"One Today" is a
poem by
Richard Blanco first recited at the
second inauguration of Barack Obama, making Blanco the fifth poet to read during a
United States presidential inauguration. "One Today" was called "a fine example of public poetry, in keeping with Blanco’s other work: Loose, open lines of mostly conversational verse, a flexible
iambic pentameter stanza form," by Ken Tucker in ''Entertainment Weekly''.
Background
Richard Blanco was asked to write three poems for the selection of the one to be read at the second inauguration of Barack Obama re-elected on his second term on November 6, 2012.
"One Today" was chosen among "What We Know of Country" and "Mother Country".
The poet said: "I wanted all three to be different facets of my writing, and my experiences, and how we can live in our country and be part of the union"
Analysis
"The images in the poem move from the universal to the specific, so that from out of the millions of nameless, faceless Americans one figure in particular emerges: the immigrant. This is where “One Today” does something very interesting: it shows us the exact point at which the story of the immigrant experience intersects with the myth of the American Dream."
"Over the course of its nine stanzas (69 lines), “One Today” offers a sweeping view of America during a single day, from sunrise to sunset. The first stanza links geographically diverse areas of the country through the image of the rising sun:"
The incipit is strongly alliterative. Almost each word recalls the following by
assonance . A sort of raffinate anagrammatic playing, highlights "us" which is contained in the word "sun" and "rose" which is contained in "shores".
The anaphoric "One" of the first and fifth line, emphasizes the diurnal light growing in intensity.
The poem is characterised by a musical harmony given by the employment of figures of sound such as
alliteration , assonance,
paromoiosis In rhetoric, paromoiosis is parallelism of sound between the words of two clauses approximately equal in size. The similarity of sound can occur at the beginning of the clauses, at the end (where it is equivalent to homoioteleuton
Homeoteleuton, a ...
, and several
onomatopoeic
Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
words such as "slide", "whistling", "brush". The style is mostly
nominal
Nominal may refer to:
Linguistics and grammar
* Nominal (linguistics), one of the parts of speech
* Nominal, the adjectival form of "noun", as in "nominal agreement" (= "noun agreement")
* Nominal sentence, a sentence without a finite verb
* Nou ...
and where the lyrical discourse proceeds for
asyndeton the speed of the rhythm creates breathtaking poetic-narrative sequences.
On the other hand the employment of
prepositions,
deixis
In linguistics, deixis (, ) is the use of general words and phrases to refer to a specific time, place, or person in context, e.g., the words ''tomorrow'', ''there'', and ''they''. Words are deictic if their semantic meaning is fixed but their de ...
, particularly spatial deixis, makes images plastic and visual.
See also
*
Poems at United States presidential inaugurations
The inauguration of the president of the United States is a ceremony to mark the commencement of a new four-year term of the president of the United States. During this ceremony, between 73 to 79 days after the presidential election, the pres ...
References
Further reading
''One Today'' at White House website* Includes a video of Blanco's reading.
* Freedlander summarizes several opinions about Blanco's poem, as well as giving the poem's text.
* Armenti offers a careful explication of the poem, stanza by stanza.
External links
*
2013 poems
American poems
English-language poems
Inaugural poems
Second inauguration of Barack Obama
Cuban-American literature
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