Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks: The Golden Shovel Anthology

If you’ve never heard of the “Golden Shovel” form of poetry, you’re not alone. It’s relatively new, created by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes to honor Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) in her centenary year. Brooks garnered a number of significant “firsts” in her life – the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to be Poetry Consultant (poet laureate) to the Library of Congress.

The Golden Shovel poetic form is usually based on a line or verse from Brooks’ poetry – the last word of each line of a poem are the words taken from a line or verse of a Brooks poem. A Golden Shovel poem can literally be read in two ways – the standard way of reading a poem from left to right and reading the last word of each line downward, to read the verse or line from Brooks. The poem doesn’t have to be about a Brooks poem or even the subject she was writing about, but it can be and often is. And so you can read a Golden Shovel poem as either direct homage to Brooks and her poetry or as an acknowledgement to her ongoing influence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Poets and Poems: Gwendolyn Brooks’ ‘Selected Poems’

My childhood was 1950s and 1960s New Orleans, during the last hurrah of segregation. I often rode the buses with my mother, who hated to drive into the city, and I learned area which section of the bus we were to sit in. The suburban movie theaters, smaller versions of the big palaces on Canal Street, had two segregated sections – downstairs and the balcony.  If I needed a drink of water when I accompanied my mother to the A&P supermarket, I was directed to the water fountain designated “white.”

Children, especially Southern children, didn’t question their parents. For me, the questioning didn’t happen until I was 14, preparing to enter high school. The schools in our New Orleans suburb had integrated the year before, with enough violence to require the presence of federal marshals and local police every day. My parents began to search for every option imaginable to avoid sending me to the public high school. I finally told them no. I was going to the public high school, regardless of what concerns they had.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.