Richard Blanco

Richard Blanco's poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review and TriQuarterly Review; and several anthologies including, The Best American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems, Breadloaf Anthology of New American Poets and American Poetry: The Next Generation. He has been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, and various conferences and venues including the Miami Book Fair, The Southern Writers Conference, The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, the Dodge Poetry Festival, and The Poetry Center at Smith College.  Blanco is recipient of two Florida Artist Fellowships, a Residency Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is a John Ciardi Fellow of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.  His books include City of a Hundred Fires, Directions to The Beach of the Dead, and Looking for The Gulf Motel, which was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2012.

Last Night in Havana

Last Night in Havana Last Night in Havana

Editor’s Note: Nation contributor Dan Wakefield alerted us to our role in helping to launch the poetry career of Richard Blanco, selected by the White House as the 2013 inaugural poet. Dan writes:   “When I went to teach at Florida International University in the spring of 1994, I went to a student reading and was especially impressed by one of the poets, a young man named Richard Blanco. I asked if he would give me copies of the poems he read that night, and I picked out three of them I thought were worthy of publication and suggested I submit them to The Nation, where I have been a long-time contributor. Rick said none of his work had been published yet, and was happy for me to send the poems to Grace Shulman, the poetry editor. To my delight and to Rick’s, Shulman selected his poem “Last Night in Havana,” and eventually published it in The Nation (March 31, 1997). So The Nation was the first periodical to accept for publication the work of our new inaugural poet. (To thank me, Rick gave me my first guided tour of Little Havana, Miami’s legendary Cuban neighborhood.)”     The palms sink willingly into the saffron ground. All I can map now is the marble veins of static rivers, the island coastline retreated like a hem from the sargasso patches of Caribbean. I think of you primo hermano, huddled on the edge of an Almendares curb last night your Greco shadow spilled over the street, and over the tracks stapled to the weeds below your bedroom window. Shawled in cobwebs of wind, we slapped at unreachable mosquitos as Havana’s tenements collapsed around us, enclosed us in yellow like the pages of old books or the stucco walls of a hollow chapel. You confessed you live with one foot ankled in the sand of a revolution, one Viking sole on the beach testing an unparted sea for the stag tide, the gulf wind, a legible puzzle of stars, the perfect moon that will increase your chances through the straits to my door, blistered, salted, but alive, to cry—Llegué hermano, llegué! And silence the sweep of labor trains in your window, the creak of your father’s wheelchair in the hall searching for a bottle of pills he will find empty, the slam of your eyelids forcing sleep. The bus tires are ready, bound with piano wire, and the sail will be complete with a few more scraps of linen Tia Delia will stitch together after midnights when the neighbors are asleep. Last night in Havana, your words bounced from your knees bent against your face and drowned with the lees in an empty bottle of bootleg wine you clutched around the neck and will keep to store fresh water.

Mar 31, 1997 / Books & the Arts / Richard Blanco

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