Another “review” for you! This is the third annotation I did for my MFA. Let me know what you think (of the essay or the book, if you read it—which you should)!
As before, don’t steal my stuff.
Family Portraits: Relational Relatability in Looking for the Gulf Motel
In Looking for the Gulf Motel, Cuban-American poet and civil engineer Richard Blanco brings the reader into a personal narrative that uses specific memories and imagery to appeal to and resonate with a broad audience. This book is equal parts about culture, family, and self-discovery, and likely every reader can relate to the struggle with those things. Not every poet can bridge the gap between their own experiences and others, but Blanco does it expertly by incorporating food, speech, music, and the smallest physical details in his poems.
The title poem is a perfect example of how to use most of these devices to evoke feeling, but especially food. In this opening poem alone, Blanco references cake, Cuban bread, mangos, espresso, pork roast, garlic, arroz-con-pollo, onion powder, tomato sauce, and whiskey (Blanco, 1-2). Even though not everyone knows what Cuban bread and arroz-con-pollo are, those two foods in particular (and perhaps mangos as well) give the reader a sense of culture specific to the poet and other Cuban/Spanish-speaking readers, while mixing them in with foods that are possibly more familiar to readers without that cultural background. Whatever culture a reader claims, they likely have fond memories associated with certain foods, and can therefore identify with the nostalgia Blanco creates here. Similarly, in “Tía Margarita Johnson’s House in Hollywood,” Blanco describes “ice-cream sandwiches and Kool-Aid,” “mac-n-cheese and blueberry pie,” and “not arroz-con-frijoles” (11). In these lines, the reader might not only be getting hungry and nostalgic, but beginning to either understand or remember their own culture “clashes,” in which they (and the speaker) explore what it means to be at odds with one’s own “traditions.”
While Blanco’s incorporation of Spanish food words and phrases do add to the narrative of the individual poems and the book as a whole, the inclusion of his relatives’ speech as well as the language of music are also effective in connecting with readers. In “Betting on America,” the speaker’s abuelo says “She’s got great teeth,” and his Papa complains “Americanas all have skinny butts” (9-10), which is not only humorous but also painfully relatable to readers with hyper-critical or judgmental relatives (however well-meaning or “innocent” the comments may be). The way Blanco writes about these people not only tells us about them, but also about him, and his own judgment/criticism, creating an interesting dynamic that flows throughout the collection. In “Cousin Consuelo, On Piano,” for example, the speaker continually requests popular American songs from the 1970s (“Crocodile Rock,” “Muskrat Love,” “Margaritaville,” “American Pie”), while his cousin—and parents, and aunt, and grandmother, etc.—essentially ignore him and settle instead on “Guantanamera,” which, while internationally popularized in the 1960s, does more than disappoint Blanco: “that damn song about Cuba they all knew by heart,” he calls it (12). The reader can feel Blanco’s annoyance and possibly even anger in this poem, as well as the sense that his aunt’s ask in the opening line, “play something—for la familia” (12), might not include him. Blanco would have been around 10 years old at the time of this memory, and even though the events of this poem are not as public as that of the title poem, the reader can feel the chagrin, hear the all-too-relatable echo of “[we] should still be pretending / we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us” (1). Blanco wants to escape his family, their history, but the fact that these moments come through so clearly in these poems proves how inescapable their impact on his life was; perhaps every reader/writer has been there.
Another aspect of Blanco’s writing that connects with readers is his attention to physical details. Visuals like his mother’s “daisy sandals from Kmart” (1), his aunt’s “red-velvet sofa not covered in plastic like ours” (11), his cousin’s “waist-long hair swaying like a metronome” (12), his great-grandfather’s “ascot tie and buttoned shoes” (14), and his uncle’s “six white shirts / starched in the closet” (22) not only create cinematic experiences to engage the reader, but become totem-like symbols of each relative, or stamps of socioeconomic status. While everyone’s family experience is different, most people can likely think of objects or images that represent or remind them of their family members, whether those objects are heirlooms passed down through the generations or something not possessed but presented, like a tic or a tell. In short, Looking for the Gulf Motel is rich with imagery and story, the breadth and depth of which cannot be fully explored in a three-page paper. Richard Blanco’s work is connective and timeless in its detail, and for that should be able to be appreciated by every poetry enthusiast for many decades to come.
Work Cited
Blanco, Richard. Looking for the Gulf Motel. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 