Place, Memory, and Mentorship: An Interview with Richard Blanco
By Alessandra Gonzalez

​I first met Richard Blanco in the heart of Miami, Florida, where I studied under him at Florida International University. In the classroom, he was not simply a professor but something closer to what he asked us to call him: “Coach.” He took that role seriously, not only guiding us through craft, but insisting that poetry is a practice of attention, discipline, and deep listening.
 
In a way, however, I had met him years earlier, when I first read his poem El Florida Room. I remember being struck by the language. I loved its lyric precision, and the way it rendered place as both inheritance and emotional geography. I recognized in it something I had not yet found words for: the texture of Cuban American experience, shaped through memory, displacement, and the uneasy intimacy of Florida as both home and threshold.
 
Years later, after completing my own MFA and finishing my first book-length poetry manuscript at the University of Central Florida, I returned to his work with renewed clarity. Much of my early writing had already been shaped by his influence – particularly his attention to place, diaspora, and the layered landscapes of Miami. As a Cuban American poet, I found in his work a kind of permission to write toward memory, migration, and cultural inheritance without losing lyric intensity.
 
I reached out to him after completing my manuscript, initially to thank him for his mentorship and the recommendation letter he had written years earlier in support of my graduate studies. What followed was a generous conversation that returned me to questions first encountered in his classroom: how to write place honestly, how to carry heritage into language, and how poetry can hold both narrative and lyric weight without choosing between them.
 
This interview emerges from that ongoing dialogue. It is an attempt to listen again to “Coach” Blanco. This time not only as a former student, but as a fellow writer still learning how to make sense of home, memory, and the spaces in between.
 
Alessandra Gonzalez: I wanted to ask a little bit about your recent book. In Homeland of my Body, you explore identity through both physical and emotional landscapes. How did you decide when a poem should be grounded in the body versus memory or place?
 
Richard Blanco: Well, I think any poem that was more present, or I should say closer to where I am right now, had less to do with memory and nostalgia. If things were more connected to childhood or something like that, maybe that was more grounded in memory. But I think, at least as far as the new poems were concerned, I made a purposeful effort to revisit some of those poems that I would normally write from a nostalgic point of view, or from an inherited-memory point of view, and see how it feels now.
It's the stage where I'm at in terms of this question of home. You might not have known this from the book, but I also moved. I was living three blocks from the very first apartment where I wrote my first book. So, there's a lot going over the same things again, but in different ways. These landscapes were familiar, but at the same time they were new. I think that's part of what was happening in the poems.
 
Gonzalez: That's an interesting thing to explore nostalgia in that way. Now, on the idea of home. Many of the poems, both from the older collections and the new one, seem to negotiate between Cuba and the United States, which is part of the reason I was initially drawn to your writing when I first ever read one of your poems.
 
Do you see Homeland as something geographic inherited or something that's constructed over time?
 
Blanco: Yeah, I think it's constructed over time, or I should say it takes on different meaning or dimension depending on where you are in life. I think you can see that throughout the various collections.
 
The first question of home is the very basic one of cultural identity and coming to a dawning understanding, a cultural coming of age. Exploring where it is that I really do come from, and whether these are just stories or something more.
 
Then I went to Cuba, and I realized that sense of home was also constructed out of memory, and that I couldn't really have a "real" Cuba anyway. I also lived away from Miami at that time. I moved away from Miami for the first time and started traveling a lot, but with that same question of where home was. You see that reflected in the second book, where there are a lot more travel poems. There are also poems about living away from Miami for the first time, which I call exile poems.
 
Then, in the third book, what became new was this idea of sexuality as home, which I had never really connected before. I always thought the cultural stuff was one thing, and sexuality was another, but when you come out, there's a sense of creating a new community, creating safe space, creating a community where you can be supported. All those things became definitions of home, especially as they intersected with definitions of Cuban culture.
 
Then, after the inauguration, the question of home became much bigger – not just what home is to me, but what home is to us as a nation. That resulted in How to Love a Country, which asks broader questions. You can almost put a question mark behind the title: How to Love a Country? What does that even mean?
 
It was a very big book. Then a couple of things influenced the new poems: moving back to Miami and COVID, which made things very interior rather than exterior. I also started realizing that art itself is a kind of home. That's why you see a lot of poems that deal with other writers, photographers, and artists. Art is another kind of home – not a geographical one, but a psychological or psychic space.
 
I think all those things influence where I'm at now with the question of home. In a sense, none of those homes are separate anymore; they're just in me. They're always with me. They're part of what collectively home means to me now. And who knows what's next? I'm not sure.
 
Gonzalez: Who knows where home is going to come out of now, or how you can bring in even more communities. You talked a little bit about some of your other collections, and I was going to ask you because this book takes the act of collage and pieces together all these different things from different collections.
 
How did you decide which poems to include from those other collections and how were they working in tandem with the new ones that you wrote?
 
