Friday, February 04, 2005

Pre-Game Poetry

In honor of Le Bowl Superb this weekend, some football poem excerpts:

First this from Louis Jenkins' "
Football" (which I first discovered at the Poetry 180 project site):

".... I've got a receiver open downfield..
What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air."

Here's a bit of verse from Flak Magazine's Joshua Adams - a 13-part poem composed in real time in commentary on Super Bowl 38. It starts out as a theft of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", but it ambitiously steals lines from many more good works than just that:

"I was of three minds, like a field goal -- missed!
The South Dakotan kicker owns the day
no longer? How could you, Adam? Wide right?
Vrabel, verily, sacks the city Delhomme.
Would that Hugh Jackman shelve the Van Helsing
and punt for the Pats. ..."

Do you know these lines from James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"?

"...
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies."

Finally, did you now that a Google search for "football poem" yields almost 600,000 hits (most, it seems, for the game we on this continent call soccer)

Give yourself a challenge this year: Find something about the Super Bowl - the GAME, not the commercials or the hype or the halftime extrashaganza - to write about. Capture bodies in motion, human struggle, your uncle's tirade at Terrell Owens. See what you come up with.

By the way: Patriots 23, Philadelphia 13.

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