Ken Tucker calls Richard Blanco’s effort “a humble, modest poem, one presented to a national audience as a gift of comradeship” and “a quiet assertion that poetry deserves its place in our thoughts on this one day, and every day.” His further analysis:
“One Today” is 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…The poem takes its structure from its title: It follows America over the course of one day, from sunrise to sunset. It dips into autobiography, mentioning Blanco’s working-class origins in his father “cutting sugarcane” and his mother toiling in a grocery store “for twenty years, so I could write this poem” — the sort of anecdotal locution that President Obama himself likes to employ in speeches.
Jahan Ramazani, an editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, also gives the poem high marks:
“[It] was especially well suited to the occasion … A more knotty or abstruse poem—even if it had a better chance of lasting or was more formally innovative, less conventional in its imagery or diction—would have missed the mark as an act of public address as well as poetry.”
And, like me, Greg Kandra caught echoes of Whitman in the poem:
It’s full of rich images and sensations—a whiff of Whitman with a dollop of Woody Guthrie and a brush stroke or two of Thomas Hart Benton for good measure. It’s a big-hearted paean to a big country.
Lastly, Annie Colbert rounds up “10 people annoyed that [the] inauguration poem didn’t rhyme.”
The Dish 