Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from.
Interpretation
Tracy K. Smith praises Jacqueline Woodson's work for its emotional depth and ability to confront difficult truths about childhood and parenting.
This quote highlights the value of Jacqueline Woodson's literature, emphasizing its subtle and lyrical nature. It suggests that her books provide a thoughtful exploration of the complexities of childhood and parenting, offering readers an opportunity to reflect on the challenges and emotional realities that children face, which parents often try to shield them from. Through her poignant storytelling, Woodson encourages readers to engage with these difficult truths, fostering a deeper understanding of both the joys and struggles inherent in family life.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of children's literature in understanding complex emotions.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha'am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha'am's essays.
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
A teacher is never a giver of truth; he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself.
What we are learning around the world is that if women are healthy and educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and equal partners in society, their families will flourish. And when families flourish, communities and nations do as well.
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in these rhythmic ways, something that came from somewhere.
Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
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