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🗓️ 27 November 2024
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Today’s poem punctuates the precious value of time spent with family around food. Happy reading.
Jacqueline Woodson received a 2023 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award, the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and the 2018 Children’s Literature Legacy Award. She was the 2018–2019 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, and in 2015, she was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She received the 2014 National Book Award for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, the NAACP Image Award, and a Sibert Honor. She wrote the adult books Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller, and Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Jacqueline grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and graduated from college with a B.A. in English. She is the author of dozens of award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
-bio via Penguin Random House
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0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, November 27, 2004. Today's poem comes from contemporary poet Jacqueline Woodson, and it's called Lessons. It is an excerpt from her young adult novel in verse. There should be more of those, by the way, novels in verse for any audience. |
0:24.7 | It's called Brown Girl Dreaming, published in 2014. |
0:28.4 | It's told in the voice of a mother who has her children gathered around her while she's cooking breakfast on a Saturday morning, |
0:34.2 | the only morning in the week that she gets to spend with them. |
0:38.3 | And as she prepares breakfast for them, she reminisces about her own childhood and her reticence to learn to cook the traditional cuisine from her mother. |
0:49.6 | And the poem is a beautiful juxtaposition then between this lament that she did not gain from her mother, that she was not interested in gaining from her mother, this rich treasure that she could then pass on to her own children who are gathered around her. |
1:07.4 | And yet, they are gathered around her. And she's making do with what she has offering to them |
1:13.8 | what she has still though the poem ends on this note of lament there's in the midst of that |
1:20.3 | beautiful scene there is a tinge of sadness that she could have offered them even more if she had been willing to receive it. |
1:29.4 | And the open question at the end of the poem is whether her own children will understand and receive this exhortation and take from her what they can. |
1:42.8 | Here is lessons. |
1:47.2 | My mother says, |
1:49.2 | When Mama tried to teach me to make collards and potato salad, |
1:53.0 | I didn't want to learn. |
1:55.0 | She opens the box of pancake mix, |
1:57.3 | adds milk and eggs, stirs. |
2:00.0 | I watch grateful for the food we have now, syrup waiting in |
2:03.6 | the cabinet bananas to slice on top. It's Saturday morning. Five days a week, she leaves us to work |
2:10.6 | at an office back in Brownsville. Saturday, we have her to ourselves all day long. Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking. |
2:20.7 | She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it into the buttered hissing pan. |
2:24.9 | We wanted to be with our friends, running wild through Greenville. |
2:28.1 | There was a man with a peach tree down the road. |
... |
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