Nikki Grimes – Reading to the Core

At NCTE last November, I had the pleasure of sitting with Nikki Grimes at her table at the Children’s Book Award Luncheon. Everyone at the table received a copy of her extraordinary verse memoir, Ordinary Hazards (WordSong, 2019). I have long been a fan of Nikki’s poetry, but reading the story of her childhood and teen years left me with a deeper admiration for Nikki.

Recently, Irene Latham announced that she wanted to celebrate Nikki Grimes when she hosted Poetry Friday today. Irene said,

Nikki has won all kinds of awards lately, and due to covid, there haven’t been in-person events, so this gives us all an opportunity to say:

I knew immediately that I wanted to write a Golden Shovel to honor Nikki. This is a form Nikki made popular through her stunning book, One Last Word, using the words and “wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance” for her strike lines. Nikki’s poetry abounds with gorgeous language and words of wisdom, but I thought these lines, from the end of Ordinary Hazards, would speak to us all during our troubled times.

Thank you, Nikki Grimes, for sharing your light with us. And thank you, Irene, for hosting today’s celebration of this amazing woman.

Once again, I am sharing a poem written in response to Laura Shovan’s Found Poetry Project. This year’s theme is “10 Words Found in the News.” For Thursday’s inspiration, Mary Lee Hahn chose Elizabeth Warren’s words from a CNN interview after she was banned from speaking on the Senate floor by Mitch McConnell. “They can shut me up, but they can’t change the truth,” Warren proclaimed.

As soon as I saw these words, Mary Lee’s post on Nikki Grimes’s amazing new poetry collection, One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2017) came to mind. Using the Golden Shovel form, Grimes uses lines from and/or entire poems written by giants of the Harlem Renaissance to create new verses. Each line in the new poem ends with a word from the original verse. (Be sure to read Mary Lee’s post for a much clearer explanation. Better yet, get yourself a copy of One Last Word and read Grimes’s note about the form. The poetry, both the original poems and the new poems they inspired, is breathtaking. Warren’s statement seemed to be tailor made for a Golden Shovel poem. Here is my attempt at the form.