29th June 2017
The Golden Shovel anthology was launched at the British Library and included a Sweet 16 for MPK. Peter Kahn invited Roger and Malika to talk about setting up the collective, and asked the audience to stand up if they had felt the impact of Kitchen – very few stayed sitting!
Spoken word poetry veteran Peter Kahn introduces a new anthology which pays homage to US poet Gwendolyn Brooks through the ‘Golden Shovel’, a new poetic form ideal for fostering poetry writing in the classroom. Gwendolyn Brooks, a name perhaps more familiar in the USA than the UK, was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, and the second Black National Poet Laureate in the US. Dedicated to the cause of civil rights, the championing of black communities, and the nurturing of black literature, she is one of the most highly-regarded of 20th-century American poets. In this her centenary year, a special anthology of poems paying homage to Brooks has been published (edited by fellow poetry educators Patricia Smith and Ravi Shankar, and me). Each poem in the anthology is written in a dynamic new form, the ‘Golden Shovel’, in which the last words of each line are, in order, words from a line or lines taken from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. The form was invented by Terrance Hayes
English