Golden Shovel
Quick answer: The golden shovel is a modern poetry form invented by Terrance Hayes: the words of a borrowed line become the end words of your own poem. Learn how it works.
In 2010 Terrance Hayes published a poem called The Golden Shovel, built on Gwendolyn Brooks's famous eight line poem about pool players at a place called the Golden Shovel. Hayes took every word of Brooks's poem, in order, and made each one the final word of a line in his own much longer poem. Read his line endings top to bottom and Brooks's poem reappears, hidden in plain sight.
Poets immediately recognised a new form and started borrowing the method, which now carries the name of that first poem. A golden shovel is part homage, part scaffolding: someone else's line holds your poem up while you build something entirely your own against it.
One poem that became a form
Hayes wrote his poem for Lighthead, which won the National Book Award in 2010, and the form spread through classrooms and journals with unusual speed. In 2017 the anthology The Golden Shovel Anthology gathered hundreds of poems honouring Brooks by poets including Billy Collins and Nikki Giovanni, timed for Brooks's centenary. Few forms can point to a precise birthday and a named inventor; this one can, and the tribute to Brooks is part of its meaning.
The rules
The mechanism is simple to state and demanding to execute. Choose a line, or a whole short poem, from an existing work. Every word of that source, kept in its original order, becomes an end word of a line in your poem. A ten word line yields a ten line poem. You may not skip, reorder or swap words, though most practitioners accept changes of capitalisation and punctuation.
Two conventions matter. First, credit the source, usually in an epigraph such as: after Gwendolyn Brooks. Second, your poem should stand on its own for a reader who never spots the buried line. The hidden text is a gift for attentive readers, not a substitute for content.
Writing yours: practical advice
Pick a source line with strong nouns and verbs; a line full of the, of and its will strand you with limp endings. Write the borrowed words down the right margin of your page first, then compose toward them. Enjambment is your best friend: letting sentences run past the line break stops the end words from thudding. Aim your poem at a subject that talks back to the source. A shovel written against the grain of its source, arguing with it or updating it, is nearly always stronger than one that agrees.
What it is good at, and the usual wreck
Golden shovels excel at homage, elegy, protest and any poem that wants an ancestor in the room. Teachers love the form because it forces invention through constraint. The usual wreck is syntax twisted into knots to reach each required word, producing lines no human would say. If a line sounds strangled, rebuild the whole sentence rather than forcing the ending. Since the form guarantees structural interest, judges reading for language and creativity will notice whether the sentences still breathe.
What poets can take from this
- Choose a source line rich in nouns and verbs, not connectives.
- Write the end words down the margin before drafting anything.
- Use enjambment so end words do not thump like fence posts.
- Let your poem argue with its source instead of echoing it.
- Credit the source poet in an epigraph every single time.
- If a sentence strangles itself reaching a word, rewrite the sentence.
Try it yourself
Take one line from a poem that changed your mind about something, and write a golden shovel that explains, without ever naming the source in the body, what it changed.
Questions
Who invented the golden shovel form?
Terrance Hayes, with his 2010 poem The Golden Shovel, which embeds Gwendolyn Brooks's poem about the Golden Shovel pool hall in its line endings. The form takes its name from that first poem.
Do I need permission to write a golden shovel?
You should always credit the source poet, normally with an epigraph. Reusing individual words as line endings is generally treated as transformative homage, but crediting is the firm ethical convention of the form.
Can I use a prose sentence instead of a poem line?
Yes. Poets have built golden shovels from song lyrics, speeches, headlines and overheard remarks. The method only requires a source text whose words you keep in order at your line endings.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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