The Golden Shovel

A golden shovel sounds like some kind of gravedigger’s award (‘and the nominees for best-dug hole are…’) but it isn’t.  I came across it today when researching places to send my poetry and discovered that it is in fact a very new poetic form which began as a tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry (no, I hadn’t heard of her either.)  You take a line or two from a poem and make your own out of it like this: each word of the original line becomes the last word of each line in the new poem.  For example, this is a poem taken from one of Brooks’:

The Golden Shovel

by Terrance Hayes, after Gwendolyn Brooks

 

 

When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we

cruise at twilight until we find the place the real

 

men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool.

His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we

 

drift by women on bar stools, with nothing left

in them but approachlessness. This is a school

 

I do not know yet. But the cue sticks mean we

are rubbed by light, smooth as wood, the lurk

 

of smoke thinned to song. We won’t be out late.

Standing in the middle of the street last night we

 

watched the moonlit lawns and a neighbor strike

his son in the face. A shadow knocked straight

 

Da promised to leave me everything: the shovel we

used to bury the dog, the words he loved to sing………..

here’s the rest:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel

 

and here’s the original:

 

The Pool Players, Seven at the Golden Shovel.

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

            We real cool. We

            Left school. We

 

            Lurk late. We

            Strike straight. We

 

            Sing sin. We

            Thin gin. We

 

            Jazz June. We

            Die soon.

 

So that got me inspired and I wrote one of my own called ‘Saving Planet Earth’ and based on Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress

 

I also sent a limerick (previously written) and started a poem about the naming of the new Prince.

I am on a roll!

Kirk out