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Poetry and Sport
“The best songs are body songs.”
—Stanley Kunitz
Poets are word athletes, and the poems they make are word
performances. Good poems are not static but dynamic—they dramatize
the motions of life. For instance, we admire a “good move”
in a game or in a poem. Larry Bird suddenly fakes out a defender, leaps
in the air and lifts the ball off his fingertips toward the basket—swish.
And a poem, near its end, suddenly “turns” and concludes with
a powerful flourish. We appreciate both poet and athlete because we have
witnessed a moment of grace.
Recent studies of the human brain have shown that it consists of a newly-evolved
neocortex, which has to do with analyzing and logic; and an ancient “hindbrain,”
which has to do with feelings and bodily responses to the environment.
Science and philosophy emanate from the neocortex, poetry and art from
the primitive brain. It’s not that poemmaking involves only feelings.
It also has its analytical part: revising means consciously manipulating
words, a process called “conscious artistry” by one writer
(Burnshaw 5657). The point is that poetry, as is true of any art, is preeminently
a function of the senses.
Because poetry is so gestural arid physical, it is difficult to analyze.
We can like or dislike a poem long before we “understand”
it; this is because our response is only partly a matter of conscious
thought. The great poet/scholar A.E. Housman illustrated this truth when
he wrote:
Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.’ The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach. (38)
One of the reasons poetry is so hard to “teach” in school
is that it is assumed ` to be not an art but rather a “subject”—something
that can be dealt with logically. Students are given poems to read and
discuss and write about, and then tested on the “material”
as if it were a quantifiable thing to learn, like gas laws. (Fiction is
a safer genre to work with because it is paraphrasable, and one can more
easily skim socalled “themes” off the top of it.) Since poetry
is associated with the older, primitive side of our nature, it will always
resist classroom analysis.
Watch children listening to nursery rimes. They don’t listen passively;
they listen physically as the lines are chanted. They respond not merely
with their minds but with their bodies, and that is exactly the response
these body poems are intended to elicit.
A poem is nothing if not physical. Stanley Burnshaw in his book The
Seamless Web writes:
But words are also biology. Except for a handful of poets and scholars, nobody has taken time to consider the feeling of verbal sounds in the physical organism. Even today—despite all the public reciting of verse, the recordings, the classroom markings of prosody—the muscular sensation of words is virtually ignored by all but poets who know how much the body is engaged by a poem. (206)
“Poetry in motion” is a cliche often used to describe an athlete
performing. The phrase aptly illustrates the fact that sports or any kind
of graceful movement can be appropriate subject matter for poetry. In
other words, sports have a builtin fluidity and encantatory quality that
we naturally associate with poetry, and vice versa. (When I use the word
“sports” in “sports poems,” I include, along with
the usual definition of “games with rules,” the looser senses
such as “an active pastime or recreation” and “to play
and frolic.” If a poem works on the basis of some physical action—if
that is what it is “about,”—then it qualifies as a sports
or body poem.)
The mature athlete in motion, like a good poem in motion, is (another
cliche) a thing of beauty. We appreciate the lively precision of a dive
by Greg Louganis or a vault by Mary Lou Retton. The performance becomes
memorable in the same way that a poem’s lines stay with us long
after we have heard them read or have read them ourselves. Seeing a perfect
dive or vault over and over on instant replay is equivalent to repeating
aloud the lines of a great poem.
Obviously, using sports as a subject for a poem does not guarantee literary
success. But when a poet describes an athlete in action, that poet is
taking advantage of a genuinely dramatic structure: the movement or event
itself. “Poetry is as good as it is dramatic,” said the athlete/poet
Robert Frost, the author of one of our best sports poems, “Birches.”
The poem is about a rural boy “too far from town to learn baseball,”
who had to invent his own sport by climbing birch trees and swinging on
their branches. The athleticism of the experience is conveyed in lines
such as these:
Then he flung outward, feet first, with
a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. (3940)
The joy of a lone boy’s play—of a whole childhood,
ours as well—is fixed in those lines, which no doubt were inspired
by a real experience.
Over the years I’ve been aware of two basic types of sports or body
poems. The first type is what I call participatory. In this poem the poet
remembers an athletic experience, then converts the experience into language.
The poet relies on the drama inherent in the action depicted—in
other words, allows the experience to carry the poem, to be the poem.
James Dickey’s “Encounter in the Cage Country” is an
example of a participatory poem. A man in sunglasses walking through an
indoor zoo is suddenly “caught” by a leopard’s eye.
