In my Introduction to Creative Writing classes, I teach each unit’s genre by technique, from characterization in fiction to perspective in nonfiction, allowing what we learn in one unit to influence how we understand the next. At the end of the poetry unit, I set aside a day to talk about form.
Poetic forms represent a panoply of important traditions to the writing world. Studying them, one can see threads pulled together from around the world: medieval troubadours’ repetitions, Arabic poets’ understandings of longing, Italian storytelling, French language play, and more. In contemporary American poetry, we have a strong tradition of experiments with these forms in our own culture’s contexts and idioms. If, as Kaveh Akbar says, we are truly in a golden age of American poetry, I believe it’s for this reason: we have all of these traditions, techniques, and teachers from which we can learn.
I communicate all of this to my students, but I also recognize that of all the units in this kind of a class, poetry usually has the most students on edge. On the first day of class for poetry, they come in quiet, uncertain whether what they’ll have to say is truly the “right” answer. So, instead of teaching sonnets, villanelles, or pantoums, I teach the Golden Shovel.
Not only does the Golden Shovel show that poetic forms are still being invented, it also recognizes the work students are already practiced in: reading. By learning a form Terrance Hayes invented as an admirer of Gwendolyn Brooks’ writing, my students can understand the MacArthur Fellow as a bit like themselves. After all, they also read poetry, appreciate it, play with language.
On this day, we start with Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” which some of my students have encountered in previous English classes. We talk about its themes and point of view as we do a close reading together. Then we turn to part one of Terrance Hayes’ “The Golden Shovel” to do the same. We compare and contrast the two poems to see what arises from their shared interests in black masculinity, youth culture, coming of age, and the precarity of black life in America. At the end of this close reading, I show them how Brooks’ poem is embedded within Hayes’, and we talk about how her voice carries through his poem while definitely transformed through his shifts in setting, language, pace, and style. To end the class period, we listen to Joy Harjo’s Golden Shovel “An American Sunrise,” and we discuss how a speaker asking different questions than Brooks and Hayes can still allow Brooks’ influence to shape her own concerns. I write our reflections on each of the three poems on the board, and by the end we have a sort of map of influence my students have created. Then I ask my students to take a line from one of the poems we’ve discussed and begin their own Golden Shovel, participating in a poetic tradition themselves.
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Jeremy Michael Reed’s poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Still: The Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere, including in the anthology Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene. He is an associate editor for Sundress Publications and an assistant professor of English at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.