Alfred Romero
10/25/2022
Professor Frank
Introduction to Literary Theory & Criticism
QCQ#6 updated
In his inauguration poem “One Today”, Education Ambassador Richard Blanco describes a scene involving a highway where different people are on their way to “clean tables, read ledgers or save lives” (Blanco stanza 2, line 7).
When listening to these words, I think of the idea of how everyone in this world has their own story. At first, this seems like a pretty straightforward idea, like of course everyone we encounter has their own life, but the more I think about it on a broader scale, the crazier the idea becomes to me. Every single car on the highway that you drive alongside has a person or people inside of it that has their own story, just like you do. But just glancing at them, this idea kind of becomes irrelevant as they just become humans in our perception. I feel like this ties in with the unity aspect of the poem, as there’s this central focus of coming together throughout the entire poem. This unity aspect has commonalities with the inauguration poem by Gorman, where even the ending segments are very similar as they contain this implication of moving forward as a whole.
If I could ask Blanco a question, it would refer to his perception of what he wrote. What does this idea of moving forward mean to him? At the end of the poem, he ends with this visualization of the people of America staring up at the stars and looking towards hope for the future together? But what exactly is this hope directed at? Would this refer to something broad like the extermination of prejudice, or is it something more specific based on the time when this was written? If the latter is the case, I’d want to know what motivated him to look at hope through the lens he does in this poem considering that racial tensions are way higher today than they were during this time period (at least it seems that way).
