How can people renew their sense of faith in the future when everything around them seems bleak?

For an answer to that question, poet Richard Blanco turned to the work of Ada Limón, a poet from Sonoma, California.

“I think you’ll see a similar theme in all these poems, which is how to find meaning in seeming oblivion,” Blanco explained. read more…

Everything old is new again — in poetry, that is.

Richard Blanco joined Boston Public Radio to share his favorite modern takes on classic poetry forms.

Blanco specifically chose to explore a form called the “pantoum” poem, which originated from Malaysia in the 1400s. Each consists of four-line stanzas where lines are methodically repeated. The effect is rhythmic and melodic, with the repeated lines taking on new meanings with each use.

“It’s kind of like a basketweave effect,” Blanco explained. read more…

In these poems, Blanco explained, television stands in as a way of engaging with larger themes like identity, companionship, and connecting with others.

“It’s not about TV,” he said. “It’s TV as an occasion to talk about something else.”

In his own piece “Afternoons as Endora,” for example, Blanco recalls seeing television — specifically, the outlandish and self-assured witch Endora from “Bewitched” — as a companion in a lonely childhood growing up gay in a hyper-masculine culture. read more…

For our bi-monthly segment of The Village Voice with Richard Blanco, we discuss poetry and how it can help us to better understand our lives and times — as we always do — this time ushering in National Hispanic Heritage Month which begins on Sept. 15.

This episode aired on Boston Public Radio on September 10, 2018.

Poetry has a reputation for being all-serious all-the-time. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says poet Richard Blanco.

Blanco joined Boston Public Radio to share his favorite works with a sense of humor.

This episode of Village Voice aired on August 13, 2018.

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 shared his favorite poems about traveling — and what going away can teach us about what it means to be home.

“Nothing really evokes questions of home like traveling, because we’re always comparing where we are to where we travel to, to what home is and where we come from,” Blanco explained.

This episode aired on July 16, 2018.

Blanco shared poems about LGBTQ relationships, including his own poem “Killing Mark.” He said the poem “really, in a way, speaks to [the fact] that love is love, and marriage is marriage, and straight folks don’t have the corner on dysfunctional relationships.”

Blanco also shared a poem by Adrienne Rich, one of America’s most prominent lesbian poets. The poem doesn’t address LGBTQ themes specifically, but sees the world with a sensitivity that Blanco said is a hallmark of many LGBTQ writers.

This episode of Village Voice aired on Boston Public Radio on June 20, 2018.

Through these poems, Blanco said he hopes to reveal “the complex emotional lives of mothers, who are first women and human beings.”

This episode of Village Voice aired on Boston Public Radio on May 4, 2018.

If you have a case of “metrophobia” — or fear of poetry — Richard Blanco wants to help you become a “metromaniac.”

The nation’s fifth inaugural poet joined Boston Public Radio to share a master class in reading and interpreting poems, including discussing some of his favorite works and what keeps him coming back to the craft.

Blanco said his approach to poetry can be summed up by a line in Roque Dalton’s poem “Like You”: “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”

“I love the metaphor because it’s the idea of sustenance, but also the idea that bread is an ordinary thing that we have every day, and that [poetry] can be that in our lives,” Blanco explained.

This episode of Village Voice aired on Boston Public Radio on April 9, 2018.

This week, poet Richard Blanco highlighted works by two eminent female poets: “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton and “The Journey” by Mary Oliver.

In “Her Kind,” Sexton looks at the stereotypes passed down in history and myth about women, particularly about those who buck society’s conventions. read more…