Boldt Words & Images: Other Observations

A golden shovel poem¹

By Bob Boldt

“Since we both share this accommodating hell, and because I know you, like so many others, will never leave, this flaming shade will gladly tell you his confession.”²

Let me patiently observe for you exactly why I,
When Orion again begins to climb the ethereal sky,
Like to set this poem on my October table.

Let me explain why I and old TS wander the back streets,
The ones most welcoming, where I find the retreats
Of a mind bereft, unwelcome even in the humblest hotels.

And wonder why hell is littered with so many unspent shells.

Streets like brain-crumbled ideas crisscross in an argument

Of campaign slogans filled only with confrontation, and intent.

Too often I, like Prufrock, dare to face Lazarus and question:

Oh, must I always ask, “What is it?”


Let me wear my favorite straitjacket for my terminal visit
In the weary chambers of bedlam where we all must go,

Talking and tasting and creating like a mad Michelangelo!

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1. From Poetry Magazine the article “Introduction: The Golden Shovel,” by Don Share:

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

The Golden Shovel is a poetic form readers might not — yet — be familiar with. It was devised recently by Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, whose centenary year this [2017] is. The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines taken often, but not invariably, from a Brooks poem. The results of this technique can be quite different in subject, tone, and texture from the source poem, depending upon the ingenuity and imagination of the poet who undertakes to compose one. As Robert Lee Brewer has pointed out, such a poem is part cento, part erasure. But don’t let the word “erasure” mislead you. A poem in this form adds something even where it subtracts; the sum isn’t necessarily greater than the parts, but in keeping with the spirit of paying tribute, it is more than equal to them.
    Hayes’s inaugural poem in the form gave the form its name, and takes its title — and much else — from Brooks’s cherished “We Real Cool.” In fact, the Hayes poem absorbed every single word from the Brooks poem, and it did so twice. “The Golden Shovel” is a tour de force, so practitioners of this new form have both Brooks and Hayes to live up to. In Brooks’s poem, you’ll recall, the pool players — 
“Seven at the Golden Shovel” — are larger than life, facing mortality and bigotry with defiant, memorable verve. These young men will “die soon,” perhaps; but in poetry, they are, like the poem itself and Brooks’s legacy, immortal.

I included not only the last line of the poem I based mine on (see Footnote 2), as required, but also used the first line of each verse as well.

2. My interpretation of the epigraph of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as a citation from Dante’s encounter with his old teacher, Guido, in the eighth circle of hell.

Copyright © 2020 by Bob Boldt