“Writing makes me think and thinking makes me write” –Richard Blanco

Funny how people percolate to the surface, move in an out of the spotlight in our lives.  Over the Thanksgiving week I heard an interview with Richard Blanco on NPR’s On Being show. Then I learned from Lorrie Wolfe about a conversation with him through the San Miguel Poetry Café .

I was not able to attend, but Lorrie was and took some wonderfully detailed notes, which I have distilled below.      

-- About persona poems, such as his “Complaint of El Rio Grande,” Blanco said that the poet needs to let the object speak and the reader judge; the poet should not judge.

-- On letting a poem flow, he suggested using Thomas Lux’s "Refrigerator 1957" as a prompt.  Poets come from an oral tradition, Blanco pointed out, urging us to let our poems be like music, our voices our instruments.

 -- Commenting from significant experience (as he wrote and read a poem for President Obama’s inauguration), he said that when writing for a specific occasion or event, you need to go beyond the obvious. The reader needs to know the poet's feeling about that event; he encourages us to make it personal with details.

 -- A poet's job, Blanco said, is to "change the reader's life." No small feat. And many of Blanco’s poems host that change on a civic level.   When asked if he is an activist poet, he countered that he is socially conscious poet.  Civic poems he finds the hardest poems to write because you must give the reader a "way out" and not just write your rage or protest.  The reader needs hope and alternatives, no matter how bad the situation is.  How to get from rage to a point where you can remember beauty? Dig deep, then dig deeper, Blanco suggested: let the subconscious mind rediscover empathy within the tragedy. "The only way we get to that caring is through language" he said, the goal being to distill complex emotions to make them accessible.

REMEMBER TO SET ASIDE NEXT SUNDAY, DEC. 13 FROM 1:00-3:00 for the periodic poetry reading, including an open mic, sponsored by the Loveland Poet Laureate program and the Loveland Museum.