By Melayna Pongratz
Photo Caption: Terrence Hayes, Poet, inventor of Golden Shovel poetry form.https://www.flickr.com/photos/ptenb/49977718682
With a name that conjures a fairytale-like image, how could you not be curious about the golden shovel? If you haven’t heard of this form before, that’s because it is relatively new: it takes its name from the poem “The Golden Shovel” by Terrance Hayes, which was published in 2010. Hayes’ piece is written after Gwendolyn Brooks, and it contains the entirety of her poem “We Real Cool” as the end of its lines. As such, it establishes the rules of the form. The procedure is as follows:
Step 1: Identify a line of poetry you’d like to work with. We’ll call this your source material.
Step 2: Write a poem in which each word of your source material appears as the ending word of your own line. Be sure to keep the words in order.
Step 3: Credit the poet who wrote your source material.
And that’s it! But while the rules are pretty straightforward, a golden shovel is tricky to write… which is all the more reason to try your hand at it. You don’t have to be as ambitious as Terrance Hayes; after all, “The Golden Shovel” set an incredibly high standard for both craft and creativity. Instead of trying to write a poem that perfectly compliments a piece you love, you can start by using the golden shovel as an invention exercise: write one that uses a line or lines from your own poetry. Write one that adheres to the theme of the original work, then one that goes in a completely different direction— bonus points if you use the same line for both. Rather than using a line of verse, incorporate song lyrics, sentences from a work of prose, or dialogue from your favorite TV show.
This all begs the question: why build one poem from another? What’s the point of making another poet’s lines the backbone of your own piece rather than simply including an epigraph? One answer is that this form makes inspiration into something concrete: the golden shovel only exists when you construct it around another’s precise arrangement of words. You can write a poem with the same message, inspired by the same lines, but then you wouldn’t have to reckon with the same impositions on your language. Additionally, this form constrains you as both a writer and a reader. You can probably identify who and what influences your art, but writing a golden shovel will take your understanding of your inspirations to another level. When choosing a line to use in your own work, you have to know what makes you want to preserve it while you adapt it. Moreover, you need to know how much of that art to preserve: will you keep its meaning intact, or will you change it entirely?
Regardless of the direction you take with this form, it will alter how you use art to converse with others. After you’ve experimented with digging up and repurposing your favorite lines, you can use the golden shovel to create a polished piece. Or, you can simply keep this form in your back pocket as a tool for investigation and invention.