A New Morning, a New Poem

In his poem "Tia Olivia Serves Wallace Stevens a Cuban Egg," the poet Richard Blanco conjures up a chance meeting between Tia Olivia and the poet Wallace Stevens. When she serves him up an egg, he questions its color, the yellow of it so unlike other yellows he has seen. The woman gets fed up with Stevens' questions, his search for the exact color and his search for words. So she bursts open the yoke by "plunging into it with a sharp piece of Cuban toast." It's yellow, she says. "Amarillo y nada mas, bien?" (yellow and nothing else, ok?) 

The colors she has unleashed begin to spill and travel, the egg yolk becomes like lava, carrying off all kinds of things in its wake, "cafeterias, 57 Chevys... mangy dogs...park benches," all the way to the sea. In the end, Stevens relents and says that yes, it is yellow. Then he asks her what about the color of the sea? The poem brings up such intriguing questions about language, about color, about words and what they mean for each of us. It made me think of the insistence of place both in the world and society. 

I loved the zest of the aunt and the persistence of Stevens and how Blanco decided to put the two of them into a poem in the first place, tangling over the color of an egg yolk and so much more. 

This morning it was announced that President Barack Obama asked Blanco, a civil engineer and poet who is the son of Cuban immigrants, to create and read a poem at Obama's inauguration January 21st. I was happy to hear that the inauguration will be infused with art and that we will all have a poem to untangle, words to sort through and take meaning from, a poem to carry with us. 

I remember listening to Maya Angelou's 1993 inaugural poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," as she spoke of  "A Rock. A River a Tree."  Her poem called each of us "a bordered country, delicate and strangely made proud." In the poem, the river sings and sings and asks us to come and rest by its side.

I wonder what Blanco's poem will tell us, what it will ask. 

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http://www.richard-blanco.com/

http://www.npr.org/2013/01/09/168899347/richard-blanco-will-be-first-latino-inaugural-poet

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/books/richard-blanco-2013-inaugural-poet.html?_r=0

http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/poets/rblanco.html

http://poetry.eserver.org/angelou.html

~ Poetry on Wednesdays