Throughout the work, it is clear that place and geography are significant, as each poem is labeled with a location and date. The poems in her collection touch on many historical issues and events from the Civil Rights Movement to the Red Scare. The Plot: Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) includes an author's note at the back (which has become a standard for verse novels that explore the author's past personal history) that explains: "This book is a late-career retrospective, a personal memoir, a 'portrait of the artist as a young American Negro Girl.' The poems cover the decade of the fifties, from 1950, when I was four years old, to 1960, when I was fourteen" (101). Marilyn Nelson is the author of poetry for adults and young readers her poetry has received numerous awards and honors including a Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Honor, National Book Award Finalist, and Printz Honor. This week, I take a closer look at Nelson's work and will follow up next week with a look at Woodson's verse novel both works are unique in their exploration of autobiography and the personal, race, childhood, and American history. It is always clear that the judges of The Lion and the Unicorn Award have a very particular kind of poetry in mind, and it is usually not a poetry that is representative of the current trends in contemporary American poetry. Woodson's ear, sadly, is fallible" (340). The judges note that "comically inauthentic is the strongest stuff Alexander has, as most of the book relies upon anemic free verse" (339) and that "Woodson too often destroys the strength of her verse with maladroit line breaks and missed opportunities for structural or linguistic repetition. While I agreed with their selection of Nelson's work as an honor book (they actually never refer to How I Discovered Poetry as a verse novel, so it's my understanding that they don't consider it one), I found their discussion of Kwame Alexander's The Crossoverand Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming unsettling and frustrating. They often dismiss and denigrate works as not being "good" poetry. Since the award's inception in 2005, although the judges rotate every year, it is always clear that the judges find very little merit in the verse novel as a form. This year marks the tenth year of the award's existence, and while I am thrilled that this award exists and that poetry for young readers is consistently acknowledged, I very often disagree with the award panels' views on the verse novel for young readers.
This year's judges, Lissa Paul, Kate Pendlebury, and Craig Svonkin, honored two books published in 2014, one of which was Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry. Recently, The Lion and the Unicornpublished its annual essay in which their panel of rotating judges awarded the 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry (see the Critical Perspectives tab for citation).
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