Ahead of Memorial Day, poet Richard Blanco shared poems by veterans. “[Let’s] take a look at war from their perspective. I think it’s a perspective that’s sometimes missing from the general consciousness,” he said.

Blanco read “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa. Written in response to visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the poem discusses racism, loss, the consequences of war. Richard said how thanking someone for their service could never capture the depth and complexity of what it means to serve. “Here’s your service in these lines: it’s pain, it’s grit, it’s love, it’s so many things.” read more…

On the latest episode of “Village Voice,” poet Richard Blanco offers a preview of his poetry class for the Writers Harbor Poetry Week at Maine Media Workshops and College, which will focus on using photographs to generate poems.

“We think photographically; memories are photographic…photos are doorways into imagination. I’ll ask participants to bring photos that have mystique or intrigue, and to let the poem discover what it means…let the imagination open up to the past. We’ll also take photographs and then write a poem based on the photo we just took. The idea is to look at the world as a poem. We have to frame certain things, what are we choosing to focus on? What’s beyond the frame?” read more…

In the latest edition of “Village Voice,” using poetry to better understand our lives and times, Richard joins Jim and Margery to celebrate National Poetry Month with work by US Poet Laureates, Stanley Kunitz, Philip Levine, Tracy K Smith, and Juan Felipe Herrera.

“I wanted to think about the position of the US poet laureate, which is somewhat mysterious. The official term is US Poet Laureate Consultant of Poetry. Officially it’s run by the legislative branch of the government. In its original conception, it was a poet who advised the library of congress on matters of poetry, and that’s still what it is, technically. Of course, it’s grown into something much larger. Many amazing projects have come from these poets which are appointed for one year and then they can opt to do a special project and stay on for another year. Our current poet laureate, Joy Harjo, is one of just less than a handful of poet laureates serving a third term. She has an amazing project called “Living Nations, Living Works,” Native American Voices in Poetry in America. read more…

In the latest edition of “Village Voice,” Richard Blanco kick starts National Poetry Month with poems by Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, and Li-Young Lee.

“The children of immigrants need to embrace a given culture, but it is a negotiation, sometimes a struggle, sometimes a growing into an appreciation of recovering a past story and trying to understand your parents. [These poems] honor the stories of parents and grandparents while still carving space for themselves, exploring the trauma we inherit.”

Richard also spoke about “Hemingway,” the documentary by Ken Burns which aired on PBS recently, and within which Richard appears. He comments on Hemingway’s famous quote as one for writers to lives by: “Today I need to write one true sentence.” read more…

“Our conversation was like stepping into a time machine and going back to twenty years ago when we met in Miami Beach with passionate chats over espressos and martinis.” read more…

In the latest episode of “Village Voice,” Richard Blanco joins Jim and Margery to spotlight and celebrate poetry by Denise Duhamel.

“Denise is a colleague and one of the first persons I read that allowed me to see the possibility of using humor and sarcasm and all those kinds of things in poetry that actually get to a greater truth than when we are being “deep.”

A wonderful review from Chamber Four, a book review site, sums up her work:
“Playful, wise, funny and heartbreaking all at once, what more do you want from poetry?” read more…

In the latest edition of “Village Voice,” Boston Public Radio’s recurring conversation about how poetry can help us understand the news of the day, poet Richard Blanco celebrates Black History Month with poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Terrance Hayes, Danez Smith, and Lucille Clifton.

He spoke about the form invented by Terrance Hayes called “The Golden Shovel.”

“Take a line of poetry from someone else’s poem and use each word in that line as the end word in each line of your own poem. So it’s like there’s a ghost in the poem. If you read the end word of each line, it reads one of the lines from the poem that it originated from. Hayes uses Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” Brooks was the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1950! read more…

In this year’s first episode of Village Voice, I spoke with Jim and Margery about Amanda Gorman, the sixth and youngest Inaugural Poet, the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate, and Harvard graduate! I couldn’t be happier with this choice! We need young voices, now more than ever.

Amanda said of inaugural poets Elizabeth Alexander and myself, “The three of us are together in mind, body, and spirit.” (That we are!) My partner likes to say, “More people have been to the moon than have been an inaugural poet!”

Learn more about Amanda Gorman and read along with the poems listed below! read more…

Enjoy this video recording of the live concert performance of my poem “The Declaration of Inter-Dependence!”

Tom Davis, a retired minister of music created a musical score for my poem, “Declaration of Inter-Dependence” with a trio of musicians who play jazz, funk, and hip hop compositions. It was such a joy and honor to hear 30 local voices, accompanied by a string quartet from The Portland Symphony Orchestra, with collaborating musicians on the piano, Native American drum, flute, and keyboard, perform this poem as a song in our little town of Bethel! Read the poem (copied below) and sing along! I hope you enjoy this recording as much as I do! read more…