It’s true, I decided to switch things up a bit in August. I will continue to write Golden Shovel but move on to Robert Frost. Frost dropped out of college twice but earned more than 40 honorary degrees. That is the smart way to go to college, but he had to win four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry to accomplish the task. He read a poem at JFK’s presidential inauguration. I switched gears in August. Robert Frost is my new poet guy because he has a way with words. Therefore, this new poem will be titled Nosy Neighbors and Flight.
Terrance Hayes invented the Golden Shovel style of poetry. This form of found poetry allows the writer to take a favorite poem and use it to make something original. I experimented with found poetry last year when I wrote Blank Verse poems. In the month of July, I focused on William Blake’s poems. Blake and I are breaking up.
The rules for writing a Golden Shovel Poem and Nosy Neighbors and Flight
While researching this style of poetry created by Terrance Hayes, there seem to be four simple rules. You can use as many lines of the poem as you want, and the poem will end with you being your creation. I find this idea interesting. Written below are the three simple rules.
1). Choose a poem that you like. I currently I will use poems by Robert Frost.
2)Use each word in the line or lines as the end word in your poem. Make sure they stay in order.
3) Construct an entire poem around them. The meaning doesn’t have to be the same.
4) Give the original poet credit who wrote the line or lines you used.
In this poetic adventure, I will use poems written by Robert Frost. This small poem I call Nosy Neighbors and Flight . The Chase. The words at the end of the lines are taken from Robert Frost’s Mending Wall.
Nosy Neighbors and Flight I silently long to take flight but I’m stuck on the ground, amazed at The scent of the flowers of spring And the trouble we take at mending-time We repair our broken wings, and we Search until we find That seam torn by them That threw stones at me there I soared until I I find I Let My broken wing and my Story broadcast by my neighbor About the one that had to know What the color of the sky was beyond The horizon and the Look of the grass on the hill.
Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh. To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.
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