. . . so I could write this poem . . .

 

How did I come to poetry in the first place? Well, I’m not one of those poets who claims to have been writing poems since I was in the womb. However, I have been possessed by a creative spirit and curiosity since I was a child, taking great pride in my Mickey Mouse coloring books, my Lego houses, and my Play-Doh sculptures. On the other hand, I was also a whiz at math and the sciences. Truly a left-brained, right-brained person, I scored exactly the same on the analytical and verbal sections of every standardized test I ever took. But we were a relatively poor working-class family simply trying to survive; the arts were certainly not dinner conversation. What’s more, there was a cultural divide: my parents didn’t even know who the Rolling Stones or Mary Tyler Moore were, for example, much less Robert Frost. That was part of the story I was born into and the reason why a life in the arts was just outside the realm of possibility. Like many immigrants, my parents strongly encouraged me to pursue a sound, financially rewarding career to ensure I’d have a better life than they had had. So, on the advice of my father, I chose civil engineering, believing that someday, somehow I’d explore my other side, though I didn’t imagine it would ever be through poetry.

After graduating with honors, I established my civil engineering career, making my family—and myself—proud. By my mid-twenties, however, I felt accomplished and confident enough to begin exploring those creative impulses that had lain dormant. I entertained thoughts of becoming a painter or applying to graduate school for architecture but never followed through. Nothing felt quite right. Nothing stuck.

Then the unexpected happened. In the course of my engineering duties at the offices of my employer, C3TS, I began writing inch-thick reports, proposals, and lengthy letters to clients and permitting agencies. Consequently, I started paying very close attention to the way language worked to organize my thoughts, argue a point, or create a persona, noticing the subtle yet important differences between writing “but” instead of “however” or “therefore” instead of “consequently.” I discovered that language had to be engineered in a way, just like the bridges and roads I was designing. It had to be concise, accurate, effective, and precise—the same terms one might use to describe a poem.

Eventually I couldn’t resist the urge to pick up a pen and explore writing for my own personal expression, merely as a creative outlet at first. My earliest poems weren’t very good, but they weren’t terrible either, according to the friends and former writing instructors with whom I shared my work. Somehow—perhaps because I felt I had nothing to lose—I was never bashful about showing my poems to others. Encouraged, the more I wrote and read poems, the more my fascination with language grew.

One night, while pondering “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, I noticed my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner and suddenly became aware of the violence of her hands chopping onions and bell peppers, the dull glint of that same old knife she’d used since I was a child, the faded tomato-sauce stains on her apron, and the smell of olive oil sizzling through the house. In that instant, time seemed to stop, and I grasped the power of imagery to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, into poetry, into a poem where my mother was not just my mother and a wheelbarrow was not just a wheelbarrow.

It was another of those life-changing moments—the moment I got poetry as a real, living thing and decided to pursue the art more seriously, though with only a vague sense of what becoming a real poet meant. So I took the next step and enrolled in a series of creative writing courses at a community college in Miami. There I began formally understanding the discipline of the craft behind the magic of the art. And as I engaged with more seasoned poets, I became more seasoned and serious myself. Eventually I applied and was accepted to the master’s program in creative writing at Florida International University, though I continued working full-time as an engineer. I graduated from the creative writing program the same year I passed my engineering board exam, meaning I got my poetic license and my engineering license at the same time! Richard Blanco, PE, which stood for Professional Engineer as well as Poet Engineer, as I was playfully dubbed by my coworkers. In retrospect, I now consider the irony of how my cultural circumstances led me to engineering, yet engineering led me to write poetry that explored my cultural circumstances. Which came first: the engineer or the poet?