Homeland of My Body: Review and Activities
President Biden, when conferring the national humanities medal on Richard Blanco last year, described him as an “engineer, poet, Cuban American.” When I first met Richard, a few years before he became President Obama’s inaugural poet, we became friends. We shared a love of poetry, of course. And whilst I hadn’t received a degree in Engineering, I had, after receiving my oceanography doctorate, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Johns Hopkins Department of Environmental Engineering. And I was an immigrant, like his parents. And when I read his poetry, I fell in love with it.
The fact that he’s stayed in touch with me is, I think a testament to the amazing person he is, and to his humility. His successes keep him incredibly busy - and yet he remains the kind, warm, generous soul he was when we first met. While he and I do not know one another as well as he and Ruth Behar, who wrote about him for Diverse Verse last year, he has always been a source of support and his wisdom has kept me going when the “writing life” got me down. So when I received a copy of his latest book, HOMELAND OF MY BODY, I was not just thrilled - I knew I had to give it the attention it deserved.
With all that I had going on in my life, I was unable to properly savor it until this summer.
Cover of Richard Blanco's latest volume of poetry
Homeland of My Body is Richard Blanco’s newest volume of poetry - but not all the poems in this book are new. This collection is a mixture of new poems and older poems that Blanco has carefully selected, to reexamine “his lifelong quest to find his proverbial home and all that it encompasses: love, family, identity and ultimately, art itself.”
I am a person who loves re-reading my favorite books. I have copies of Blanco’s CITY OF A HUNDRED FIRES, LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL, and HOW TO LOVE A COUNTRY, on my shelves. And it was a delight to re-read the poems Blanco chose to incorporate into this volume, bookended by two sections containing entirely new work.
Cover of How To Love A Country
One of my favorites in the first section containing new poems is entitled MUSIC IN OUR HANDS and it is inspired by Paul Cordes’s photo, The Musician. I’ll admit my ignorance. I hadn’t heard of Cordes until I read this poem - and I loved how the poem introduced me to a new artist. Of course, it does so much more! There is a nod to Keats in the poem’s opening lines - a poet whose work I’d loved as a child, the only one of the Lake poets I’d devoured. The poem plays with words and wordlessness just as a musician plays with notes and silence - and it ends with a line that resonated in my being long after I finished reading the poem: “…all the music of our lives played out in silence.”
As I walked along the beaches near my home in the ocean state, this line from Blanco’s poem UPON A TIME: SURFSIDE, MIAMI, often echoed in my ears: “still searching this sea, still facing this same/ mute horizon, I ask again: Who am I? What/ should I do? The answer, as always: Everything.” I remember he and I discussed that very subject, line breaks, several years ago, and I am struck by the beauty of Blanco’s line breaks in this poem, which, like so many others, is both keenly sensual and profound in its philosophy.
But there is also something else that makes Blanco’s work such a pleasure to read and a treasure to re-read: each poem reaches esoteric heights, while remaining deeply rooted in the relatable everyday reality that we all experience. And Blanco never loses sight of humor. The poem LIVING WILL made me smile and smile, even as it tugged at my heart and brought tears to my eyes.
CLASSROOM ACTIVITY STARTERS:
Here are two suggested activities for focused, poetry-loving high school students:
Share the poem with the class, along with a few of Paul Cordes’s photographs. Allow them to enjoy the dialogue between Blanco’s poem and Cordes’s photo, The Musician, and then invite them to write a poem about a photographic portrait by Cordes that speaks to them.
Discuss what a poet might consider when creating a new selection from older work. Ask have the students read the contents section, on its own. One of my poet friends, Peter Covino (winner of the 2007 PEN/American Osterweil Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence; and author of THE RIGHT PLACE TO JUMP and CUT OFF THE EARS OF WINTER), told me that when he was judging poetry collections, he’d read through the contents, paying as much attention to the titles of the poems and the way in which these were arranged, as if the contents themselves were a poem. Encourage the students to wonder what would happen if the poems were arranged in a different order. How does each poem build on and speak to the ones that come before and after it, in a poetry collection such as HOMELAND OF MY BODY? Ask the students to peruse Blanco’s earlier works and note down their observations about the structure of poetry collections. Then, have them read Ada Limón’s article on How to Write a Poetry Collection.
I’ll end by quoting Ada Limón’s words about Blanco: “A masterful poet who is clear-eyed and full of heart, Blanco explores the country’s haunted past while offering a bright hope for the future.”
Richard Blanco
