Prompt: Terrance Hayes and the Golden Shovel

Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes invented a poetry form he calls the Golden Shovel. You take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire, and use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem while maintaining the order. So, if you choose a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long.

This borrowing method is not without precedent in poetry. One similar form is quite ancient: the cento, in which you make a poem entirely from other poets' lines. Another form makes a new poem by removing lines from an existing poem - that is known as an erasure.

For my own first Golden Shovel attempt, I wrote a poem for my daily writing practice last year. I chose a poem by Gary Snyder called "Changing Diapers" and used his line "you and me and Geronimo." I wrote it in the ronka form that all my daily poems for 2014 used.

Geronimo [after Gary Snyder]

After the reading, talking briefly to you
and recalling another time – when I, Steve and
you shared coffee conversation – you remembered me.
A wonderful lie. We are men, and
we jump like paratroopers and shout Geronimo.

My poem came out of a brief encounter with Snyder recently when he read at the Dodge Poetry Festival in New Jersey. It also recalls a longer conversation we had at another Dodge Festival more than 20 years ago.

In what I believe must be the first Golden Shovel poem, Terrance Hayes used a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. He started with Brooks' often-anthologized poem, "We Real Cool." His poem is called "The Golden Shovel.".

"The rules" for this new form are:

• Take a line(s) from a favorite poem
• Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem and
• Keep the end words in the order they appeared originally. That means that you could read the stanza at the right edge like an acrostic.
• Give credit to the original poet (it can be in the title, an epigram or within the poem) and for our prompt also include a note a reference to the poem, though it doesn't have to be part of the poem itself. It would be great if you could include a link to the original poem online so that readers could see your inspiration.
• The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the original poem, but it can be related.

We know how poets love to play by the rules. Mr. Hayes pushes a bit on his own rules by using more than a line and and using every word from the Brooks poem. Twice. Setting the bar high. In his collection, Lighthead, he also has a poem using Elizabeth Alexander's poem, “Ladders” (for his "Last Train to Africa") and borrows lyrics from songs by Marvin Gaye and Louis Armstrong for others.

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Terrance Hayes' poem “The Golden Shovel” is from Lighthead (2010, Penguin) which won the National Book Award.




Extra Credit: Think you know why Hayes called his poem and form "The Golden Shovel?"   Tell us your answer in a comment on this post.

Prompt: Gary Snyder and Lessons Learned

  

 Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
    ... there's no through trail
    In summer, ice doesn't melt
    The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
    How did I make it?

Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

Another year ends. What have we learned?

This is a time of year when we see many reviews of the year's events, movies, books, etc. But you don't see many reviews of what we have learned. I suppose that is a topic for personal contemplation rather than public expression. Still, with the proliferation of blogs and status updates via social media, many of us seem to be continuously reviewing our lives. Some denigrate this as "navel-gazing" but when it is done well, it is much more than that.

In the two poems by Gary Snyder we use as models this month, he looks at lessons learned

Snyder is still associated with the Beat Generation poets. In 1955, he read with Allen Ginsberg at the famous October Sixth Gallery Reading where Ginsberg read "Howl" for the first time, and the two poets became lifelong friends. Jack Kerouac based The Dharma Bums’ Japhy Ryder character on Snyder.

Unlike the other Beat poets who were city kids, Snyder grew up in the woods of Washington and Oregon and was interested in nature, anthropology, Asian culture and was a dedicated Zen Buddhist. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called him “The Thoreau of the Beat Generation.”

When he took lessons in landscape painting as a meditative practice, he tried to translate the concept to poetry. This led to his epic myth-poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, which he sees as a kind of literary equivalent of a Chinese or Japanese scroll painting. He worked on it over the course of 40 years.

He attended Reed college where he started reading Asian poetry. In the summers, he worked in logging camps, on trail crews, and as a fire lookout in the mountains.

His poem "Hay for the Horses" came out of those summer experiences, and it is one that I have loved for many years. It is the poem of a younger person who is learning from the life of someone else. The lesson learned from the hay truck driver is that we often end up in a life that we swore we would not end up in. Does that mean the life is bad? Not necessarily, but a caution nevertheless to a younger person at how easily we can fall comfortably into a life that we never intended. 

Hay for the Horses

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

In the poem, we learn a lesson from the truck driver who after 51 years knows clearly what lesson he did not learn early enough.

But what do we do with lessons we learn, but learn too late?

Snyder spent about twelve years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. But most of our lessons learned are not learned in formal study or in classrooms.

A later poem of his directly addresses our writing prompt for this month.

What Have I Learned

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

The moments
between hard pleasant tasks

To sit silent, drink wine,
and think my own kind
of dry crusty thoughts.

     —the first Calochortus flowers
     and in all the land,
              it's spring.
I point them out:
the yellow petals, the golden hairs,
              to Gen.

Seeing in silence:
never the same twice,
but when you get it right,

     you pass it on.


In "What Have I Learned," it is the voice of a older person looking at the lessons of their own life. Here, the lessons are small and the speaker is almost dismissive.

What have I learned but
the proper use for several tools?

That "but" is a kind of apology for what was learned. And yet, we know the speaker cherishes not only the lessons but the opportunity to pass them on. (In the poem, to Snyder's own son, Gen.)

And the second use of that "but" turns this around:

but when you get it right,
you pass it on.


Our prompt for this month is a poem about a lesson (or lessons) learned, either from someone else or on your own - but a lesson that was passed on to another.

