The Best American Poetry

Is There Poetry in Soccer? By Alissa Fleck

Musing on how to make sense of myself as a soccer player with the heart and mind of a poet

The diehard poet sees a poem in everything. The most seemingly unpoetic experience still offers a story through her lens. Who can say exactly why the poet’s brain works this way?

In some cases, it is an organizing factor. In others, it is a mechanism of defense or cathartic process. At times we construct narratives to protect ourselves from what is raw, painful or inexplicable. We put language onto what we cannot understand, we grapple for a semblance of sense or beauty. Words protect us. That’s how we can write poems about trauma, for example, how the most unimaginable pain can become poetic.

What about distinctly “unpoetic” experiences of the everyday? Poems exist on the most mundane of subjects. Nothing is mundane in the hands of the skilled poet or, rather, the mundane becomes extraordinary in that it is mundane.

But how much of life does the poet approach, not with the images or pieces of a poem, but with the actual poetic process itself?

Everything I do seems to fall into the same general interest areas, requiring use of similar parts of the brain—I write and research and write some more; I curate a reading series for poets; I make music—with the notable exception of playing soccer. I like to think language is a realm in which I have some degree of mastery and playing music seems to exercise the brain in many of the same ways. Where does soccer fit in, besides making me—ideally—a more well-rounded person? 

While I enjoy the game immensely, I am all but incompetent on the soccer field. At the risk of constructing a false dichotomy, I’ve always considered myself more intellectually-inclined than athletically. Of course the two need not be mutually exclusive; indeed perhaps I can fuse the disparate pieces of my life and say it is possible to see the sport of soccer—or any sport for that matter—as a poetic experience. 

For skilled players, there is a great deal of, well, skill to playing soccer. There is foresight and strategy. You make predictions, take gambles and develop systems of spoken and unspoken communication with teammates. You get better by practicing and watching the masters (rarely in life, however, is that not the case). 

There’s a certain art to the balance of the game. You must learn to read your opponent, to think ahead and visualize. So much of the game is lived abstractly, in one’s head, before any play is made. A play takes a moment, while visualization and strategy last all match—even all season. Soccer involves immense amounts of running and passing and work, punctuated by small, intense bursts and climaxes as when a player takes a shot.

How similar all this sounds to the poetic process. A great deal of work goes into crafting a poem. There are hours upon unseen hours of toiling for the little bit that's ultimately displayed. To begin to understand that work, you must read between the lines, unfold and dismantle the finished product.

All poetry is also a conversation, just like soccer, though neither is a conversation in the most traditional sense. Poets converse with their contemporaries and their predecessors, while soccer players converse with their teammates and their opponents. They get to know each other intimately. As my sports fanatic uncle has always preached: “Everything you need to know in life, you learn on the soccer field.”

There’s certainly rhythm and repetition to soccer, as with poetry, but there is also a lot that is unpredictable and beyond our control. Despite certain limiting repetition of a soccer game, there are infinite possible outcomes. 

In poetry as in play, we can control what we do but we cannot necessarily control the consequence. We cannot control how a game will unfold just as we cannot control how a poem will unfold—what will it become once it’s left to others’ interpretations?

Alissa Fleck is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on Bitch, Truthout and Narrative.ly and in the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and more. She writes a weekly literary column for NY Press.

tl;dr [by John Beer]

This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.

 

***

Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is worthwhile.”

 

***

What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.

 

Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished tongue.

 

Shibboleth?                [can’t hear you.]

Ear of corn?               [can’t make out the word.]

 

She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter there.

 

(I are my ownenemymemory)

 

 

[river]

[flick]

[flicker]

 

(The Unmemntioable, Erin Moure, House of Anansi, 2012)

 

In addition to writing some of the most singular books of poetry of the last decade (2002’s O Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant translation/reimagination of O Guardador de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of drafting the writings associated with his name.

Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.

Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.

But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity. In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the ‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”

What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.

 

***

 

This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962 collection New Poems, which I consider one of the underread gems of 20^th-century American poetry. Here’s one poem from that collection:

 

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

 

How do you read a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?

One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never being taken in is the highest virtue.)

“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions; variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” & he or she probably is.

 

***

 

“Imagine taking a college exam…clicking the ‘send’ button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.”

Really, imagine it.

The loveliest bit of this story is the line that when everything in academia is automated, it’ll free faculty up “for other tasks.”

Light construction projects? Armed security? Fracking the campus subsurface?

The Game With The Funny Ball [by Mitch Sisskind]

As the 2013 Super Bowl approaches, it's time to watch Vince Lombardi give a ten minute lecture on his favorite football play. If you're like me, you prefer to skip the introductory content that encumbers many Youtube clips, so just begin watching at 1:08. You'll enjoy seeing Lombardi start to go crazy as his lecture continues. And this is actually just the first of several Youtube lectures by Lombardi on the same play.

           .

Along similar lines, here's an interview with Jim Ringo. He played center on Lombardi's Green Bay Packer team until Lombardi got rid of him because he wanted more money. Ringo looks like George Washington in this video and seems very composed, but he had to be an extremely aggressive player in order to make up for his lack of size. He was also a fervent anti-communist.   

Games Poets Play [by Heather Christle]

This evening I was reading this post on The Hairpin, all about "low-effort toddler games" like "Do You Like My Hat?" and "Hide Things in Your Clothes," and it reminded me of a passage from the children's book Pinky Pye, wherein a cat types up a list of suggested games:

 

The very clever cat then goes on to explain more complicated games, which you might enjoy reading (beginning on page 118).

