golden shovel

golden shovel, a poetic form in which a line from a preexisting poem is used to create a new one. Essentially, each word from the borrowed line becomes the last word of each line in the new poem. The form was invented by American poet Terrance Hayes for his poem “The Golden Shovel” (2010), which pays homage to Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” (1959). Hayes’s invention inspired many poets to write their own version of a golden shovel. The form has become a popular poetry writing prompt for writers of all ages.

How to write a golden shovel poem

Follow these guidelines to create a golden shovel poem.

1. Select a line or more than one line from a favorite poem or other work of literature.
2. Use each word in the borrowed line(s) as the end word for each line in the new poem.
3. Keep the end words in the same order that they appear in the borrowed line(s). For example, each word of the line “Mary had a little lamb” would create a new poem of five lines ending in Mary, had, a, little, and lamb, respectively.
4. Credit the writer of the borrowed work. In Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel,” the epigraph “after Gwendolyn Brooks” appears beneath the title.

Other guidelines

It is not necessary to use each word from the selected line in its original meaning, nor does the new poem need to center on the same subject as the original work. For example, in the line, “For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat,” from Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” (1888), bat refers to playing baseball. In a new poem, bat can be changed to mean the mammal, the unit of measurement, or the act of blinking one’s eyes.

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In addition, the length of the new poem is dependent on the length of the original line. For example, a line with five words will create a five-line poem, a 20-word line creates a 20-line poem, and so forth.

Origin of the form

Hayes devised the golden shovel form after repeatedly reciting “We Real Cool” with his five-year-old son to help him memorize it. Later, Brooks’s words continued to ring in Hayes’s head, and they inspired him to incorporate them into a poem of his own.

Brooks’s original is an eight-line poem consisting of four couplets, the first of which is:

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Hayes used each word of “We Real Cool” to construct a two-part poem, each section consisting of 24 lines of 12 couplets. The last word in each line borrows a word from Brooks’s poem, and the words are used in their original order. Therefore, the first four lines of his poem read:

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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

The remaining lines end in the words left, school, we, and so forth, allowing all the words of the original poem to be used in the new one.

The title “The Golden Shovel” was inspired by the epigraph of “We Real Cool”: “The Pool Players. / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” In 2010 Hayes published his poem in his collection Lighthead, which won that year’s National Book Award for Poetry.

Influence and variations

Hayes’s creation inspired the 2017 book The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Patricia Smith, Peter Kahn, and Ravi Shankar. The anthology features a foreword by Hayes that details the form’s origin story followed by golden shovels by many prominent poets, including Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, and Philip Levine.

Some writers have characterized the form as a 21st-century sonnet or a reverse acrostic. The latter description refers to a short verse that is constructed so that the initial letters of the lines, taken consecutively, form words.

Many poets have also experimented with its guidelines. Notable variations include Michael Kleber-Diggs’s “America Is Loving Me to Death,” which combines Hayes’s form with a traditional acrostic. The first letters of the lines spell out the poem’s title, and the end words weave in the Pledge of Allegiance. Instead of poetry, Patricia Smith’s double golden shovel “Don’t You Wanna” incorporates lyrics from Magic Sam’s version of the blues song “Sweet Home Chicago” at both the beginning and end of each line. Other writers have suggested writing a golden shovel using newspaper headlines.