Poetry Friday: Golden Shovel

Spotted owl,
 Encyclopedia Britannica

 

May's challenge was to write a golden shovel, using as inspiration one line from Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "Letter to NY." To refresh your memory, a golden shovel uses each word of the chosen line as the last word of new lines in a new poem while still maintaining some connection, or conversation, with the original poem. (A more in-depth explanation and history can be found here.)  

I wasn't familiar with Letter to NY (maybe you aren't either; if so, please read it here.) On first glance, I found that Bishop wrote a rather sad, cynical take on a relationship that seems to have been tarnished over time. 

Here's a hint of that sadness:

In your next letter I wish you'd say

where you are going and what you are doing;

how are the plays, and after the plays

what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,

driving as if to save your soul

where the road goes round and round the park

and the meter glares like a moral owl

(more here)

For me, the line choices were hard to re-imagine in a new context. (For example, using the perfectly wonderful in context "where you are going and what you are doing" as end words in a new poem seemed to be asking for a vague mess.)  So, I just picked a line that had interesting words in it, and fiddled around. (Most of poetry is fiddling around, right?)  And in the end, I found I'd written a poem that maintained a connection with the original by writing about the beginning of this fictional relationship, instead of its sad present state.   

The line I chose:  "and the meter glares like a moral owl"

The golden shovel I created, with still a hint of foreboding (I hope) 

In the beginning

The conversation is poetry: you and

me, dropping words into the 

snapping fire, not measuring meter

yet, not forcing rhyme, our bashful glares

into the flames heroically funny like

we weren’t feeling the rising heat; a

log cracks, loudly, expending its moral 

energy, but we lustfully ignore it—and the watching owl.

-----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

You can find my poetry sisters' golden shovels here:

Liz

Laura

Tricia

Mary Lee

Tanita

Poetry Friday is hosted today by the wonderful Karen Edmisten.

Poetry Friday: Growing a Golden Shovel

Photo: Wolfgang Forstmeier

(Posting this a week late due to travel--and general procrastination.)

June's poetry challenge was the "golden shovel," a form created by poet Terrance Hayes when he took Gwendolyn Brooks's mesmerizing poem "The Pool Players; Seven at the Golden Shovel," and used its lines as end words for an entirely new poem.  (See his intricate poem, here.)

Or to put it another way,  Hayes grew a new poem from one he loved, and made it something astonishingly fresh.

And that, my friends, is what the Poetry Sisters are doing this month, too---only we are growing our new poems from the rich soil of Gerard Manley Hopkins' gorgeous poem Pied Beauty:

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

So much to choose from!  Each line is ripe with juicy words! What to pick, what to pick....???  In the end, I decided to use two lines, from the heart of Hopkins' poem:

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

(I also took as my title his opening word.) 

Glory 

We hope to be fresh
or even hot, as firecoal;
we hope to chew on an old chestnut

cracking open guarded words, until all falls
newly to earth. But if finches
require nine primary remiges on their wings

and twelve retrices on their tails---a landscape
of feathers carefully plotted
since the Middle Miocene age and

dappled evermore---to fly, then we, too, must be pieced
into lifting lines, and thrust from the fold
to be made fertile or laid fallow,

bouncing in flight like true finches and
tearing the earth as we dive to plough.

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

My Poetry Sisters' earlier posts of Golden Shovels (truly stunning---I mean, just WOW) can be found here:

Tanita
Laura
Tricia
Kelly
Liz


Poetry Friday is hosted today by poet Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading.