The poem Acceptance Speech by Lynn Powell is about a housewife who feels undervalued by her family and by society. The title of the poem suggests that the character has received an award for achieving something brilliant, but in fact she is being sarcastic and conducting an imaginary award ceremony for herself in her kitchen, since no one else is willing to appreciate her hard work. The poet uses irony and personification of kitchen utensils and ingredients to add humour to the play. She uses the In this poem, the character deals with her desire to be appreciated by propelling herself into an imaginary scenario in her kitchen where she is in the spotlight and humorously personifies ingredients in food who are just as under appreciated as
Humour is used her by the poet to illustrate that although making food for the family in the kitchen is not the most glamorous job, it deserves to be acknowledgement and appreciation as it requires hard work and is essential for a household to function. The structure also helps to emphasise that this poem is a parody of an acceptance speech. While in actual acceptance speeches, the speakers always give special thanks in particular to their family members, the speaker is this poem spares only one stanza of four lines to discuss thank her family, while in the majority of the rest of the poem she gives special thanks to ingredients such as “tomatoes”, “oregano” and “the salt.” This is humorous because the speaker finds these personified kitchen ingredients to be more worthy of recognition than her family in her acceptance speech, as they have been more supportive of her than her family. Again, this highlights that she feels undervalued.

Overall, this poem discusses how society fails to appreciate people for their hard work and simply take them for granted. This doesn’t only pertain to housewives, but the vast group of people who take on the lesser wanted jobs. This is a huge flaw in our society. The lack of appreciation often leads to a feeling of loneliness, as in the case of the speaker of this poem, whose closest friends seem to be the ingredients in her