Jim Daniels' "Short-Order Cook"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem goes out to all the unsung heroes of the grease trap and the fry basket. Happy reading.

Jim Daniels is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently The Middle Ages (Red Mountain Press, 2018) and Street Calligraphy (Steel Toe Books, 2017). His third collection, Places/Everyone (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), won the inaugural Brittingham Prize in Poetry in 1985. He lives in Pittsburgh and is the Thomas Stockham University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

-bio via Academy of American Poets

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Transcript

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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 Thursday, June 20th, 2004. Today's poem is by Jim Daniels, and it's called Short Order Cook. I'll read it once, offer a few comments, then read it once more.
0:18.8	Here is Short-order cook.
0:26.9	An average Joe comes in and orders 30 cheeseburgers and 30 fries.
0:29.7	I wait for him to pay before I start cooking.
0:30.8	He pays.
0:32.6	He ain't no average Joe.
0:36.3	The grill is just big enough for ten rows of three.
0:42.1	I slap the burgers down, throw two buckets of fries in the deep friar, and they pop, pop, spit, spit.
0:42.9	Pss!
0:44.7	The countergirls laugh.
0:46.0	I concentrate.
0:48.0	It is the crucial point.
0:49.5	They are ready for the cheese.
1:06.9	My fingers shake as I tear off slices, toss them on the burgers, fries done, dump, refill buckets, burgers ready, flip onto buns, beat that melting cheese, wrap burgers in plastic into paper bags, fries done, dump, fill 30 bags, bring them to the counter, wipe sweat on sleeve and smile at the countergirls.
1:09.1	I puffed my chest out and bellow.
1:11.6	Thirty cheese burgers, 30 fries.
1:16.9	I grab a handful of ice, toss it in my mouth, do a little dance and walk back to the grill.
1:20.3	Pressure, responsibility, success.
1:23.5	30 cheeseburgers, 30 fries. G.K. Chesterton once wrote in an essay on cheese that poets had been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese, but Jim Daniels is not one of those poets.
1:42.6	Many of my favorite Jim Daniels poems happen to feature cheese.
1:47.0	We featured one of his poems here on the Daily Poem sometime last year called American Cheese.
1:54.0	And here again, cheese is at the heart of what is happening in the action of this poem,
	...

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