He doesn’t just stand there and stare back at the cat, but spontaneously
begins to “perform,”
first saunt’ring then stalking
Back and forth like a sentry faked
As if to run and at one brilliant move
I made as though drawing a gun from my hip-
bone, the bitesized children broke
Up changing their concept of laughter…(2126)
But the leopard, evidently transfixed by the sunglasses,
only watches, “alert, attentive,” as the man performs before
its cage. The man finishes his act and leaves, the cat following him “right
to the end / of concrete.” Outside in the sun, he takes off his
glasses and feels, after the strange encounter, “inside and out
/ of myself” and concludes:
and something was given a life-
mission to say to me hungrily over
and over and over your moves are exactly right
for a few things in this world: we know you
when you come, Green Eyes, Green Eyes. (3439)
At least two things strike me about this poem. First, the comicironic
duality: the freemoving, clumsybycomparison human versus the caged, graceful
leopard. Second, the crucial linking of these two different animals, an
identity sparked by the odd athletic movements of the speaker. It is as
if the encounter has forced the man to express a wordless, wholly physical
and animalistic “something” that has always been waiting in
his body to be expressed. He has discovered some “moves [that] are
exactly right / for a few things in this world.”
“Encounter” is much more than it seems. Beyond, or rather
through its play aspect, it is an ecological statement which says that
we are related to all other species in the creation, and that, in Joseph
Wood Krutch’s words, “only by feeling with them can we truly
feel about them” (53). I am also reminded of Henry Bestori's
words in his classic,
The Outermost House:
For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. (25)
The second type of sports poem is nonparticipatory. In this poem the speaker
describes, say, an athlete in action, but is not involved directly in
the experience described. The poet may or not be writing out of a personal
body memory, but is observing from a distance. Sometimes, as in many participatory
poems, the writer is almost purely descriptive. An example would be Walt
Whitman’s short poem “The Runner”:
On a flat road runs the welltrain’d
runner,
He is lean and sinewy with muscular legs,
He is thinly clothed, he leans forward as he runs,
With lightly closed fists and arms partially rais’d.
More typically, the nonparticipatory poem goes beyond description and
makes a statement, not only about athletes or sports, but about life.
Robert Francis is one of the best practitioners of this kind of poem.
Francis has written about ball players, gymnasts, divers, skiers, and
other athletes. Most of his sports poems demonstrate a detachment which
allows him to comment as he describes. For instance, from
“Watching Gymnasts”:
How flowerlight they toss themselves, how
light
They toss and fall
And flowerlight, precise, and arabesque
Let their praise be. (912)
The elegant tone—which is a function of distancing—the repetition of light syllables and syntax, the obvious admiration the speaker has for the gymnasts—all these add up to a description of how it must feel to be a gymnast as well as a definition and celebration of the sport. Another example is found in these lines from “High Diver”:
How deep is his duplicity who in a flash
Passes from resting bird to flying bird to fish.
Who momentarily is sculpture, then all motion,
Speed and splash, then climbs again to contemplation.
He is the archer who himself is bow and arrow.
He is the upperunderworldcommuting here. (16)
The main difference between the nonparticipatory poem and the participatory
poem is that in the former there is distance between speaker and action.
This distance—which is not simply a matter of using the third person
point of view instead of the first person—allows the poet to make
distinctions, to analyze, to summarize, and so on. In the opening lines
of “The Diver” quoted above, Francis, the careful observer,
correlates physical actions with such abstract ideas as “duplicity”
and “contemplation.” He also defines the diver and his sport
by using several apt metaphors: archer, arrow, sculpture, bird, fish.
But as we read this poem we are not inclined to identify with the speaker
as if he were the diver himself. We, like the poet, are watchers of grace.
Stanley Kunitz wrote that “the words of a poem go back to the beginnings
of the human adventure when the first symbols were not spoken but sung
or chanted or danced” (5053). If that is so, then sports or body
poems may be among our oldest artistic expressions. These poems remind
us that the body has its own language, its own wisdom. They tell us to
keep moving, to keep our senses awake, to stay in shape. They teach and
celebrate awareness.
Works Cited
Beston, Henry. The Outermost House. New York: Rinehart
& Company, Inc., 1949.
Bumshaw, Stanley. The Seamless Web. New York: George Braziller,
1970.
Dickey, James. Poems 19571967. Wesleyan University Press, 1967.
Frost, Robert. Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Rinehart,
Winston, Inc., 1936.
Housman, A. E. The Name and Nature of Poetry. New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1950.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Great American Nature Writing. New York:
William Sloane Associates, 1950.
Kunitz, Stanley. Next to Last Things. Boston: Atlantic Monthly
Press, 1985.