Tim Rich and Noah Jacob
The Golden Shovel
Gwendolyn Brooks published the poem ‘We Real Cool’ in her 1960 collection The Bean Eaters. It was inspired by her encountering a small group of boys shooting pool, at The Golden Shovel pool hall in Chicago, when they should have been in school. In a few short stanzas of staccato lines, she tries to imagine how they feel about both themselves and authority. It’s a truly powerful and much-celebrated piece (easily found online). An aside: the poem was banned in some quarters because the word ‘jazz’ was mistaken for a reference to sex, rather than music.
Fifty years later, Terrance Hayes published the poem ‘The Golden Shovel’ in his collection Lighthead. This takes on the spirit and themes of Brooks’ poem, adopting the point of view of a son encountering the tough grown-up world frequented by his father – ‘a school/I do not know yet’ – then taking his place in it. Structurally, Hayes incorporates all of ‘We Real Cool’ in his piece, ending each of his lines with the next word from her poem. Read down the ragged right margin of ‘The Golden Shovel’ and you get an extraordinary reworking of ‘We Real Cool’, with audacious breaks and cuts (like ‘die’ becoming ‘die-/t of hunger).
The Golden Shovel has now become the term for this technique of line/s transplanted into line-endings. Broadly, its ‘rules’ are:
- Select a line or lines from a poem or other text
- Write a new poem – this can be (but doesn’t have to be) in conversation with the theme or tone of the original
- Use each word you selected from the source poem as a line- ending word in your poem
- Your end words must match the original line/s
- Don’t add any other line-ending words
- Give credit to the writer of the original piece
We felt the Golden Shovel offered us a way to write together, with our poems speaking to each other. It’s also a pretty demanding method and that appealed to us.
So, first, we each wrote a poem inspired by the festival’s Human.Kind theme. We shared that with the other and started work separately on our Golden Shovels. We found the technique forces you to end lines in an uncharacteristic way, unsettling your established rhythm and vocabulary. This enjoyable discomfort made us recognize the grooves we, as poets, often settle into, allowing us to push our voices. In this way our process gave us an opportunity to consider Human.Kind through creative collaboration, exploring the limits of our human- ness (as individuals and together).
Having an immovable scaffold brought the liberation of constraints, with both of us able to respond quickly to the source poem. As long as you adhere to the ‘Your end words must match the original line/s’ rule, the method actually invites you to be audacious in how you rework the ‘meaning’ and syntax of the source poem. So, it’s a disciplined form but one that offers tremendous freedom within its structure.
The poems are being displayed as part of the 26 Connections exhibition during the Bloomsbury Festival and until mid-November. The exhibition features interpretations of the poetry by artists from the Lettering Arts Trust. The exhibition is free at the Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT