"How to love a country?" is also a fraught question.
Is "country" a geological space with geographical borders? In Blanco's "Complaint of El Rio Grande" (9), the river speaks to us as a personal, eternal entity, "meant for all things to meet..."
to make the clouds pause in the mirror
of my waters, to be home to fallen rain
that finds its way to me, to turn eons
of loveless rock into lovesick pebbles
and carry them as humble gifts back
to the sea which brings life to me.
Without wading into partisan politics, Blanco's river persona speaks from a humane place broader than national policy. Another poem "Using Country in a Sentence" (31) begins, "My chair is country to my desk," the desk is country to his chair, and he imagines "A mountain as country to the clouds that crown and hail its peak, then drift...." He describes a classroom map of the US and how he fell in love with "blue stare of the Great Lakes, and the endless shoulders/ of coastlines, the curvy hips of harbors, rivers/ like my palms' lines traced with wonder from / beginning to end" (68).
Is country a culture? Blanco writes a tribute to his Cuban father, "the exile who tried to master the language he chose to master him" (28). To the boy he punched in fifth grade, the poet admits "I ... envied you -- the americano sissy I wanted to be, with sheer skin, dainty freckles...that showy Happy Days lunchbox..." (29).
Is "country" a system of government? Blanco writes how the words Life, Liberty, Happiness for we, the people "buzz[ed] off the page" in school and "into my heart's ear" (68). His "Declaration of Inter-Dependence" riffs off of lines from famous American texts. Such has been our patient sufferance conjures the image of a mother waiting at the checkout line with her three children feeling both "joyful and bruised." After Jefferson's line we have petitioned for redress, Blanco tries to be empathetic to both sides in a violent encounter of a sort all too familiar:
We're a black teenager who drove too fast or too slow, talked too much or too little, moved too quickly, but not quick enough. We're the blast of the bullet leaving the gun. We're the guilt and the grief of the cop who wished he hadn't shot. (2)
The title "Election Year" for a poem about a garden alerts us to allegory as "overnight, a vine you've never battled" shows up to take it over (6). Why use the screen of allegory to write about Trumpism? He writes of "something we can only / speak of by speaking to ourselves about flowers...tended under a constitution of stars / we must believe in..."
Can "country" include people with a background different from yours? Blanco finds commonality in aspirations. "Staring at Aspens" is subtitled "A History Lesson," as the poet mixes the long history of the Dine tribe through the Long Walk and the subterranean connection between all the aspens in a field, "all born from the same roots they share, [learn] how they thrive as many, yet live as one" (14). Taking on the persona of a daughter from China detained months at Angel Island in 1938, Blanco has her write to her father that she understands why fellow detainees write curses on the cell walls, "But those words never are mine -- /nothing can stop our sun, our moon ... nor what I have dreamed in you..." (16).
And what is to "love" a country? In "America the Beautiful Again"(66) he remembers his mother singing O beautiful, "her Cuban accent scaling up each vowel," and the boy Blanco feeling closer to America's spacious skies at an Independence Day parade when he's lifted up on his father's "sun-beat shoulders." Lamenting the combative shouting that he sees on TV, he exclaims, "How I want to sing again" in "harmony" with his divided country, "beautiful or not," from sea to shining sea.
But love of country is more than nostalgia. "[T]o know a country takes all we know of love," Blanco writes:
to keep our promise every morning of every
year, of every century, and wake up, stumble
downstairs with all our raging hope, sit down
at the kitchen table again, still blurry-eyed,
still tired, and say: Listen, we need to talk."What I Know of Country" (68-70)
A big fan of Blanco's earlier collection of poems and his memoir, I was intrigued when I heard Blanco explain on Atlanta's NPR station WABE-FM how he struggled with commissions that came his way after the inauguration. How do you write authentic poetry when entities that commission you to write will expect you to express their visions? Then, invited to write on the theme of "borders," Blanco felt liberated, realizing that borders can be political, personal, and psychological. How to Love a Country is a "mosaic" of poems on that theme.
I admit that I was put off at first by dozens of pages that look like prose essays. But read them aloud, and you appreciate how Blanco the poet plays with language. In the excerpt I quoted from "Declaration of Inter-Dependence," opposites balance to suggest how the black teen has no viable choice, and alliteration propels us from blast and bullet to guilt and grief. Often his poems develop as lists or litanies, thoughts with the same initial word: "Until...." or "Let...."
As in "Declaration," Blanco creates several poems with lines of found text as a matrix. Blanco borrows familiar lines from prayers and scripture (Where there is hatred, let me sow love... A time to rend, and a time to sew... And if I should die before I wake...) for a pair of poems about the Michael Brown shooting and its aftermath in "St. Louis: Prayer Before Dawn" (55) and "At Dawn" (71).. "Poetry Assignment #4: What Do You Miss Most?" alternates passionate lines paraphrased from Blanco's stint teaching poetry writing to prisoners with the dispassionate commentary of the teacher (53-54).
I also cringed at the more blatantly political bits. When Blanco stereotypes upper-middle-class middle-America middle-brow people by their cocktails (1), free-trade coffee, and their green lawns (8), my cringing is mitigated by the fact that he includes himself with them. When he's congratulating himself for playing cultural ambassador to Cuba, his Cuban limo driver, dealing with the Castro regime's impact on his family, blows up at Blanco (23), Why don't you write a damn poem about this?
After living with the book for some months, I appreciate how Blanco finds something personal and universal to grasp even when he writes about subjects that divide Americans.
- More of my blogposts about Richard Blanco
- Solace in Blanco Verse for Midlife, Midwinter Blues was what I wrote when some lines by Blanco helped me through a couple of dark hours of self-doubt.
- Review of Looking for the Gulf Motel: Not Grievance but Gratitude.
- "It Takes a Pueblo": Richard Blanco's Loving Memoir (review of The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood)
- See a curated list of my posts about Poetry and Secular Psalms.
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