We are coming to the end of another Poetry Month, and we would be remiss to let it go without highlighting a staggering new work by Nikki Grimes.
ONE LAST WORD is an ode to the Harlem Renaissance, but also thoroughly modern. It utilizes the Golden Shovel form, in which a line from a previous poem, or the entire text of a short poem, is repurposed in a new poem. The words from the previous poem each appear in their turn as the last word of each line of the new poem. For example, the line “We live, and how intense is life!” from Clara Ann Thompson’s Life and Death becomes, in Grimes’s hands,
JAMAR
The evening news never spares us. Tune in and we
hear: if you’re a boy and you’re black, you live
with a target on your back. We each take it in and
shiver, one sharp-bladed question hanging overhead: how
long do I get to walk this earth? The smell of death is too intense,
and so we bury the thought, because the future is
ours, right? We get to choose? Well, we choose life.
As you see, the style allows Grimes both to honor the Harlem Renaissance poets, bringing them alive for a new generation, and to speak to that new generation about its own struggles, while placing them in historical context. It is a stunning achievement, but Grimes takes it even further. She pushes herself to create a Golden Shovel poem for the entirety of Langston Hughes’s twenty-line Mother to Son, and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s sixteen-line, ninety-word Common Dust. She even creates one of the illustrations! Speaking of the illustrations, they are gorgeous, and worthy of study on their own. Grimes further gifts us with concise and informative text on the Harlem Renaissance and with short biographies of the poets and illustrators she features.
ONE LAST WORD could be a class in itself, all contained in one slim volume with poetry, art, history, race, feminism, and ethics. As Grimes notes in her introduction, “I want to take a moment to celebrate those earlier poets, add my voice to theirs in a very direct way, and introduce them to a new generation.” She has succeeded in spades—or should I say shovels?
Kate Hillyer is a middle grade writer in Washington D.C. She blogs here and at From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors, and served as a 2016 and 2017 Cybils judge for Poetry. You can find her on Twitter and at www.katehillyer.com.