January 21, 2013. Blanco was made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States, meaning that his mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid, where he was born. Only forty-five days later the family emigrated once more and settled in Miami, where Blanco was raised and educated. The negotiation of cultural identity and universal themes of place and belonging characterize his three collections of poetry, which include City of a Hundred Fires (awarded the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press), Directions to the Beach of the Dead (recipient of the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center), and Looking for The Gulf Motel (winner of the Patterson Poetry Prize, a Maine Literary Poetry Award, and the Thom Gunn Award). His poems have also appeared in the Best American Poetry, and Great American Prose Poems series, and he has been featured on CBS Sunday Morning, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air, as well as major U.S. and international media, including CNN, Telemundo, AC360, the BBC, Univision, and PBS. Blanco is a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. A builder of cities as well as poems, he is also a professional civil engineer currently living in Bethel, Maine.

Reviews

Richard Blanco occupies a post that only five poets in American history have enjoyed, that of Inaugural Poet, an experience he revisits in this self-described “memoirette.” Short in length and long on entertainment, it’s a dive into the chaotic wonderland of being selected to write and read a poem for an American president on the biggest stage any poet has ever known. How Blanco was selected as inaugural poet for Barack Obama remains a mystery. He was a modestly known poet with three critically applauded books, but he was not in the limelight. However, as an immigrant, a Latino, openly gay, an engineer by trade, and a poet, he is a walking checklist of political issues. This book spotlights Blanco’s creativity, honor, and humility. He reflects on his background, confesses to his “star gazing” at the inaugural, and pays tribute to those closest to him. In addition to the inaugural poem, “One Today,” are two other poems written for the inaugural committee, all accompanied by Spanish translations. This is a beautifully made record of an important moment in poetry. --Mark Eleveld

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Days before our field trip to the science center, Mrs. Bermudez tells our class the sun is actually hundreds of times larger than the earth. We move around it. We’re nothing, zooming through dark space, she says, matter-of-factly, as if it didn’t matter that we were no longer the center of our own little worlds. We, with crayons in our hands coloring dittos of the sun and our nine planets. We, at our desks but also helplessly zooming through cold, empty space. I don’t want to believe her; the sun is the size of a sunflower, I insist. I draw lemon-yellow petals around it and color its center sienna brown. The first time I see a lion I am nine years old, my grandfather’s hands holding me back from the cage I want to open. I can still feel his grip and the lion’s eyes staring at me like tiny, amber planets behind bars, asking me to set him free. My first kiss was under the shade of moonlit palms in Janet Carballo’s backyard, exactly two days before the end of the school year. But I’m still feeling the powdery skin behind her earlobes, smelling her strawberry lip gloss and the orange blossoms in the air already thick with summer. I never saw a comet until I was twenty-four, cupped in the darkness of the Everglades and the arms of a man I loved. It was past midnight on a Sunday, I remember; I didn’t go to work the next day. I’m still sleeping with the mangroves and the ibis, under a masterpiece of stars. The comet’s tail a brushstroke of pure, genius light.

These are more than memories. They are what lives—and relives—inside our bodies, in every cell and heartbeat. The undiscovered DNA of our souls imprinted with the minute details of those eternal moments that change our lives, our stories, forever. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes dramatic, but we know nothing will ever be the same the instant we experience them. And quite often they are unexpected.
    
On the afternoon of December 12, while casually driving back to my home in Maine, I receive a phone call with the news that I have been chosen as inaugural poet. Bewildered, I first wonder if it could be some cruel joke a friend might be playing on me. You mean like Robert Frost? Like Maya Angelou? I ask, wanting confirmation that what I just heard is true. Yes. Yes, I’m told, as I keep driving down the interstate in a daze, trying to speak, trying to fathom what has just happened. But I know. My body knows it’s the most important moment of my life as a poet, a day by which I will mark the rest of my life, the day I learned that I will be named the fifth poet ever in our history to be US Inaugural Poet.

I’m asked by the Presidential Inaugural Committee to write not one but three poems in three weeks. Quite a challenge. But before any apprehension or pressure sets in, the world I move through is transfixed by my jubilation and astonishment: one by one the birches along the highway turn from silver to gold; the bare-branched oaks traced with snow become perfectly balanced sculptures; and the highway stretches right into the sun. I begin the poem in my mind as I drive, musing over a flood of lines and images.
     
But then I catch my eyes in the rearview mirror, and it becomes a portal into my past. In my reflection I see my father holding my hand for the last time, as he is quietly dying in the spare room of the house where he raised me. His eyes blink forever once: goodbye; twice: forgive me; three times: I won’t be back. Gone, into the space beyond the sun and stars. I think of him, my mother, my grandparents—their courage and sacrifices, all their struggles and hard work to make a better life in America for themselves and for my brother and me. Overcome by a wave of immense gratitude, I pull off the highway, step out of the car, and sit on the shoulder, leaning against the car door. Looking into the sky, the sun becomes a sunflower again. This is because of them . . . I keep thinking and repeating . . . because of them . . . all because of them . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807033804
• ISBN 13: 9780807033807
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120