Golden Shovel Poetry

Even though Black History Month starts tomorrow, my freshmen and I got a jumpstart on it today when we began learning about Golden Shovel poetry. The definition to this is a little bit confusing, but I'm going to do my best to make it as simple as possible...

In 1963, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem called "We Real Cool." It goes like this:

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.

Years later, in 2010, Terrance Hayes wrote a poem called "The Golden Shovel" and it goes like this:

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.

In actuality, that is only half of Hayes's poem, but I'm going to let you research the second half on your own. It's definitely worth it, but I only need to first half to prove my point, because if you read only the last word in each line of the longer poem, you will find that it creates Gwendolyn Brooks's original poem. Check it out.

Period three was astounded when this came to light.

Period four was underwhelmed.

Both classes are excited to write their own poems, and in school today, each of my classes worked together to write a sample poem in preparation for tomorrow's real poems. (Mr. Great With Accents and Turnip-Shmurnip have already started... and finished... and will likely write more poems tomorrow!) I didn't take a picture of period three's creation, but here is what period four and I came up with. First we took three lines from Shel Silverstein's poem "Falling Up." Then we used those fourteen words to create a fourteen-line poem.

Here's what period four came up with:

Stepping into the class when

The bell rang, I

Was worried. But then I looked

And saw no one was around.

Feeling alone, I

Went to my seat and got

Out a snack that smelled sick,

Like old fish and my grandma's house too.

Oh my.

I didn't dare to stomach

My words and my emotions and

My pride, so I

Cried and threw

Up, then lay face-down.

There you go, kiddos... I wrote a blog about it! 😉