This week’s poetry blog features the poetry of Sylvia Cavanaugh. Sylvia’s third book of poetry is, Icarus: Anthropology of Addiction (Water’s Edge Press, 2019). In it Cavanaugh blends elements of the Icarus myth (the maze, the minotaur, wax wings, the consequences of flying too close to the sun) to write poems of everyday topics like friendship, raising a family, Shepherd’s pie, beach glass, surfing, and more. We even learn the name of Icarus’s mother, Nacrete (at least I didn’t know).
But what this blog is about today is a form at which Sylvia has become a master, the golden shovel.
For those who don’t know, golden shovel is a form that uses a line from another poem, a song, a quote, etc., as an epigram and then fashions a new poem using the words of the quote as the end words of each successive line.
For those interested in the origins of the form, it was invented by Terrance Hayes whose poem, “The Golden Shovel”, was fashioned using the words in Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “We Real Cool”, as the end words in his poem. The Golden Shovel was the name of the pool hall in Brooks’s poem. You can read both poems at these links:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28112/we-real-cool
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel
There are five prime examples of golden shovels included in Cavanaugh’s Icarus book. You’ll find two below.
Notice how reading the end lines top to bottom reveals the epigram used. The trick of course is to make it seem unobtrusive, unforced, and also to say something new. And for her purposes here, there was the added requirement of having it fit into to the book’s theme. She does this quite deftly, I think. Enjoy.
Law of Gravity
“how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing, in his ecstasy”
From The Windhover, by Gerard Manly Hopkins
I am the unspoken reason as to how
the boy’s flight ended so tragically. He
tumbled crazily from the dizziest rung
of sheer joy, his youthful flight upon
fleet wings, my cold law indifferent. The
science of attraction wins, with the rein
of mass, the void of empty space, of
mathematics. O, how he slyly flaunted a
stodgy force like mine. A weak wimpling,
he was careless of his waxed wood wing.
I trudge through particles and planets in
a hungry, insistent way, and I pitied his
craven flight, his defiance, his ecstasy.
A Bee to Her Flower
“Remember when I moved in you and the holy dove was moving too
and every breath we drew was Hallelujah.”
From “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen
My dance of geography is to remember
the scene in shake and waggle, when
everyone is staring, ravenous, and I
go through the motions, moved
by some strange impulse, hovering in-
between the audience and you,
your scented leavings on my legs and
brightly buzzed in electrostatic charge, the
evidence of lust as clear as holy
stigmata, or the boy’s wax wings as he dove.
O, but the hive’s hexagonal imperative was
just an emergent property. A job moving
me thoughtlessly on, forging me female, too.
They say I’m simply a working John and
sometime nurse maid. Truth told, every
one of us spells the singular busy breath
of some incomprehensible whole. We
are the God of old who tried to think and drew
a blank. But your sexy nectar was
so sweet. Praise be, praise be, Hallelujah.
You can order Icarus: Anthropology of Addiction from Water’s Edge Press or from Sylvia’s website.
https://sylviacavanaugh.com/
https://www.watersedgepress.com/