The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks

"Rather to my embarrassment, I didn’t know that much about Gwendolyn Brooks before this book. One of its editors, Peter Kahn, has been a real force of change in British poetry: he set up something called Spoken Word Educators in London schools. They got a bit of money together and put together a squad of poets to work in tough inner-city schools. An American, he brought this practise from Chicago, where Gwendolyn Brooks was also from, He works closely with people who are going to be big, some of whom are already pretty big in the small world of poetry, but when he told me about this volume I said, ‘I’m not sure anybody in Britain really knows very much about Gwendolyn Brooks’; he just replied, ‘Oh they will. They will.’ “This book invites readers to be writers and writers to be readers. It’s celebrating the fact that the two must go together” And when it was launched earlier this year at the British Library, it was stunning, among the most stunning events I’ve ever seen. They had Terrance Hayes who is now the poetry editor at the New York Times , and he is so charismatic, so extraordinary to hear, to read. Someone described him to me as the Elvis of poetry. There seemed to be a huge number of poets of colour present, all reading, and again and again I realised that they had been confined to the box marked ‘Performance.’ ‘Now, though,’ they were saying, ‘we are being published and for that we have to thank people like Gwendolyn Brooks, who took the idea of poetry and spread it and gave it to people in a much wider way.’ Of Brooks herself, I know what you can glean from the book. She was America’s first black Poet Laureate. Yes, and she was based in the community. She was not a mandarin, in any way. She wanted always to be of the public, with the people and for her, I think, communication and the desire to give other people agency in their own lives and writing was absolutely paramount. And that’s a very different model to UK laureates like John Masefield who did their stuff and everybody just bought the books (or didn’t). Gwendolyn Brooks was a participant and believed that other people were participants too. Absolutely not. And that acknowledgment is really important, because for a long time in this country the only places for a poet to really earn a living has been in academia. And I would like poets to be able to live outside the academy, because if you live inside the academy chances are you will end up, like it or not, writing the kind of poetry that pleases the academy rather than connecting to the broader public. Yes, it’s a really good idea. You take a striking line from a poem you enjoy, something that fastens itself to the mind. You take that line and run it down the right hand edge of your paper, one word on each row and then you write a poem in which each of your lines ends with a word from the borrowed line – so it gives you a structure, but it’s not an acrostic. It can be almost invisible, but it gives you a structure and since so many people have such difficulty even starting to write a poem – because they think ‘I better write something really deep and meaningful and it better be completely brilliant’ – here you can say, ‘write a poem and it will have a brilliant line in it already.’ It kicks things off, like the Oulipian idea of a freeing constraint. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter What I found so interesting about this was that the editors invited poets who are at the top of their game, alongside emerging poets. So anyone can do a golden shovel. It’s not something you just do in workshops or with kids. So here we have poems by British poets such as Kwame Dawes, Claire Pollard and Leontia Flynn, as well as masses of Americans. Sharon Olds is there, and Rita Dove, Richard Powers… the list of contributors is good. This book is something that you’ll return to, you’ll pick it up and get excited by each poem, wherever the pages fall open. But I suppose what I love most about this book is what it’s trying to do. It is inviting readers to be writers and writers to be readers. It’s celebrating the fact that the two must go together. Precisely."