This summer, Chautauqua Writers’ Center featured a virtual porch series and held a brown bag with Poet in Residence, Mathias Svalina. Svalina talks about form as a "container for ideas" and that "containers are as problematic as they can be," that they are "exciting and exploratory" as well as can also "exclude." Much like the traditions of Chautauqua that have been handed down from generation to generation, poetry forms have also been handed down from generation to generation. Svalina focuses on a few newer forms, "The Golden Shovel" by Terrance Hayes and the "Duplex" by Jericho Brown, that are also a “container of ideas” and also literally contain other poems within them whether by using the words of the poem as the line endings like in "The Golden Shovel" or with the "Duplex" form, it is a container that holds several forms of poems into one.
The Golden Shovel, created by Terrance Hayes, employs the words of “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks as line endings and re-creates a poem around these endings.
Brooks’ poem begins: “ The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We Real Cool. We Left School. We…” Hayes’ poem begins: “When I am so small Da’s sock covers my arm, we cruise at twilight until we find the place the real men lean, bloodshot and translucent with cool. His smile is a gold-plated incantation as we…”
You can see where Hayes borrowed Brooks’ lines to create his line endings and formed a new poem around it. (For the full copy of Hayes’ poem, follow the link here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel and for Brooks’ poem, here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28112/we-real-cool ). There is an anthology surrounding this form and its tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks - The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. I have seen poets use other poems from other poets and employ the same tactics Hayes originally sets up with his poem, "The Golden Shovel.” For more information regarding Terrance Hayes’ form visit: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92023/introduction-586e948ad9af8 .
The Duplex is a form by Jericho Brown that melds the makeup of a blues poem, a ghazal, and sonnets. It uses a couplet form and the first line of each couplet is derived from the last line of previous yet with meaning and context change. The last line of the poem reimagines the first line of the poem. Each line is made up of 9-11 syllables. Brown’s The Tradition holds many examples of this, but the most commonly found online can be read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/152729/duplex . “A poem is a gesture toward home. It makes dark demands I call my own. Memory makes demands darker than my own: My last love drove a burgundy car. My first love drove a burgundy car…” To understand the duplex, you must first understand the parts that make it up: the ghazal, blues, and sonnet poetry forms. The ghazal is comprised of couplets that end on a repeated phrase set up by the first couplet. They also frequently use the poet’s name in the final couplet. The blues poem draws inspiration from the blues lyric and it's form has varied to be closer to the blues lyric and further away from it, but the important thing to remember about the blues poem is the conversational tone to it, which follows about 8-10 syllables like a normal speech pattern and it's subject matter is generally regarding something that's wrong either in the speaker's life or in the world. There are several types of sonnets, American, Petrarchan, and Shakespearean, but to cut it to the most basic: they are all of 14 lines and employ some type of meter, most popularly iambic pentameter. For more information on Jericho Brown’s form and its creation visit this website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2020/05/invention .
To watch the brown bag conversation with Mathias Svalina, click here: https://porch.chq.org/re/event/279/
To learn more about the blues poem, see here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/150539/blues-poems
To learn more about the ghazal, see here: https://poets.org/glossary/ghazal
