Golden Shovel Poetry Prompts
Quick answer: Golden shovel poetry prompts: 14 original source lines and exercises for the form Terrance Hayes invented, plus advice on end words, credit and revision.
The golden shovel is the newest form on most prompt lists, invented by Terrance Hayes in 2010 in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. The rule: take a line from an existing poem, then write a new poem in which each word of that borrowed line becomes, in order, the final word of one of your lines. Read your end words vertically and the source line reappears, hidden in plain sight like a watermark.
The form's secret difficulty is not the mechanics but the gravity. Your poem keeps getting pulled toward the source poem's subject, and the best golden shovels resist that pull, travelling somewhere the original never went while the borrowed words tug quietly at the margins. Choose lines with plain, flexible words; a line full of rare nouns will steer you like a rail.
The Prompts
For copyright safety, these prompts use public domain lines or your own words as sources. Always name the source line and poet beneath your title, whatever you use.
- Take Dickinson's line 'Hope is the thing with feathers' and write a golden shovel set in an airport at 3 a.m., where hope is a delayed departure board.
- Use 'I took the one less traveled by' from Frost and write about choosing the supermarket queue, letting the tiny decision carry the big one underneath.
- Build a golden shovel from Blake's 'Tyger Tyger, burning bright' about a house fire survived in childhood, keeping the repetition as two separate line endings.
- Take 'Water, water, every where' from Coleridge and write about a flooded town's first market day after the waters fell.
- Use a sentence from your own earliest surviving diary entry as the spine, and let your adult lines argue with each ending word your child self supplies.
- Take Wordsworth's 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' and set your poem in a crowded lift, ten strangers, nine floors, one wanderer.
- Build a shovel from Henley's 'I am the master of my fate' spoken by someone assembling flat-pack furniture alone after a divorce.
- Use the line 'Because I could not stop for Death' for a poem about a paramedic's night shift, where stopping is precisely the job.
- Take a proverb your family repeats, house rules count as poetry, and shovel it into a poem about the first time you broke it.
- Use Keats's 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever' for a poem about a chipped mug nobody will throw away.
- Build a double shovel: the same public domain line down the right margin of two facing poems, one set in summer, one in the same place in winter.
- Take 'Do not go gentle' as concept only, then choose a public domain line about sleep or night, and write a shovel about teaching a parent to use a phone.
- Use Rossetti's 'Remember me when I am gone away' for a poem in the voice of a decommissioned lighthouse.
- Choose one sentence from a letter someone once wrote you, with their blessing, and let their words end your lines while your words do the confessing.
How to Use These
Set the end words down the right margin first, one per line, before writing anything else. Then draft toward each fixed word as if it were a stepping stone, letting enjambment carry sentences across several line endings so the borrowed words sit naturally inside your syntax rather than clanging at the ends. If a word jams you, small function words like 'the' and 'with' are gifts, since almost any sentence can pass through them.
Revise by covering the right margin and reading your poem as if the constraint did not exist. It must stand alone. Then uncover the margin and check the vertical line still reads cleanly. Credit the source under your title, 'after' followed by the poet's name is the convention Hayes established. If you submit a golden shovel to a contest, use a public domain source line and include the credit; originality rules stay satisfied and judges enjoy watching a form handled well.
What poets can take from this
- Choose source lines full of small flexible words rather than rare nouns.
- Write the borrowed words down the right margin before drafting anything.
- Use enjambment so sentences flow across the fixed end words instead of stopping at each.
- Let your poem leave the source poem's subject; the pull back is the form's trap.
- Always credit the source line and poet beneath your title.
Try it yourself
Take the public domain line 'The fog comes on little cat feet' and write a golden shovel about the morning a diagnosis arrived, letting the weather do the talking your family could not.
Questions
What is a golden shovel poem?
It is a form invented by Terrance Hayes in which every word of a borrowed line becomes an end word in your new poem, in original order. Reading your line endings top to bottom reveals the source line. Hayes named it after Gwendolyn Brooks's poem 'We Real Cool', set at the Golden Shovel pool hall.
Do I need permission to write a golden shovel?
Writing one for practice needs no permission. For publication or contests, using a public domain line is safest, since the whole borrowed line appears within your poem. Whatever the source, credit the poet and poem beneath your title.
Can the source line come from prose or song?
Yes, poets shovel sentences from novels, letters, speeches and songs. The same cautions apply: credit the source, and prefer public domain or your own material when the poem will be published.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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