Inaugural poet Richard Blanco to read ‘One Today’

The White House invited him to recite a poem at President Barack Obama’s swearing-in ceremony in January. Blanco knew millions would be watching. And he didn’t want to mess up.

So in the days leading up to the event, he stood outside on the deck of his home in Bethel, Maine, memorizing and reciting his poem “One Today.” He read to a solitary snowman his nephews had built in his yard.

His deck was like the platform he would read from at the Capitol. And the chilly Maine air helped more than prepare him for reading outdoors in the Washington winter.

“When I went to read, I just kept on thinking about the snowman,” said Blanco, the youngest, first Hispanic, first immigrant and first openly gay man to read at a U.S. president’s inauguration. “The snowman was a much tougher audience, actually. He was just staring at you without any kind of expression.”

Blanco has written a memoir about his once-in-a-lifetime experience titled “For All of Us Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey,” due to be published in November. He is scheduled to discuss and read “One Today,” excerpts from his memoir and selections from his other books of poetry at the AJC Decatur Book Festival on Aug. 31. The following day, he will join a panel including Atlanta poet Kevin Young, winner of the 2013 PEN Open Book Award, to discuss “poetry in the public life.”

Blanco’s poem fits perfectly in that discussion, given that he recited it for the first time at a president’s inauguration. Its focus: a nation of diverse but tightly knit people.

“One Today” has the sweep of Walt Whitman’s poetry, taking in the country’s shores, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes and the Great Plains. He mentions his mother, his father and the mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn. Of the shootings, he wrote this penetrating line: “…or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain / the empty desks of twenty children marked absent / today, and forever.”

“One Today” draws much of its power from its vivid details: “pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights, / fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows / begging our praise.” Blanco commands readers to hear what he is writing about: “…squeaky playground swings, trains whistling, / or whispers across cafe tables.”

Looking through his kitchen window in Maine and seeing the sun rising above the treetops helped him glue it all together. The first line – “One sun rose on us today” – underscores our interconnectedness.

Blanco highlighted a subtle tension – an incompleteness — in “One Today.” It is revealed in the last line about people mapping — and naming — a new constellation of stars together.

“Whether we recognize it or not, the idea is that we don’t behave as ‘One Today’ every day and that we haven’t quite figured out how to make that a permanent state,” Blanco said. “So the idea is the striving for, the hope, the reaching for that ideal, which is the principal ideal of our nation.”

The White House asked Blanco to write three poems for the occasion and ultimately chose “One Today.” He plans to publish the other two poems with his memoir. One focuses on his mother’s story as an immigrant and what that means about being an American. The other explores the relationships between people and their countries.

The child of Cuban exiles, Blanco, 45, often says he was “made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States.” The family left Cuba for Spain when his mother was seven months pregnant. She gave birth to Blanco in Madrid. Forty-five days later, they immigrated to the United States, settling first in New York City and then in Miami.

Blanco often raises questions in his poetry about cultural identity: What is home? Where do I belong?

Appearing at the president’s swearing-in ceremony was transformative for him. It has boosted his career and changed how he thinks about poetry. But it has also changed how he thinks about himself.

Blanco grew up here and is a U.S. citizen, but he said he didn’t feel completely at home until his appearance at the Capitol. He talked about a powerful moment when Obama and Vice President Joe Biden shook his hand just before he read his poem, almost as if they were saying, “This is your country.” In a way, Blanco said, the event felt like his inauguration into being a U.S. citizen.

Before he walked up to the podium and read his poem, Blanco turned to his mother – also a U.S. citizen — and said: “I think we are finally Americans.”