Golden Shovel

Poets write to other poets by responding to their poems. Often this is in an epigraph, just below the title, saying something like after Sylvia Plath. It may or may not name an individual poem as in After Paula Meehan, “Death of a Field”.

The poet Terrence Hayes wrote a poem to honor the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, but it wasn’t only a new poem. It’s a new form called the Golden Shovel written after her poem We Real Cool. The word at the end of each line comes from the original poem. Originally the form honored Brooks, and poems were written to do just that, but poets have stretched the form to honor other poets as well. In the original Golden Shovel, Hayes cited the entire poem (twice). We Real Cool is a brief, terse poem, making that possible. The form is often used now to acknowledge another poet or their poem, but only a line or a title is cited. There is no rhyme or meter, but like other forms, choose your source carefully so you don’t write yourself into a rut.

First, the Gwendolyn Brooks poem We Real Cool, in which she writes about young men playing pool at a place called the Golden Shovel.

 

We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS. 
                   SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

The Terrence Hayes poem, the original in the Golden Shovel form.  

The Golden Shovel

BY TERRANCE HAYES

after Gwendolyn Brooks

    I. 1981

 

    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

 

    his rusted pistol, his squeaky Bible, his sin.

    The boy’s sneakers were light on the road. We

 

    watched him run to us looking wounded and thin.

    He’d been caught lying or drinking his father’s gin.

 

    He’d been defending his ma, trying to be a man. We

    stood in the road, and my father talked about jazz,

 

    how sometimes a tune is born of outrage. By June

    the boy would be locked upstate. That night we

 

    got down on our knees in my room. If I should die

    before I wake. Da said to me, it will be too soon.

 

    II. 1991 

    Into the tented city we go, we-

    akened by the fire’s ethereal

 

    afterglow. Born lost and cool-

    er than heartache. What we

 

    know is what we know. The left

    hand severed and school-

 

    ed by cleverness. A plate of we-

    ekdays cooking. The hour lurk-

 

    ing in the afterglow. A late-

    night chant. Into the city we

 

    go. Close your eyes and strike

    a blow. Light can be straight-

 

    ened by its shadow. What we

    break is what we hold. A sing-

 

    ular blue note. An outcry sin-

    ged exiting the throat. We

 

    push until we thin, thin-

    king we won’t creep back again.

 

    While God licks his kin, we

    sing until our blood is jazz,

 

    we swing from June to June.

We sweat to keep from we-

 

    eping. Groomed on a die-

    t of hunger, we end too soon.

 

Here is a golden shovel written by my friend Rhonda Rosenheck and published by Heirlock Magazine

 

Sweet Things

 

                                                “I craved sweet things, but those

                                                Seemed strong when I was young.”

                                                -- Robert Frost, To Earthward

 

Last night, when I shouted “I love you!” from the kitchen, I

meant that, besides milky chocolate, you were everything I craved.

While dancing the Conga solitaire, I kept humming sweet

bars of songs I make up about you that tell you no things

you don’t already know, nothing I haven’t sung before, but

in repetition add depth, like the layered glaze of those

orange and teal vases in that gallery. They luminesced. It seemed

we could fall into their finish without cracking the clay, strong

from fire and from loving hands that understood. This morning, when

I whispered “Good-bye” through the cracked window, it was because I

knew you’d be back. You knew the playlist of made-up songs was

waiting with the “I love you” and the dancing-in-socks that keeps us young.

 

Comments

  1. UnknownApril 17, 2022 at 12:56 AM

    Rhonda is a clever woman. This is cool. I have never heard of the Golden Shovel much less tried to use it.

    ReplyDelete

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