Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body: Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 2023)is an homage at once to a country as it is to community. From found letters of exiled Cubanos to wills and testaments both extant and imagined, this collection asks all of us: what is our collective responsibility toward one another? There are multiple homes in this collection, home in the living rooms of Cuban expatriates waging bets on the next Miss America and, not least, as Blanco himself so eloquently concluded our chat, home in the act of writing itself.
Over café, Richard and I spoke at length. As two Latino poets with our own deep commitments to civic engagement and the belief in the American democratic experiment, we rattled on and off the page.
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The Rumpus: You’ve really seemed to take on this outward-facing, political orientation in your work. What role do you see your poetry intervening in spaces like the American civic process, politics, community organizing?
Richard Blanco: I evolved into that. A big turning point was serving as presidential inaugural poet for President Obama. Suddenly, I was thinking a lot about what is the civic role of poetry in our country, dawning what I call a poet of social conscience. In a sense, it’s the same question of home, place, and belonging that I’ve always written about, just now a more intimate and autobiographical way. It’s about asking that question for our whole country, and of myself: How do I belong in this country? Do I? How do people like me who don’t really understand or feel that they are part of that American narrative or excluded from it in some way. The poetry became aimed at that, not just at myself, but who are these other people.
The other part of it is cultural. As you know, in almost every other place, poetry occupies a very different space. It’s not rarified as it is in America. It’s part of a collective voice, the proverbial campfire, it’s political not in an overt sense but because it raises up feelings and it gets people to think and unite around a feeling. I’ve always considered myself a poet of the people, and part of that was simply growing up as an immigrant, a gay kid who didn’t have much access to the arts and the humanities. I never wanted to make art that was in any way elite.
It’s important to present the problem, but it’s the poet or artist’s job to open up a new dialogue, to ask questions that aren’t being asked, to turn a subject or an issue on its head and see what we’re not looking at. We do that by adding real names, faces, tears of joy and sorrow to these abstracted issues, whether it’s through my autobiographical witness or through stories.
Rumpus: That’s beautiful. I do see this enormous, exuding generosity and belief in the goodness of this country that comes out of your work. This sense of appealing to our better angels, teaching us to see, or rather re-see. You have a poem called “América” and in the second section, you have these tíos in an intergenerational conversation about communism and Cuba and they say,
The bile of Cuban coffee and cigar residue
filling the creases on their wrinkled lips;
clinging to one another’s lies of lost wealth
ashamed and empty as hollow trees.
The poem seems to navigate masculinity, race, and nationhood. How do you see these three axes come together in your work?
Blanco: In a way, I am still asking the same question Whitman was asking: What is America? And that poem you’re referencing (in the question) was my very first poem in my very first creative writing class and my assignment was to write a poem about America, which is kind of the same assignment that Obama gave me: “Write a poem about America,” twenty-five years later.
One of the things that’s challenging is going past this liberal gaze of “I just want to consume this poem.” How do you go past that? How do you write authentically with that person behind you? People are looking for that redemption. That’s what being Latino, being brown is. We’re a selling point, we can still be good.
Rumpus: What I love about the book is there’s a lot of experimentation happening—diagrams, a poem to read sideways. You’ve got so many epistolary poems where you’re addressing, sometimes you’ll indent, sometimes it’s a series of “Whereases.” Can you talk about these forms you’re using where it seems to harken to classical traditions of the letter, the address?
Blanco: The epistolary form brings in a certain level of intimacy, honesty, a dialogue with my subject matter. I’ve always loved that form. It’s a tricky form. On the one hand, you have to craft a poem where you are really authentically talking to somebody. But also, you have to be aware there is someone, the audience, overhearing you. You have to give the poem information without being myopic.
Rumpus: I’m drawn to this idea on honesty, and I suppose the obverse of that is we as a people are not honest, or that there are poems which don’t prompt as much honesty, that are more performative. Would you say the epistolary strips that a little bit? What would you say about the epistolary that prompts that kind of affect?
Blanco: In a novel, the job of the author is to completely back out and let the characters play it out. If the author steps in, the conceit of the novel is broken. In a poem, it’s exactly the opposite. The more present the poet is, in fact, it demands it from you. Unless I can feel it in the poem, the poem’s not done. I learn something new in my life I didn’t know before. That means I dug deep enough.
Rumpus: There’s this poem in the beginning called “Playing God,” where we have these stanzas that are almost Lego-like, not quite contrapuntal but approximating it, where the speaker is Rubik’s Cubing himself in an orientation, ostensibly his sexuality. How do you see the relationship between constructing an image and archetype?
Blanco: I had never really come out in my poetry in reasons I couldn’t understand until my third book, Looking for the Gulf Motel. I didn’t conceive the poem in terms of a safe space, in terms of home, a psychological home, a safe space, and how we build it through communities, through language, by being resocialized to find a place we can live our lives without shame or fear.
But here’s the other caveat as a writer: I’m gay. So what? What’s the story beneath that identity marker? The middle section in that book takes a deep dive on gender roles, gender expectations. My grandfather was one of the gentlest people in the world who watched Westerns and saw men shoot each other. My father didn’t have much say in the family. He was like a piece of furniture. I cannot separate my story as a gay man without questioning my other identities. They all belong to each other.
It’s about telling the cultural coming of age story. I wanted to be this other America that I didn’t know was a myth. It wasn’t a rejection of my culture, rather a process of coming to appreciate when you’re ready to receive that. It’s imprinting in you growing up.
Antonio: I’m glad you brought this up. In the poem, “Queer Theory,” you have this single block, a strophe. No spacing, a series of directives. It feels chaotic. You read it, and your eyes don’t have space to rest. It’s almost a shorthand receipt of writing on the commandments of how not to be gay, or at least “look the part.” “Never dance alone in your room,” for instance reads almost comical. Almost.
