One purpose of the PARH USA blog is to examine form and other poetic devices as they relate to social justice poetry and then provide associated writing prompts. In this post, we discuss the golden shovel form.
The golden shovel form was devised by Terrance Hayes to honor Gwendolyn Brooks. Writing a golden shovel involves using each word, in order, from a line or lines in an existing poem as the final word in each line of a new poem. The name of the form derives from Hayes’s poem “The Golden Shovel,” for which he borrowed every line from Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.”
In general, many golden shovels have been based on Brooks’s poems. In fact, in February 2017—the year Brooks would have turned 100—Poetry magazine published a collection of golden shovels that included 20 powerful works arising from her poetry. As well, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (The University of Arkansas Press, 2019) is dedicated to Brooks-inspired golden shovels. That said, the form can be used to pay homage to any poet or poem. Golden shovels also can spring from works that are not even poems, such as speeches, news headlines, and so on.
So why use the golden shovel form for social justice poetry? For a variety of reasons! Through this form, you can engage in dialogue with other poets writing about social justice issues, thereby interjecting your work into a larger conversation. When you borrow from a formidable poem to create your own formidable poem, you amplify the impact of both works! You also can draw comparisons between past and present by using a historic poem or document as the source for a golden shovel. Or you can magnify the urgency of current-day issues by crafting a golden shovel that responds to political commentary, news headlines, quotes, and so on. Another useful feature of the form is the potential for juxtaposition—developing a social justice golden shovel from a source unrelated to social justice can produce an unsettling and potent contrast of ideas. Moreover, golden shovels inherently offer the opportunity to present multiple distinct messages in a single poem. The poem as a whole may speak to one aspect of an issue while the words from the source line trailing down the poem’s right edge address a completely different aspect. PARH USA member Rikki Santer’s exquisite golden shovel “She Just Packed Up Her Stuff and Left” (Poets Reading the News, 2021) provides an example of this characteristic of the form. The source line for this poem, which interrogates the idea of justice for women, is a New York Times headline. In the poem, Santer conducts a respectful reflection on the wholeness of a woman while the source line emphasizes the devastating quality of dismissive language used to describe her as a missing person. It’s clear that in numerous ways, the golden shovel is a highly effective form for social justice poetry.
Convinced you’d like to try writing a golden shovel that confronts racism, bigotry, or hate? Here are three prompts to get you started:
Prompt 1: Read a selection of Gwendolyn Brooks poems and choose the one that resonates most with you. Borrow a line or lines from that poem as inspiration for your golden shovel.
Prompt 2: Identify one of your favorite poems as a source poem for a golden shovel. Study the lines in that source poem to determine which you might incorporate in the new poem to convey the strongest possible message.
Prompt 3: Use language from the next disturbing news item you encounter as inspiration for a golden shovel.
We encourage you to explore the power of the golden shovel form for your next social justice poem. If the result is a poem that confronts racism, bigotry, or hate, consider submitting it for potential inclusion on our Featured Poem page (see submission guidelines here).