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Motion: American Sports Poems
Sports have long served as inspiration for poetry-the ancient Greeks wrote odes in praise of their athletes-so it is little surprise that in a culture as obsessed with athletes as our own sports would exert an influence on contemporary poets. American Sports Poems rescues sports from our society's focus on superstars, multimillion-dollar contracts, and gold medals to capture champions and losers, competitors and spectators in moments that are anything but fleeting. As Noah Blaustein points out in his preface, among the many parallels made between sports and poetry is the idea of transcendence. Forged from the most basic elements of sport-energy, movement, and rhythm-the poems in this anthology reflect something sport as metaphor, sport as struggle, sport as the battleground for mythic figures and local heroes.
The often celebrated sports-baseball, boxing, football, and basketball-are here along with unexpected pastimes like surfing, skateboarding, tennis, soccer, karate, rock climbing, bowling, and curling. Young and old, black and white, male and female, the poets in this anthology celebrate everyone who has come together in the shimmy and shake and sweat of sport.
The often celebrated sports-baseball, boxing, football, and basketball-are here along with unexpected pastimes like surfing, skateboarding, tennis, soccer, karate, rock climbing, bowling, and curling. Young and old, black and white, male and female, the poets in this anthology celebrate everyone who has come together in the shimmy and shake and sweat of sport.
- GenresPoetry
256 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 20, 2013
This is a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly powerful collection. I was expecting wussy stuff I could use in class to teach figures of speech, and instead I got art.
I also took the time to tabulate how many good poems (as chosen by the editors and stamp-of-approval'd by me) were written about each sport, because that's the high level of reporting you've come to expect from whatever it is I do here. The results are sort of surprising: out of 128 poems,
35 were baseball poems (no surprise there)
19 basketball
12 boxing (this sport isn't even going to be allowed in ten years)
11 fishing/ hunting
10 running/ track and field
9 water related (swimming, surfing)
5 racket sports
5 football (!!)
22 misc (including one about curling-- who knew?)
For a good taste of what's happening in this volume, check out Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" and Dickey's "For the Death of Vince Lombardi."
I also took the time to tabulate how many good poems (as chosen by the editors and stamp-of-approval'd by me) were written about each sport, because that's the high level of reporting you've come to expect from whatever it is I do here. The results are sort of surprising: out of 128 poems,
35 were baseball poems (no surprise there)
19 basketball
12 boxing (this sport isn't even going to be allowed in ten years)
11 fishing/ hunting
10 running/ track and field
9 water related (swimming, surfing)
5 racket sports
5 football (!!)
22 misc (including one about curling-- who knew?)
For a good taste of what's happening in this volume, check out Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" and Dickey's "For the Death of Vince Lombardi."
Displaying 1 of 1 review