Golden Shovel: Poetic Form/
Created by Terrence Hayes

Here are the rules for the Golden Shovel:

Take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire.
Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem.
Keep the end words in order.
Give credit to the poet who originally wrote the line (or lines).
The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem that offers the end words.

If you pull a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long. If you pull two lines totalling eleven words, your poem would be eleven lines long; a stanza with 24 words, your poem would be 24 lines long. And so on.

My meager attempt at this form was culled from the first two lines of Emily Dickinson's poem: "Hope Is the thing with feathers"

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

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