Curiosity 74: Golden Shovel poems

My monthly poetry group met this morning—stimulating and illuminating as always—and one of our number offered up a "golden shovel" poem: a poem that pays tribute to a favorite line in someone else's poem (or if the original poem is short, the entire thing). The form was originated by Terrance Hayes:

The Golden Shovel

                    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.

He wrote a second one, based on the same lines, in 1991. 

Here is the poem by Brooks that he is referencing:

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.

In 2017, a collection titled The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks was published, featuring work by Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, and Julia Glass, among many others. This morning, Jericho Brown was mentioned as a practitioner of this form (yes, he is one of the contributors to this anthology); I cannot find any examples of his golden shovels, but I did find this tweet by him from 2018:

Well, the form has continued to evolve, and now is described in the Poetry Foundation's glossary generally as a "poetic form... designed to allow poets to pay tribute to existing work by poets they admire." 

Quoting a poem, "1975," by Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer (1882–1976), here is Nikki Grimes with "Kneel":

1975

Turn an earth clod
Peel a shaley rock
In fondness molest a curly worm
Whose familiar is everywhere
Kneel
And the curly worm sentient now
Will light the word that tells the poet what a poem is.

Kneel

In search of verse, enter a garden and kneel.
Feel the sun-kissed clay between thumb and
forefinger. If you're surprised by the
wriggling life-form in the midst, a curly
brown creature, thank her for doing her worm-
work, turning your soil into gold—her sentient
sacrifice of time unmeasured, until now.

Meditate on the gifts the earth will
furnish, assuming nourishment, light,
and life's clear elixir—the
water which satisfies, soothes, tickles—what wet word
pours itself into the vessel that
you call thought? Be still till your imagination tells
you which pictures it wants you to paint—this is the
lyrical word-journey of the poet.
Pace yourself. Watch the bee slowly gathering what
fragrant nectar he can find worth of a
hive and its queen. Now, slowly, gather words for a poem,
a honey-glazed treat. Isn't that what a poem is?

I trust by now you've figured out just how the golden shovel poet is paying tribute, but if not: Take the final word of each line and read down. Then look back at the poem being referenced. There. See it now? It's a cool (and, according to my friend, not so easy) way of acknowledging appreciation for another's words.