Poet Richard Blanco was President Barack Obama's inaugural poet for his second inauguration in 2013 and reveals the honor that was given to him felt like he "was home finally."

The 44 year old son of Cuban exiles Richard Blanco says he felt "a spiritual connection" with President Obama right from his early days in politics. Early January the President's inaugural planners announced that Blanco had been  chosen to be Obama's inaugural poet for the year 2013.

Blanco talks to NPR about his experience at the inaugural, his family and his writings.

On how being the inaugural poet affected his sense of being American

"All along, through different stages of my relationship with America ... I've always been sort of wondering: Where's home? Is home America? That ideal doesn't really exist, does it? Where's all those sort of principals that I grew up with? And when I was up on that platform - for those two hours or so that we were up there - it was like all those ideals came to life in ways that I had never imagined. So even with all the politics and all the fiscal cliff and all the rest that [was] going on, for those two hours there was still this sense that was still so pure about America. ... Just the idea that all those hundreds of thousands of people have just come to bear witness. ... I really embraced America up there like I never had before, and I think I finally felt like I was home in some way. ... And I turned to my mother at one moment and I told her, 'Well, I think we're finally American.' "

On his Cuban grandmother and where he's from

"My grandmother was as xenophobic as she was homophobic, so I remember growing up so that anything that seemed culturally odd or weird or strange was also sort of tagged as 'queer' - and I'm talking like things like Legos and Fruit Loops - so anything she perceived as strange she also questioned in terms of my sexuality. ... My grandmother was also a very central figure in my life for being one of those relatives that ended up doing a lot of good for you, in terms of all the harm that they did to you. I always claim that my soul is Cuban - my soul was made in Cuba - and I was assembled in Spain and then imported to the United States, because I was only 45 days old when we left Spain for Manhattan, so my green card photo is my first baby photo."

On how being an engineer - as he is - is similar to being a poet in the sense of having a catastrophist's temperament

"As an engineer ... in your designs and whatnot, you're trained to figure out what's going to go wrong. That's how you design a lot of things. You're like, 'OK, that's a decently designed curve there in the road, but what could go wrong? What's wrong with this design?' And you're constantly putting things up to the test and up to the test, and overdesigning and implementing things and safety factors, and if I wasn't like that already, 25 years of engineering have pretty much reinforced that."