For the latest installment of "Village Voice" — Boston Public Radio's recurring conversation about how poetry can help us better understand the news of the day — poet Richard Blanco shared poems about television and all that it represents in our lives. Blanco is the nation's fifth inaugural poet and his latest project is the collection " Boundaries," a collaboration with photographer Jacob Hessler.

In these poems, Blanco explained, television stands in as a way of engaging with larger themes like identity, companionship, and connecting with others.

"It's not about TV," he said. "It's TV as an occasion to talk about something else."

In his own piece "Afternoons as Endora," for example, Blanco recalls seeing television — specifically, the outlandish and self-assured witch Endora from "Bewitched" — as a companion in a lonely childhood growing up gay in a hyper-masculine culture.

"Television was my best friend in a way ... It was a source of comfort, it was a source of allegory, it was a source of stories I could get into," Blanco said.

Blanco discussed how television can serve as a backdrop for some of the most important relationships and events in our lives, and how our connection with characters on TV can feel as real as the connections we have with people in real life.

"There's a collective sort of connection that we have psychically that is of course more than just about television," he said. "[It melds] into our story, into our lives, into memories, into good times and bad times and relationships."

Follow along with the poems discussed, in order: