The Inaugural Poem

Some simple thoughts on Richard Blanco's inaugural poem, "One Today":

The title is playful, I suppose, but I sort of trip over it. 


There are some really fresh and provocative lines in the poem: "pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights" and

"one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches
as mothers watch children slide into the day."

But there are also lots of American cliches:

"every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal"

and "dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains" and "the unexpected song bird on your clothes line." There have just been too many birds on clothes lines over the years. But I doubt that the problem is Richard Blanco--I just think that writing a patriotic poem must be the hardest thing ever: as far as I know, it's rarely done these days, except in an absurdly kitschy way. And then once every four years we need a really good inaugural poem. And how do you appeal back to the tradition without using lines like "for amber waves of grain"?

Blanco did squeeze quite a few energy sources into not too many lines--oil, coal, windmills. I guess using energy is a traditional American activity. I really wished he'd talked about fracking. 

There were a couple of biblical resonances--"Thank the work of our hands" and "One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes."

I was ambivalent about the personal references he made. I don't even think Walt Whitman gave us that many life giving strokes of personal fact (as my high-school English teacher used to call them).

The poem gelled nicely with Obama's themes of unity and education. I guess maybe Blanco got a draft to read in advance.