On this episode of the Village Voice, Richard Blanco joined Jim and Margery to share a crash course on the persona poem, also known as dramatic monologue, in which the poet speaks through a voice other than their own.

“It’s a neat way that poems can twist the point of view to get at something else you wouldn’t ordinarily get to if you were just speaking as the poet narrator or the poet speaker,” he said.

For our listening pleasure and for a true experience of the dramatic monologue, Richard read the following poems before opening up the conversation. read more…

Richard Blanco joined Boston Public to celebrate the month of Valentine’s Day by reading a handful of poems that celebrate love, and the experiences of falling in and out of it.

“It’s a very big theme,” Blanco said of the role that love and romance play in poetry. “The loss of it, the yearning for it, all sorts of different nuances and dimensions of love– which I want to take you through with a few poems we have today.”

Blanco went on to read and discuss a few of his own poems, and poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Pablo Neruda– all of which are listed below. read more…

In this episode of the Village Voice, we shared several modern spins on one of poetry’s most celebrated forms: the sonnet.

“[These are not] our grandparent’s sonnets,” Blanco said, referencing traditional expectations like meter and subject matter. “There’s a lot more going on that we’ve inherited from the sonnet, and a lot of it has to do with the rhetorical mode or structure or movement.”

We then offered some historical background on the famously square poems, including their surprising origins. read more…

In this episode of The Village Voice, Richard Blanco joined Boston Public Radio on Monday to give Jim and Margery a crash course in poetry. During the segment, he read a prose poem called “Mango, Number 61.” read more…

In this episode of The Village Voice, Boston Public Radio and Richard Blanco share poems to commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month, from an anthem to immigration and nationhood, to a retelling of the creation story, as a Cuban would have written it. read more…

August is almost over, and with that comes the beginning of a new school year and the bittersweet end of summer. Noting the time of year, poet Richard Blanco says that this time of year is a time to appreciate living in the moment.

In this episode, Blanco shares some of his favorite poetry to read during this time of year. read more…

Richard Blanco joins Boston Public Radio for another segment of Village Voice to share a collection of poems “that surrender to oblivion as a way of feeling renewed and perhaps in a way arriving at a new kind of awareness that helps us to keep on going,” he says.

Follow along with the poems as they are read and discussed: read more…

In the latest edition of “Village Voice,” Jim and Margery get a lesson in evocative writing from poet Richard Blanco.

“I just wanted to take a little deep dive into one of the golden rules of creative writing, called show don’t tell,” he said. “I don’t know [that] we always know how that really works in a poem, and in our lives, so I’m going to walk you through this, and you’ll be my students today.” read more…