Terrance Hayes
Quick answer: Terrance Hayes craft guide: the golden shovel, American sonnets and form invention, with practical ways to bring his experiments into your own poems.
Terrance Hayes treats poetic form the way a jazz musician treats a standard: something to honour by transforming. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1971, a painter and college basketball player before he was a poet, Hayes won the National Book Award for Lighthead in 2010 and a MacArthur Fellowship in 2014. His 2018 collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin contains seventy sonnets written in the first two hundred days of a presidency, all sharing one title.
He is also that rarity, a poet who invented a form other poets actually use. The golden shovel, introduced in Lighthead in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, takes every word of an existing poem and plants them, in order, as the end words of new lines. Studying Hayes teaches you that constraint is not a cage but a collaborator.
An artist who kept switching instruments
Hayes came to poetry through visual art and sport, and both remain visible: his poems think in images the way painters do and move with an athlete's timing. His early books, Muscular Music and Hip Logic, announced a writer obsessed with what identity, especially Black American male identity, is made of, and unwilling to answer the question the same way twice.
Formal restlessness became his trademark. Lighthead borrowed the pecha kucha, a Japanese presentation format, for poetic sequences. How to Be Drawn leaned on visual art. The American sonnets converse with Wanda Coleman, who pioneered the term, and compress fury, tenderness and comedy into fourteen-line rooms.
The signature moves
Four habits define his practice.
What you can take from him
Write a golden shovel this week. Choose a short public domain poem or a single line you admire, set its words as your line endings in order, and write toward them; the borrowed spine will pull sentences out of you that you could not have planned. It is among the best exercises ever devised for escaping your own habits.
Then practise the turn. Hayes packs multiple reversals into fourteen lines, so try drafting a sonnet-length poem that changes direction at least three times, argument, memory, joke, grief. Structure and creativity are separate scoring criteria in contests like Writory's monthly one, and the borrowed-form strategy strengthens both at once: the form supplies structure while the strain against it reads as invention.
Where to start reading
Lighthead is the essential book, home of the original golden shovel poem. Follow with American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin to watch one form flexed seventy ways, then How to Be Drawn and the earlier Hip Logic. His prose book on Etheridge Knight, To Float in the Space Between, doubles as a masterclass in reading another poet generously.
What poets can take from this
- Write a golden shovel using a line from a pre-1928 public domain poem as your end-word spine.
- Draft a fourteen-line poem that turns direction at least three times.
- Repeat one phrase three times in a poem, rotating its meaning on each return.
- Borrow a non-literary structure, a slideshow, a recipe, a scouting report, to organise unruly material.
- Answer a poem you love with a poem, and let the homage show in the architecture, not just the epigraph.
Try it yourself
Take a proverb your family repeats, use its words in order as the end words of your lines, and write a poem that argues with the proverb while being built out of it.
Questions
What is a golden shovel poem?
A form invented by Terrance Hayes in Lighthead, honouring Gwendolyn Brooks. You take the words of an existing poem or line and use them, in order, as the final words of your own lines, so the source text reads down your right margin.
What are Terrance Hayes's American sonnets?
Seventy fourteen-line poems, all titled American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, written in 2017 and collected in 2018. They use the sonnet's compression without a fixed rhyme scheme, in conversation with Wanda Coleman's earlier American sonnets.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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