Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh,and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

As a novelist, and one who subjects his characters to perils that sometimes go off the charts, I recognize they need resilience, but also they need anchors. Some thought or person or place that provides them a concept of stability when nothing else can, and their world is in utter chaos.

Think about your own life. Do you know what your anchors are?

Continuing this train of thought, poets often do the same thing, or at least something similar. You realize it sometimes in how they describe a person, or place, or thing, or event, and how it connected with them in their past, and how they look for something with relatable resonance in the present to hold on to.

Today’s poem, El Florida Room (https://poets.org/poem/el-florida-room), by Richard Blanco, is about a very specific place, as the anchor to a life.  I’m not going to go deep into his biography - there is plenty on the Poetry Foundation website (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-blanco), or you can go to his own website at https://richard-blanco.com/ . I’m just to comment on two things: one is that he is an Inaugural poet - meaning he was chosen to read at a presidential inauguration - there are only a very few of those.  Amanda Gorman is in very select company - she makes number five.  The other thing is that he is an Engineer / Writer / Poet, something I aspire to be, and yes, probably something else there aren’t a lot of.

Defining terms, a Florida room, generally, is a room at the back of a house with windows that look out onto garden flowers. Ideally the windows are big and also let in lots of sun. Ideally there are flowers to be looked at, and ideally the windows are louvered, to let in fresh air.

In Richard Blanco’s case,

Not a study or a den, but El Florida

as my mother called it, a pretty name

for the room with the prettiest view

of the lipstick-red hibiscus puckered up

against the windows, the tepid breeze

laden with the brown-sugar scent

of loquats drifting in from the yard.

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