48 | The Writer • April 2020
HOW I WRITE
BY ALLISON FUTTERMAN
A
ward-winning poet Rich-
ard Blanco was launched
into the public eye after
reading his poem “One
Today” at President Obama’s second
inauguration. Following this life-
changing event, Blanco took on an
increasingly public role – one he con-
tinues with his speaking and teaching
and as the education ambassador of the
Academy of American Poets. His latest
poetry collection, How to Love a Coun-
try, is a poignant and moving reflec-
tion on issues facing our nation and its
people. Topics he addresses in the col-
lection include
cultural identity,
immigration,
race, sexual iden-
tity, mass shoot-
ings, and modern
politics. His pow-
erful, beautiful,
and sometimes
painful work con-
veys both personal and collective expe-
riences and struggles. Blanco is also
the author of two memoirs, The Prince
of los Cocuyos and For All of Us, One
Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey.
How poetry is taught
I want to turn metrophobes (people
with a fear of poetry) into metromani-
acs. I think the fear goes back to the
way poetry is taught. I think we should
approach poetry more like music or
art. Instead, it’s shrouded in mystery.
Like anything new that you try, you
start and fail and then improve. You
have to keep practicing. Creating can
be a wonderful space, but it can be ter-
rifying, and you just have to accept it
and dive in. Eventually, you get into the
flow, and it gets a little easier.
Richard Blanco
I argue against the
idea that if a poem
is accessible,
it’s not complex.
Accessible is not
synonymous
with simple.
Beginning a poem
For the most part, I don’t know where
a poem will lead, but I’ll have a sense
of the theme or texture to start with. It
can be an image, a quote, or a memory,
and I’ll slowly start seeing what devel-
ops on the page. Typically, when I start
holding strongly to an idea, it doesn’t
turn out well because there’s no discov-
ery. Finding the structure is like tuning
an instrument until you hear the right
note. And with free verse, every poem
has to find its own internal logic andstructure. You figure that out during
the process.Persistent themes and questions
My whole trajectory with my work
comes down to one essential question:
Where is home? In a lot of my earlier
work, cultural identity and belonging
in terms of place was biographically
centered around those questions. After
serving as inaugural poet, I was thrust
into a public world, of not only my
poetry but myself. I felt a natural sense
of thinking about civic duty as an out-
growth of that. It became not just “me”
but “we,” and a broader, more pluralis-
tic way of questioning the same things.On accessibility
Raised in a working-class, immigrant
family, I didn’t have access to poetry. I
want to write poetry that my mother
can read, or poetry that I would have
loved as a little boy. I think of myself as
a poet of the people. I argue against the
idea that if a poem is accessible, it’s not
complex. Accessible is not synonymous
with simple.Prose vs. poetry
For me, I kind of just wanted to teach
myself to write prose and go through
my own learning process. The main dif-
ference is that even with memoir, what
drives the book is plot. The narrative
has to keep moving. A poem is like a
two- or three-minute song, where a
memoir is like a movie. As I wrote, I
kept asking, “What happens next?” But
I can’t write a memoir without writing
poetry first. I need to know, “What is
the emotional center?”Allison Futterman is a freelance writer based in
Charlotte, North Carolina.