Christopher Spaide on Terrance Hayes ("The Golden Shovel")

Close Readings: Episode 10

What can we make of what we inherit? From the tendencies of our parents and from their words, from poets, from the words they leave us? I talked to Christopher Spaide, one of my favorite poetry critics, about a poem that addresses these questions and performs its own kind of answer, Terrance Hayes’s “The Golden Shovel.” You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

This was a fascinating conversations, which kept giving way to depths upon depths. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that the Hayes poem literally contains another poem within its lines, the great and much-beloved Gwendolyn Brooks poem “We Real Cool.” Here is an image of the Brooks poem that Chris was kind enough to provide, from Broadside Press in 1966.

In the episode, we listen to Brooks read the poem. That recording is available here. But check out the recording of on the website of the Academy of American Poets as well—she’s incredibly charming in her framing of it, and reads with real verve.

I love what Chris has to say in the episode about the effect of all those terminal, enjambed “We”s:

These are subjects that don’t know their predicates. They’re subjects that don’t receive a stress, they don’t receive primacy of place in the line.

Here is the quote from Brooks (from her Report from Part One) about her own poem that Chris offers in the episode:

The ending WEs in “We Real Cool” are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative “Kilroy-is-here” announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the “We” softly.

Terrance Hayes also plays with the right hand margin of his poem, and he has invented a new poetic form in the process.

As Chris explains it, Hayes’s poem is “after” Brooks’s poem in two ways—and “before” it in another: Hayes comes after Brooks in the history of poetry, he writes his poem in homage to hers, but also (this is the “before”) he strings the words of Brooks’s poem down the right hand margin of his poem, which means that his words, line by line, are positioned literally before the words of the poem that his is after.

That canny, ambivalent act of positioning suggests a complex and loving relation between Hayes and Brooks, “The Golden Shovel” and “We Real Cool.” Brooks’s poem evinces a kind of heroic skepticism about institutional education—the seven figures at the pool hall are there instead of being in school, and they have opted out of the lives that school is meant to lead us into. Hayes—like his own son, like all of us—has gone to school in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, and he’s learned from her, which means that her articulation of “cool” has made an impression on him, but also that Hayes is invested (in a way that maybe “We Real Cool” isn’t) in discovering and describing other kinds of intergenerational handing down, other forms of education.

What’s so touching about the Hayes poem—or rather one of the incredibly touching things about it—is the tender relationship in it between father and son. Chris is just brilliant in this episode at picking up on all the ways in which the father’s words, his stance, his way of being have infiltrated his son’s consciousness, offering not only a model of coolness to the boy in the poem but a way of talking and thinking and being to the poet that boy grew into, sitting at his desk and writing this poem.

Listen to the episode, and you’ll hear Chris talk about how Hayes wants always to read—to read other poems, but also to read the world—in a way that sees into its core but also preserves its potentiality:

Hayes is someone who writes—particularly response poems, particularly a poem like this that looks at another poet and poem—to imagine alternate ways things could have gone, to imagine a multiplicity of forms of Black life and Black poetry.

“The Golden Shovel,” it occurs to me, is a closed form that describes an open future.

In the episode, we listen to Hayes read the poem at Harvard in 2010. That full reading can be found online here. Or here is another reading that Hayes gives of the poem, and which Chris directed me to, at Andover. (Hayes begins his intro to the poem at around 10:30 in that video.) Fascinating to see Hayes bring this poem to schoolchildren.

One thing I wish we’d had time to discuss in the episode—which already was our longest ever!—is the influence that Hayes’s poem has already had. If you want to learn more about that influence, I highly recommend The Golden Shovel Anthology, to which Hayes has contributed a Foreword.

Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.

Once again, the episode is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a rating and review, and please share it with someone (perhaps with someone a generation removed from you).