Hearing that Richard Blanco had been chosen to write a poem for President Obama’s second inauguration reconfirmed for me why this president will be remembered as a transformative leader.
Blanco is a Cuban-American gay poet. His work journals the cross-cultural experiences of two minority groups — the LGBT and Latino communities — at a time when the country’s acceptance of either is divided. But there’s also something strangely indigenous about Blanco’s poems, too.
His collections includes “City of a Hundred Fires,” “Directions to the Beach of the Dead,” and “Looking for the Gulf Motel.”
A personal favorite is a five-part poem titled America, a humorous take on family, discovery, and assimilation. This is part one:
Although Tía Miriam boasted she discovered
at least half-a-dozen uses for peanut butter—
topping for guava shells in syrup,
butter substitute for Cuban toast,
hair conditioner and relaxer—
Mamà never knew what to make
of the monthly five-pound jars
handed out by the immigration department
until my friend, Jeff, mentioned jelly.
Obama may have chosen Blanco purely for political expedience, a wink and a nod to two communities that strongly supported his re-election. But that doesn’t change the reality on the ground: a legitimization of the Latino and LGBT experience as authentically American.
Blanco joins a small group of poets who are asked to write a poem especially for a presidential inauguration by a leader who understands that inclusiveness is more than a slogan; it’s vital to the survival of the state.
This article appears in Jan 9-15, 2013.
To the extent this clown’s remembered at all, it will be as nothing other than an incompetent self-infatuated demagogue who tried and failed to “fundamentally transform” this great land into a bankrupt third world socialist backwater.
P.S. Half a century after Nixon and Rebozo, this hardly seems “transformative”, or even noteworthy. (Unless you’re just grasping for some reason to remember Obama.)
Thank you for clearly identifying the racism and sexism that continues to plague our country. According to Mr. Macaluso, the choice of Mr. Blanco is commendable because he is Cuban and gay. So much for MLK Jr.’s dream. And if you still don’t get it, imagine a post heralding JFK’s choice of Robert Frost because he was an Anglo-Saxon heterosexual.
Whether Richard Blanco is gay, straight, or hermaphroditic and whether he’s Cuban or Vulcan is irrelevant to the fact that his work is just plain BAD !