Stepping Into Another Poet’s Lines: A look at S. Salazar’s “3 Golden Shovels”
I’ve never tried my hand at the golden shovel form, but I have a lot of admiration for it. At Table for Deuce (our poetry podcast and blog, “Posts, Toasts, & Roasts”), one of our biggest priorities is not just discussing whether we like a poem, but exploring how a poem converses with the world. In the case of Salazar’s 3 Golden Shovels, this means considering how poets converse with other poets.
For those unaware of the golden shovel form, don’t worry, you aren’t a dummy. It is a relatively new form invented by Terrance Hayes in 2010 in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks. For a golden shovel, the poet ‘digs’ into a source poem, excavates a line from another poet, and then builds a new poem over it with the source poem’s line as the end words of each line. Think of it like a set of footprints left by one poet you can step into and then map your own terrain. The end result isn’t just a poem that pays homage to the poet’s voice, themes, and sensibilities, but it also illuminates the source poem in new ways.
“They Don’t Love You Like I Love You” reads like an elegy of belonging and a dislocation of place. The speaker distrusts “maps,” referring to destinations as “mapped ghosts.” Language of colonization and death—“graves synonymous with places”—and bilingual texture—“ciudades y barrios”—create a tension between geography and erasure. I love how the speaker stutters out “can’t” in the final lines: “can’t chart what I can’t see, / can’t chart through.” It reads as both failure and persistence to keep moving, even if you have abandoned the map.
“That Which Cannot Be Stilled” is more of an internal poem, where the realm is a medicated body. The enjambment of fragments mirrors a medicated consciousness as the speaker articulates the feeling of routine and tedium with taking medication:
“White pill bit between white teeth, I
sun salutation the bottle. The bridge was
out all day, left to make my own connections. A-
nother pill slithers down…”
The poem’s repetition of “white” (literal and metaphorical) perfectly conveys blankness, absence, depression, and numbness, but also in its repetition enhances the sense of monotony and despair of daily treatment. The last line is minimal and compressed, but devastating: “The / lack of chemical, the condition.” It halts the poem’s momentum, landing cold like a “shit diagnosis”.
From the stilled, internal landscape of medication and routine, Salazar shifts into the wilder, more urgent world in “Wolf OR-7” (a reference to a tagged wolf known for crossing state lines). This shorter, feral, psychological poem examines fear, desire, and the pressures of survival. The speaker’s “self-doubt for instinct” and “anxiety-desire” show how uncertainty and need collide, while the enjambment generates a snapped, nervous energy, as if each line is devouring the next.
“If I’m prescribed the right juice, I
might just confuse
my self-doubt for instinct,
my I’m-too-broken-to-love for
let-me-call-my-anxiety-desire—"
Every borrowed word in a golden shovel isn’t just quoted text; it becomes a pivot point in syntax and imagery. Salazar’s 3 Golden Shovels show how the form can be both homage and invention, uncovering new layers in Diaz’s originals while also asserting Salazar’s own voice. The poems inhabit their source lines, but they also chart their own ground—disorienting, meditative, and alive with the tension between the familiar and the unknown. Exploring Salazar’s poems was like taking a literary spade and digging around another poet’s ideas—sometimes messy, sometimes surprising, all the while leaving traces of the brilliant, luminous lines Diaz first put down.
