American poet Terrance Hayes created the golden shovel form in 2010 after reciting Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool” (1959) with his five-year-old son to help him memorize it. Hayes was inspired to write a new poem using each word of “We Real Cool” as the last word in each line. Its title, “The Golden Shovel,” is from the epigraph of “We Real Cool.”
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