Monday was certainly a day for notable oratory through the ages: Obama’s second Inaugural, 50th anniversary of King’s March on Washington + the MLK holiday, 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. And, next up, the 44-year-old Cuban-Spanish-American gay poet, Richard Blanco! No jitters, man…just read the poem you managed to write in the last few weeks for perhaps the largest live audience ever to hear a poem read aloud.

As more illustrious commenters than I have noted, Blanco’s poem makes effective use of an expansive, encompassing Whitmanian approach, using the “oneness” of the day, the light, and other elements of the landscape to reference the breadth of American experiences, while bringing these together in a common experience of life. He weaves together his parents’ immigrant sacrifices, (somewhat overly) newsy/political references to Newtown and 9/11, and sensual evocations of American language and the physical sensations of life and work.

If you’re the Guardian, then you point out that even a child knows America isn’t the only place that has a sun, light, etc…but you would say that, wouldn’t you? Everyone seems to agree that Blanco struck a pretty darn good balance between the public-poetry mission of the Inauguration and the more rigorous artistic standards we might want to apply to poetry in its normally less-public sphere.

Hi, I’m not a hot Latino Robert Pinsky, but I played one at the Second Obama Inaugural

Beyond this “Winners/Losers” snap analysis of the poem’s success, reading the poem gave me a wonderful opportunity to learn about his story as the only Inaugural poet to be…wait for it…a licensed Professional Engineer! (Please read this early news article on Blanco, and his path from engineering to poetry, that manages to include the phrase “turn for the verse” in the title.) Blanco put himself through an MFA night school program at FIU in Miami while already working as a civil engineer and designing, among other things, improvements to Sunset Drive that he addressed in his only previous occasional poem, “Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008.” I’m sure that Whitman would have found a lot to admire in a poet-engineer who happens to be a smokin’ dude with a lion tattoo and a white Miata (in his younger days at least…now that he is a middle-aged man living in Maine I imagine him driving a Forester “LL Bean Edition”).

But “One Today” reminded me not so much of Whitman but of Whitman’s descendant, Adrienne Rich. In particular, Blanco’s effort to evoke America’s people and geography, summoning a shared constellation/landscape that we are invited to map and name for ourselves, draws powerfully on Rich’s 1991 masterwork “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” As I wrote last year after Rich’s death, “Atlas” offers a magisterial sense of hope and possibility, even in such a world (or country) full of pain and injustice. And I happen to know that in the early 90s, just after “Atlas” came out, Blanco was in a course on Contemporary Poetry that looked at Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jorge Luis Borges (fun Latin American take on contemporary poetry! FIU represent!). So the odds are that Blanco opened up “Atlas” during his formative years as a poet seeking to represent America and his immigrant parents, and read these opening lines:

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something
--a woman's voice, a man's voice or
voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast
past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires
THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes
dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand
in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,
Malathion in the throat, communion,
the hospital at the edge of the fields,
prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,
the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching
planes dusting rows of pickers.

An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton, 1991), p. 3

Blanco’s mission in the Inauguration was not to frame his vision of the country in such pointed or political terms, but he sure seems to have been grounded in Rich’s late-20th-century use of the Whitman toolbox. I like to imagine Blanco reading Rich’s passionate commitment to evoking “others” that make up America, and her beautiful and wrenching language of communion that links together the migrant workers, the fruit, the poison that keeps the fruit “fresh,” and the nurse who witnesses the true origin and price of this American bounty.

Blanco’s father, he writes in “One Today,” “[cut] sugarcane / so my brother and I could have books and shoes,” while Rich’s father was the first Jewish doctor tenured at Johns Hopkins. There is so much to think about and compare in these two poets’ wrestlings with their fathers, America, gay identity and what it means to think of your country…but it’s past my bedtime. Despite Rich’s famous rejection of public honors from our previous Democratic President, I hope that there is something of Rich’s spirit in all of us that feels a special pride in Blanco’s Inaugural poem, not just on its poetic merits but for celebrating the poetic lineage from which it emerges.