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Do you have more than one idea? Poet Richard Blanco also works as an engineer. On a tough day at the office, he wrote poetry. And when his poetry’s getting challenging, he designs bridges!
What do you want to be when you grow up — what work would you like to do?
Love, writes Poet and Civil Engineer Richard Blanco,
is our wisest formula, most elegant calculation,
our most noble science, most brilliant invention.
Love, our greatest genius, as genius as the fire
in the still eyes of the stars, still watching us.
His poetry often mentions stars and he has become something of a star himself, chosen by President Barack Obama to read his poem “One Today” at the ceremony when the President was sworn in for his second term. That poem begins with a star: “One sun.” It continues to describe “pencil yellow school buses” and many other images of people going about their lives in the United States.
In “One Today,” Blanco also mentions the people who
ring-up groceries as my mother did
for twenty years, so I could write this poem.
He told Math4Science that his parents “were not sitting around talking about Picasso at the dinner table” and “didn’t know who Robert Frost and The Rolling Stones” were. They had left Cuba and moved to the United States by way of Madrid, Spain, where Richard was born. As immigrants living in Miami, his parents and also his grandmother, who helped raise him, valued work like engineering.
In their household, it was “ok to get a B in English but you better get an A in math.” Perhaps with this in mind, they sent him to a math tutor when he was in seventh grade.
Luz Martinez Gayol had taught Richard’s grandfather. “She was the most brilliant human being” and kind. Martinez helped him with math from basic algebra through calculus. And she helped him learn physics as well. She made the material real — “it was contagious, the love that she felt for numbers.” A friend of the family, Martinez Gayol “made me fall in love” with math.
Richard preferred the idea of being an architect to being an engineer. He would eventually try architecture, but partly because his grandmother discouraged that idea, he chose to study engineering first.
Structural engineering, which Blanco made his first focus, “wasn’t poetic enough.” It was “so abstract and formulaic.” So he found himself seeking out environmental projects, jobs “out in the field,” and specializing in bridge hydrology. By the time he graduated from Florida International University, with a B.S. in civil engineering, he had a job working for Ramon Castella, a friend’s older brother.
To build effective, lasting bridges one must study the water over which the bridge is built. So Blanco studied river systems and modeled them, to learn about what happened during flood conditions. “Talk to me, river,” he remembers thinking as he began work on the environmental end of engineering. (Apostrophe, a poetic device, involves addressing something that’s not human – something like a river.)
“A small creek could turn into a 50-foot river in… hours.” That mattered when Blanco chose how deep a bridge’s piles would be. (Piles, often made of concrete, metal, or wood, are poles which hold up bridges and other structures, by reaching deep into the earth below them.)
When he worked on the Bayou Texar bridge, in East Pensacola, Florida, “the modeling was very complicated.” The team had to study the tidal surge from hurricanes and look at the river the bridge would cross “way upstream.” There’s also an estuary there. “You had to worry about the velocity of the water that can scour the piles and cause them to fail.”
Flood water levels also mattered: “How much? How fast?” Florida’s topography is relatively flat, but the “more subtle changes in elevation” that affect water’s movement there are challenging. So they studied topographical maps created by the USGS (United States Geological Survey).
Years after the project was finished, a hurricane hit the panhandle area of Florida, where the Bayou Texar bridge is located. Blanco called his boss to find out how the bridge did. “It survived the hurricane.”
While working full-time as an engineer, Blanco earned a masters degree in creative writing. “I got my engineering license and my poetic license in the same year.”
As he works on projects, Blanco finds geometry and trigonometry to be especially useful. That math helps team members place buildings and other structures properly on the site where the engineers, architects, and builders create their projects. “If the surveyors mess up … every angle will be off.”
He also finds geometry and the process of writing a geometric proof helpful when he writes poems.
I think of it like trusses: each line is a member of a truss [the framework which holds up a structure]. It must carry its load and transfer its load to the next member, building a structure of words, each relying on the strength and load of the other. The line is the building block.
Although Blanco has seen some sexism and homophobia at work in his profession, he mostly finds engineering to be “one of the most ethical fields.” He describes a feeling engineers share “of in many ways helping humanity.” And they are aware of the importance of their work, individually and as members of a team. “You make a mistake and 5,000 people die.”
While contractors hired to get a project done prioritize doing so within a certain budget and might be tempted to cut corners, engineers, says Blanco, focus on safety issues. They “maintain the ethics of the project.” With this in mind, he left his job when asked by a contractor to make the plans for a public school building’s playfields “look like [they included] drainage.” His response? “Can you make it ‘look like’ a school?”
Shortly after that, he took a job as a creative writing professor in Hartford, Connecticut, where he met his future husband, a scientist. They would move together to Miami and then on to Maine.
In addition to helping keep people safe, engineers can improve their lives in other ways. After returning to Miami and his work with Castella’s consulting firm, Blanco became involved with town development and revitalization projects. He found that actions as simple as widening sidewalks and adding crosswalks to narrower roads would help people slow down and create space for cafes. Afterwards, residents “don’t have to drive 15 miles to have a nice cafe meal on the sidewalk on a nice Miami night.”
What we call “Miami” is made up of dozens of municipalities. Blanco helped revitalize South Miami, one of those areas, improving a few blocks of Main Street. He had to “learn the sensitivity that it takes to be an engineer,” seeking buy-in from the residents of the area, who “had grown up driving and biking up and down this street.”
The town of Golden Beach lacked properly functioning public spaces. Blanco studied the history of the beach-front town and talked with its residents. They did not see the value of widening their sidewalks until he showed them photos of nannies pushing strollers in the middle of the street….
One winter resident argued that even in the neighborhood where she lived in Chicago, the sidewalks were only four feet wide. Blanco patiently explained that laws require sidewalks to be at least five feet wide. She went home and measured, returning to admit her mistake and to become a supporter of the revitalization of Golden Beach. The team also fixed up and expanded the town’s neglected parks. As the work got done, residents “saw the beauty and value of space they just took for granted” before the project began.
Blanco discovered as he worked that each town’s particular history and the needs of its residents had their own kind of poetry. A poem he wrote about the South Miami project led to a public reading. At the groundbreaking ceremony, Blanco read “Photo of a Man on Sunset Drive: 1914, 2008“ with his hard hat on. It’s now a piece of art: the copy he read has an engineering seal on it.
After the White House called, it became possible to work as a full-time poet. But Blanco misses engineering. To understand his passion for his work, he suggests that you read Samuel C. Florman’s book The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. It describes the history of engineering, from Achilles’ shield to modern times. “I can be a poet that does engineering — that book gave me permission to be a poet as well as an engineer.”
You might also check out the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, one of Blanco’s favorite poets. Referring to the way she builds her poems, he says that it’s “as beautiful as a quadratic equation.”