How do you negotiate humor and other kinds of affects in a moment where it seems to be the opposite: violent, menacing, terrorizing, that suppressing this part of the speaker that’s being buried? More broadly, how do you negotiate the emotional engine of a poem as you traverse difficult topics?
Blanco: The whole overwhelming feeling, my grandma was berating me, suffocating me, so the poem can’t stop. It’s machine-gun fire. Spit spit spit. It’s a rant. I’d written that poem first in third person. What happened was I sounded like I was whining. I wasn’t really connecting any kind of empathy.
Even in her verbal abuse, to me, the poem is about finding empathy for yourself, your life, and the people in it. When I switched to her voice, now people are going to enjoy that moment as silly as it was. But now, she’s incriminating herself. She’s showing her ignorance and her love as well. Not necessarily trying to eradicate me but trying to let me survive in a world she sees as completely hostile. She doesn’t want anyone else to treat me the way she does.
When I use humor, there’s always gotta be a little jab. Humor comes back to my cultural sensibility. Cubans, Latinx peoples in general—there’s certain joie de vivre, a different rapport.
Rumpus: I feel the same way. I was so blown away by this series, “Found Letters from 1965: El Año de la Agriculture,” not so much because it was an anomaly to the book but because the approach was distinct. Here you’re appropriating the voice of the state. Talk to me about the ways you’re trafficking history and archive and official documents. Is this a counter-narrative, a counter-history? How would you classify both the process of writing this poem and the things you’re trying to do in this poem that seem distinct than the other poems?
Blanco: Thanks for pointing that out. In putting together The Selected Poems, it isn’t always about your best poem but really about poems that were important but that never got a lot of playtime or that were different, that disrupt or add what I might be known for already. Part of what I’ve always considered myself is the idea of being an emotional historian. You’re born in this milieu of exile and immigration and then it fed all this other stuff of history of this Cuba you don’t even know about. “What was the Cuban Revolution. I’ve been hearing about this since I was 2 years old.” Understanding historical circumstances in which things happened, the nuances and perspectives of my mother versus my father. It’s almost like fieldwork.
My mother grew up very poor and her entire family stayed in Cuba, which is part of her great tragedy but there’s also a political reason for it: because they were much poorer than my father’s family and they benefitted from it. When I found those letters, I was just floored—the pain they must’ve gone through. What I didn’t realize: she wrote this eight-page letter, single-spaced, typed, in response to her farewell letter to her sister (who’s living in the United States by the way). But she never mailed that letter.
I was playing with the epistolary form, but a borrowed one. It’s a found poem. It’s almost like call and response, my response to what I am reading and also how I imagined that of my mother’s. “How do you step off that plank? What was that last day in Cuba look like?” It was a very important poem. I really enjoyed that.
Rumpus: With a poet like yourself, who has so much esteem and lineage and such a catalog of work, I do wonder how you think about your own canonization. Richard Blanco. The nation’s poet laureate. National Humanities Medal recipient. To quote President Biden, “this century’s Walt Whitman.” The greatest hits, like a singer, you become known for these poems but then it’s like you said, there are other poems that are equally as intimate, so how do you convey to people like “Hey I’m not just a Cuban gay Obama poet but I have other sides of me and concerns?” How do you, from a personal and poetic way, insist upon that even when people are trying to package you literally?
Blanco: I have and haven’t struggled with the question of that. It depends on what day you ask me. To be honest with you, I love being representative because we need representation. Here’s what I like to do and this helps me not feel weird about that. To say to people, “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Irish, Canadian, we all are operating on the same five emotions, and I’m just here with my window dressing, this poem is really for you. This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”
I try to shift the message and expectations to readers so they understand. It’s really a universal story. This is one of the most American stories you can think of. This is America at the heart. Not that I am Whitman. But I am Whitman, right. I am Whitman, right. I am asking the same question.
I think there’s also, in some way, such a poor education of readers by our school systems not in terms of literacy but cultural literacy.
Rumpus: Yeah, we’re not this Amazon infallible brown superman. At the same time, there is this pressure by America to redeem itself through us. Our progress, our ability to advance forth is both the indictment and redemption of America in the same breath.
Maybe we can end on this. I see my generation, the current landscape of American poetry, as preoccupied with identity politics, which is important, but what I love about your work is its emphasis on our common ties. And I feel at this age that that is such a minority opinion. I don’t read Latino authors who have that impulse you do. How do you traverse our current moment in American letters and culture where we have this tendency to go with our flock? We bookshelf ourselves as we’re the Latino section. How do you negotiate that, personally, politically, poetically?
Blanco: I think I agree with you. I see it in my graduate students. A lot of it is very content driven. You can’t critique the content. It turns into a therapy session versus the poem itself. We are in a place where the extremes have almost met, in some weird way, and I’m speaking generationally, it’s a slippery topic, you want to be respectful. But the more polarized we get, the more each side has zero tolerance—we’re not accepting the other.
Rumpus: I see that in your work, the death of the author. That’s signaling the death of a self, the death of self that is fed up with these traditional notions of the poem as a kind of barometer, this vessel of emotion, or the instrumentalizing as a kind of coping mechanism when you’re like post-post traumatic like what comes after the poem as a vessel of trauma. What is the afterlife of a poem?
Blanco: I’ve gotten deeper into homing in that without so much so cultural specifics. That’s what the new poems are doing in the book. They’re really looking at home by having conversations with other artists, other painters, other photographers, with other poets: with Elizabeth, with Hemmingway, they’re looking at a real sort of the psyche of home. For me, this book is also about letting go of those traditional notions of home and belonging and surrendering them and also surrendering the ego.
I’ll leave you with this. The other home I found is in the art itself.
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Author photograph by Matt Stagliano
