What a thrill it was to talk with Christopher Spaide about one of the great poems of this century, Terrance Hayes's "The Golden Shovel."

This is a two-for-one Close Readings experience, since you can't talk about the Hayes poem without also discussing the Gwendolyn Brooks poem that his is "after," "We Real Cool."

Christopher Spaide is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, where he focuses on poetry, ecopoetics, American literature, and Asian American literature. His academic writing on poetry (as well as music and comics) appears in American Literary History, The Cambridge Quarterly, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, ELH, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and several edited collections. His essays and reviews and his poems appear in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, Slate, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and honors from Harvard University, the James Merrill House, and the Keasbey Foundation.

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