Blanco: Sure, I had the same question going in. Luckily, my editor and agent were very knowledgeable about that. They gave me some great advice: it's not always the best poem, or what you think is your best poem, and it's not always the poems you've shared most. Rather, sometimes there are poems that don't get a lot of play but are actually poems that show important inflection points in the collection or in your life.
 
That was part of what I was looking for. There are poems that you tend to gravitate toward because you read them a lot or because they're crowd-pleasers. So, I looked at the poems that I don't share very often and thought, is this really something worthwhile to give space to here? That was part of it. It was trying to find a balance. Of course, you want to show great work – your best poems, craft-wise – but there were also poems that I've ignored for one reason or another.
 
The other interesting thing that came out of thinking about that same question was the organization of splitting the new poems into two sections. The book functions as a kind of question: where's the present? Where's the narrator in the present? Once we finish the first section of new poems, you go through this journey – a flashback through the chronological order of how I got here in the first place – and then a flash-forward to letting all that go in the last section.
 
That's how I decided on those poems. The first poems were more about where I am right now as an artist, thinking about home. The other poems were more about letting go of all that inherited drama, trauma, and nostalgia, or at least turning the page on it.
 
Gonzalez: You talked about balance, and I noticed that your work oftentimes blends narrative with lyric intensity. Something that I actually have taken and mirrored in my own work. I was wondering how you balance storytelling with poetic compression.
 
Blanco: It’s something I'm very aware of all the time. That's a great observation. As I teach poetry, you've probably heard it from me too. In every poem, one slightly rules over the other, so I'm always conscious: okay, this might be more of a lyrical poem, but there's still some narrative backdrop that needs to be more explicit for the poem to open up.
 
Then there are poems where I find myself more in the storytelling mode, in a narrative mode, and forgetting to put in a really good simile or do something more unexpected, something interrupted by something else, to make it not just a pure storyline kind of poem.
 
Over the years, I think I've become – or maybe I've consciously tried to become – more lyrical versus narrative. Partly it's because I'm out of stories. In the beginning, there's a lot of what you're saying: there's a lot of stuff we inherit, and there's a lot of storytelling involved.
 
When you think about the later work, it's more immediate. It's more about what's happening in my life right now. Also, when you think about occasional poems, there are a lot of occasional and commemorative poems. Those are poems of the moment, so the narrative has taken a little bit more of a backseat.
 
But it's something I'm always aware of, trying to find that balance. It's also something I think about when I read other people's poems and offer comments on them.
 
Gonzalez: It's something that I struggle with when I'm writing a poem that is very rooted in the history of Cuba, because I know when I'm thinking of audience, that not necessarily everybody knows what is happening over there. Not everybody had the same experience as my family and many immigrant families had.
 
Do you have any sort of tips when it comes to writing historical poetry with being able to incorporate that exposition, but also stay in the realm of poetry?
 
Blanco: I think I've had a couple of extreme cases like that. To answer your question, I think it's: how do you poeticize plain old dumb facts?
 
I'm always aware that I have a reader. I always assume that my reader is monolingual, and I always assume that my reader knows very little to nothing about Cuba.
 
There's a poem called “Letters from the Revolution.” It begins with letters that I found. My aunt had written them, and my sister and my mom had replied to her. They're very rooted in the Revolution and what was going on at the time. I started with those letters and messed with them in a way that gave the historical context.
That was one extreme case, but I don't write that much historical poetry. I tend to write more about the emotional repercussions of that history because that's ultimately what carries the poem. If I render that correctly, I think everything else can fall into context.
 
In some ways, we've all felt some kind of loss or nostalgia for something. If I can get that emotion across, you might not need to understand exactly what happened historically in Cuba or the circumstances surrounding that context. I always try to bubble up the emotional impact a poem is making on the reader so that carries through.
 
I often think about it as a song. There might be a personal narrative informing a song that you have no idea about, but you're still feeling the emotion of the singer-songwriter. It's a silly example, but I don't really care about North Carolina, and yet every time James Taylor sings “In My Mind I'm Going to Carolina,” I'm right there. I'm right there because the feeling he imparts is so strong. Of course, there's music involved, not just words, but the emotion is so powerful that I connect it to my own Carolina, so to speak.
 
That's always what I hope for: to get to that baseline, core emotion that transcends facts and data.
 
Gonzalez: That makes me think back to the quote that you introduced to us when we were in class, the Roque Dalton quote. “Poetry is like bread, for all.” I usually read it to my students at the beginning of my poetry unit because it really sat with me.
 
You think of audience and you think, “how can I make my audience relate to some semblance of what I'm writing here?” But everybody has a poem that they love, whether or not they're into poetry as an art form, or find themselves going to open mics all the time. I'm sure everyone has something that they can say about poetry.
 
Blanco: Yeah, that was Robert Pinsky when he was Poet Laureate, and it's still around. He had exactly the same premise. It's called the Favorite Poem Project, and that's what I did as Poet Laureate in Miami-Dade as well.
 
