Hopkins Award Poetry:One Last Word by Nikki Grimes

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grimes, N (2018).One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomsbury USA. ISBN:978:1619635548

SUMMARY: In this collection of poetry, Nikki Grimes looks afresh at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance—including voices like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and many more writers of importance and resonance from this era—by combining their work with her own original poetry. Using "The Golden Shovel" poetic method, Grimes has written a collection of poetry that is as gorgeous as it is thought-provoking.

Analysis: Between the covers of this compact volume lies artistic, literary, sociocultural, and curricular gold. Taking her inspiration from the poets of the Harlem Renaissance and her poetic form from a method first developed to honor Gwendolyn Brooks, Grimes offers an introduction and a homage to these strong African-American voices. After providing brief author’s notes on the Harlem Renaissance and its role in inspiring her own work, she describes and demonstrates the Golden Shovel form, wherein a poet takes the words from a line or several lines of an existing poem, places them vertically against the right margin, and crafts a new poem around them. Working with powerful yet child-friendly poems by the luminaries of the period as well as lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn Bennett and Clara Ann Thompson, Grimes then organizes her new poems, alongside the originals, into thematic strands that remain hauntingly relevant to contemporary experience. Her riffs not only an honor but also interpret the poems she has chosen, building stories and drawing thematic and intergenerational connections through the creation of narrative voices of different ages. Mothers and elders exhort and reflect while young boys and girls plead and dream, reimagining the sorrows and dreams of the legendary wordsmiths into scenarios involving superheroes, bullies, peer pressure, poverty, and prom dates that young readers will relate to. This is simply essential for both personal and classroom collections.

USE: One of the poems from the book show a highlight of the analysis is Mother to Son by Langston Hughes. “Well, son, I’ll tell you:/Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. Withered and wise, I might as well/shift memory for the hard lessons you, my son,/most need to learn, though how I’ll/choose which stories to tell–/well…I’ll just share a few with you. These lines come first from “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes and second from “Lessons” by Nikki Grimes. Using the Golden Shovel technique, a form of poetry in which the poet chooses words from poems by these literary lights and uses them in brand-new poems of her own, she creates luminous art of her own. We are thus able to experience both the original poem and her unique creation. As she points out, it is a “very challenging way to create a poem” but she rises to the challenge admirably.

For a lesson using this book, I can teach and model the golden shovel method and have students to recreate their favorite poems from poets. The purpose would be to show a message that they would want children after them to see and learn from.