The deadline for submissions to this prompt is January 6. 2013.

Labor, Work and Jobs

September seems to launch in America with the Labor Day weekend. I have written elsewhere about the Labor of Labor Day that seems to be lost. But there's no question that every poet has a few stories about their own job history.

Philip Levine received the National Book Award in 1991 for his volume of poems titled What Work Is. Levine has long been associated with blue-collar workers in factories and especially on the assembly lines of his hometown Detroit.

At 14, he worked in a factory during World War II when older men were away at war and teenagers were hired to produce materials for the military.

“Growth” from that book begins:

“In the soap factory where I worked
when I was fourteen, I spoke to
no one and only one man spoke
to me and then to command me
to wheel the little cars of damp chips
into the ovens.”

Levine collected some poems online under the heading "Overhand the Hammers Swing: Poems of Work." It is a collection of images of work from American poets.

"When I say work I mean the sort of brute physical work that most of us try to avoid, but that those without particular gifts or training were often forced to adopt to make a living in a society as tough and competitive as ours," says Levine. "This may in fact be a species of work that is disappearing from America as more and more automation replaces the need for human hands, that is manual labor."

He quotes Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself":

Blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil,
Each has his main-sledge, they are all out, there is great heat in the fire.
From the conder-strew'd threshold I follow their movements,
The lithe sheer of their waists plays even with their massive arms,
Overhand the hammers swing, overhand so slow, overhand so sure,
They do not hasten, each man hits in his place.

He also quotes another pair of workers - a father and son from "Song for My Father" by Yusef Komunyakaa

We stood on a wooden platform
Facing each other with sledgehammers,
A copper-tipped sieve sunken into the ground
Like a spear, as we threaded on five foot
Of galvanized pipe for the pump.
As if tuned to some internal drum,
We hammered the block of oak
Placed on top for the pipe.
It began inching downward
As we traded blows - one for you,
One for me. After a half hour
We threaded on another five feet. The sweat
Gleamed on our shirtless bodies, father
& son tied to each other until we hit water.

He also references one of my favorite poems of work - "Hay for the Horses" by Gary Snyder.

Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds -
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

Drawing by N.C. Mallory and posted here via Creative Commons

The poem I'll use for this month's prompt on jobs is Phillip Levine's own "What Work Is." I highly recommend that you listen to Levine introduce and read the poem as you read along.

WHAT WORK IS


We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.


For this month's writing prompt, write a poem about a job that you have had that involved that real work that Levine describes.

Are you new to Poets Online? Check our submissions guidelines.

Additional readings on work suggested by Levine

• Pickle Belt by Theodore Roethke
• The Orange Bears by Kenneth Patchen
• The Whistle by Yusef Komunyakaa
• Coming Close by Philip Levine
• The Women Who Clean Fish by Erica Funkhouser
• Womanhood by Catherine Anderson

Gary Snyder Wins Poetry Prize

Gary Snyder has won the 2008 Ruth Lilly Prize for his body of work.

The Lilly Prize, with a stipend of $100,000, is one of the most lucrative prizes in American letters. Snyder is considered a Northwest poet because of his nature-centered verse, even though he has long lived in Northern California.

The 77-year-old poet, a follower of Zen Buddhism, lived on a farm in what was then the rural area of Lake City, Washington until the age of 13. Spending the summer of 1952 as a fire lookout in the North Cascades also had a huge impact on Snyder's writing.

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. He has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, including The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) (Counterpoint Press, 1999); Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997); No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild (1990); Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947-1985; Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award; Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Hay for the Horses


He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."

From Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder, published by North Point Press.





more on Snyder

Haiku For Blog Action Day

Today is Blog Action Day.

The theme this year is the environment and anyone with a a blog can join in by posting something today related to the environment.

Maybe it's a local environmental issue, or the beach cleanup nearby, or a poem or story with an environmental theme. Podblogs, videoblogs, and photoblogs count too!

The purpose is to have a massive hit on public awareness by sharing as many ideas in as many ways as possible.

Check out the Blog Action Day blog and read more about how bloggers can change the world. You can register your blog and join the 15,000+ other blogs (with 12 million readers) that are already signed up.

I clicked over to the excellent Poetry Foundation web site for inspiration, and using their search tool found some haiku.

I enjoy haiku for many reasons, but I do particularly like the close-up focus they often take on something in nature.

A few haiku from "After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa" by Robert Hass

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.


And two by Gary Snyder-

Hammering a dent out of a bucket
a woodpecker
answers from the woods

At the last turn in the path
“goodbye—”
—bending, bowing,
(moss and a bit of
wild
bird-)
down.


Both of those poets are ones that I particularly enjoy reading and having met them both and heard them read, I know that their sense of nature and its influence on their poetry is quite - organic. Is that the word I want? It is within them, not something they take on in the writing. It is part of their practice of poetry.

Still, my favorite haiku still come from the masters.

In this one by Bashō,

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

you might say, "Where is nature?" I would have trouble answering you, and yet I am fairly certain that within that longing for place that is prompted by the bird's call is some longing for something lost from nature. Am I imagining that?

In this poem by Issa,

On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

the branch, river and cricket represent three areas of the natural world. I hear that cricket's sound as joyful (singing) and yet I also feel it may be doomed in its river journey. Is it singing like those on the Titanic going down? I might even convince some (especially without the author or time period being identified) that this small poem is a plea for our natural world (cricket) which is being carried away while we sing a song of ignorance is bliss or the song of the sirens or a sad dirge.