A lot of people say, "I don't get poetry." But if you ask them, "Do you have a favorite poem?" nine times out of ten they'll say yes. There's something that has stayed with them all their life. Usually, it's not that they don't get poetry. It's just that the last time they read a poem was thirty years ago. Well, you just haven't been reading poetry. It doesn't mean that you don't like poetry.
I love that poem also because it democratizes art. Personally, as a working-class kid from an immigrant family, it wasn't part of what I was supposed to have. I feel that's important.
I think culturally it does change. Most cultures, except the United States, embrace it in a different way: a more gregarious and less apprehensive way.
 
One of my greatest influences is Elizabeth Bishop. You would think, what does Elizabeth Bishop have to do with a gay Cuban kid from Miami? On the surface, nothing. But besides liking her aesthetic, she was effectively orphaned when she was four years old, and I see in her work a constant struggle with place and identity, which is refreshing to see.
 
It's a little ironic, but I feel that if I can see myself in someone like Elizabeth Bishop, hopefully someone like Elizabeth Bishop would be able to see themselves in me, if we're doing things right. If we're getting down to that core emotion, regardless of the window dressing, the particular details, or the historical context.
 
I trust that. I think it has to do with your earlier question too. It's great when you resonate with something. I like to tell people: I'm not writing just for Cuban people. They're certainly part of my audience, and if you're Cuban, you probably get a bonus. But I'm also writing for any human being who's ever experienced questions of identity, loss, or belonging.
 
In the words of Shakespeare, we're all human. Do we not bleed? We're all feeling the same emotions.
 
A lot of times people expect me to say that my greatest influences have been Latino poets, and they certainly have. They've given me permission and they've given me ways of telling my story. But it's certainly not the only way.
 
I think it's powerful when you first see yourself in someone who's of your own kin, but it's also powerful when you see yourself in someone you don't expect to see yourself in.
I always tell my students and readers: read outside your comfort zone. Read within your tribe, but also read elsewhere, because that's going to be inspiring too. It might shift something in you that has become too accustomed to the same stories.
 
Gonzalez: Absolutely. On the question of identity, since you were talking about that earlier. I want to ask, looking back, what does the phrase “homeland of my body” mean to you now?
 
Blanco: I think I touched upon it, but home is something I carry within me. In a way, I've always carried it within me. It's something that nobody can take away. Perhaps it's no longer a geographical thing.
 
I think part of that is maturing and realizing that the idea of having a paradise of a home was a little bit ego-driven. I have to find my home, my paradise. It's this idea that you have to find the perfect place with the perfect landscape and the perfect people and the perfect language.
 
In letting go of that, I realized there's an egoic drive to find home because I deserve to be happy. That's part of what's going on. Again, I think that's influenced by getting older and also by history. So many things have changed with Cuba since I was first thinking about Cuba, but that's what it means.
 
And again, home is also my community of writers across time and space, so it's not just a physical thing. Rather, it's a psychological thing that exists within me. It's memory at the end of the day.
 
Gonzalez: What advice would you give to writers that are exploring topics on family, migration, and identity in their work?
 
Blanco: Well, I'll answer that in a very recent way. One of the things I did when I first started investigating my background was go to Cuba. I went to the source. I wanted to see where all these stories came from. Did they come from real people and real lives and real stories?
​
I think that's an important part of it. Lately, I did this huge interview with my mother, about three hours long. The things they still haven't shared are amazing. It's incredible what you're still finding out about them and about yourself.

I think it's important to look to the elders while you still have them. Just talk to them. Tell them to tell you stories. Pull up a chair, have a shot of rum and a cafecito, and let them talk, because they're like living storybooks. It grounds you in an interesting way. It lets you tell stories, and perhaps it's not just about relating their stories, but telling your own story in the context of where you learned about yourself, too.
 
My mother just texted me yesterday. She's eighty-nine years old, and she said, "When you come visit next time, I want to tell you a bunch of stuff about your father that I never told you." My dad died when I was twenty-two years old. I was only twenty-two, so you can imagine. He was also an emotionally absent person, as were many of the men of that generation. I think she realizes, too, that she's going to die and nobody's going to know anything about your dad.
I thought that was so cool: oh my gosh, she's actually going to share it.
 
I've done interviews not only with my mother, but also with older relatives from Cuba about how they grew up. I grew up completely differently than they did. Sharing stories is an important way to grow as a writer.
 
Gonzalez: I think that's an excellent point. I definitely want to visit at some point. Hopefully I will get that opportunity. Thank you so much for sitting down to talk with me and giving me all this great advice. I'm really excited to put it to use now that I'm more of a fully-fledged writer.
 
Blanco: Of course. Stay in touch, and good luck, and…dale!
 

 
Alessandra Gonzalez is a Cuban American poet and educator. Gonzalez holds a MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Central Florida, where she currently teaches English to high school students. Gonzalez’s work explores diaspora, intergenerational memory, and the complexities of living between cultures.