Glossary of Poetic Terms

Created by poet Terrance Hayes, this poetic form was designed to allow poets to pay tribute to existing work by poets they admire. A golden shovel borrows a line from the existing poem and uses each word from that line as the last word of each line in a new poem.

The first golden shovel Hayes created, “The Golden Shovel,” borrows its lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” Hayes originally published his poem in Poetry and later in his collection Lighthead, which won the National Book Award in 2010. The bolded words in this excerpt from “Golden Shovel” were borrowed from Brooks:

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 …

A special Poetry folio in 2017 gathered golden shovels by various poets. In 2017, poet-teachers Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith compiled and edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, which was published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Other poets who have experimented with and embraced this poetic form include Raymond Antrobus, John Burnside, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, Inua Ellams, Nikki Giovanni, Nikki Grimes, Langston Kerman, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Nick Makoha, Andrew Motion, Jacob Polley, Don Share, and George Szirtes.