And this led me to thinking of all the games I've played with poet friends, which now I will tell you how to play, in case you find yourself with guests or selves to entertain this weekend.

1. Game of First Lines

This is just like Balderdash, only instead of inventing definitions for obscure words, you invent first lines for titles. Pull a literary journal off the shelf, open to the first poem, read the title aloud, and then have your friends write down a convincing option for a first line, while you write down the actual one. Gather them all together, read them out loud, and have everyone guess which is real. Points to anyone who guesses right, or whose line manages to fool someone. Or don't keep track of points. Then pass the journal to the next person, so you get a chance to invent.

2. Game of Following the Rules of Vasko Popa's Game Poems

I just made this up, but I think it would end in tears. Here is how you play "Seducer"

One caresses the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And motions him coyly with her leg

Another kisses the keyhole
Keeps kissing it and how 
Until the keyhole returns the kiss

A third one stands to the side
Watches the other two
And shakes and shakes his head

Until his head drops off

3. Game of Not Listening

When you are stuck in an audience listening to someone who is dull or going on for too long, write down words and phrases she says, in order, but very selectively, so that by the time she finishes you have a much better speech she could have made had she only known how to edit herself. Extra points if you arrange her own words into an entirely different subject.

4. Game of Constant Similes

Pretend that every time someone says "like" as filler (of the "um" variety) he is embarking on making a simile it is your job to understand.

5. Game of Stacking Books

This game I borrowed from Matthea Harvey, who borrowed it from the artist Nina Katchadourian. Go to a place full of books. Find titles you'd like to arrange into a poem. Stack them in an order that pleases you. Depending on whether or not you think the place is trying to keep the books in a different order, you might consider leaving them there for someone to discover. Or take a picture.

6. Game of "Life of Game"

Listen to Loren Goodman.

7. Game of Thinking of Something

Think of something. Tell your friends you are thinking of something. See if they can guess what it is. If you are not with friends, try just thinking of something.

Those are all of the games I know. I'm lying. Those are half of them, but I am trying to raise my level of mysteriousness, which is part of a game I'm not telling you about.

--Heather Christle

 

Quote of the Day: Walt Frazier

(JOSHUA C. CRUEY, ORLANDO SENTINEL)

"The diminutive [Jameer] Nelson is a Lilliputian among Gullivers."
                               -- Walt Frazier (NY Knicks vs. Orlando Magic 1/5/2013)

-- sdh

This Never Wanting it To End: Hunger, Gymnastics, and The Shapely Lyric by Tarfia Faizullah

RAMADAN, THE ISLAMIC month of fasting, began this year on July 20^th, 2012. One week later, the opening ceremonies of the Olympics took place.

*

Perhaps it isn’t so strange that the Olympics are taking place during Ramadan. After all, don’t both the Olympics and Ramadan occur within the body? Don’t both test the body of its ability to endure, sustain, to be disciplined?

*

What can a stripped art reveal?

— Gregory Orr, “Some Part of the Lyric”

*

We wake before dawn to eat something to sustain us throughout the day. We take the last sip of coffee, the last bite of a bagel or a bowl of cereal or a plateful of eggs. We return to our beds to sleep a few more hours or we stay up to watch the day unveil itself from night. We know the day will bring a hunger we don’t yet feel.

*
On August 2^nd, I watch Gabby Douglas ease herself with her palms onto the balance beam during the All Around Women’s Finals. She is taut with hours and days and months of self-discipline, of training her body so it does not and cannot fall off that narrow width of suede-covered wood. I’m struck again by the way extreme control lends itself to such grace, such elegance.

Continue reading . . .

Counting Footsteps by Roger Bonair Agard

ROGER GUISEPPI was one of the best players we had ever seen. He was one year below me in high school, and almost from the first day he showed up, he seemed possessed with otherworldly ball control. He could dribble past anyone at anytime, almost effortlessly it seemed. He could tell you he was about to put it on you — and there was nothing you could do to stop it. Gip (that’s what we called him) had a signature dribble. We called it a sex. To us it was the greatest ignominy to bestow upon an opposing player — to slip the ball through his legs. It was the ultimate embarrassment. Wherever we were, if you could sex your defender, the field, the courtyard, the balcony over looking the gym, the fellas standing on the corner, all went ohhhhh!! And momentarily the game would take second place to the shit-talk that accompanied the move.

I grew up in the twin-island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. To date, we are the smallest nation to have qualified for the World Cup. With a population of 1.3 million, it seems miraculous that we’ve accomplished what we have. We’ve had an Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meters (Hasely Crawford 1976). We’ve had two Miss Universes. We’ve been part of the most dominant cricket team of all time. But Trinidadians are obsessed with soccer. We are obsessed with the beautiful game and obsessed with making it look beautiful at all times. Many of the teams we’ve produced have outplayed their opponent and lost 1-0; including the heartbreaking loss to the United States in 1989, when all we needed was a draw to make it to the World Cup in Italy in 1990. We lost that game 1-0, in Trinidad. The next year, an attempted coup dominated the headlines for many months. It is impossible to decide whether or not they’re connected.

Continue reading . . .

The Straight-Across-the-Forehead Variety by Michael Heald

For T.R.

SO YOU'RE MISSING out on the biggest race of the Olympics. Okay, maybe not, but what you are missing out on is the biggest moment… for my father.

When they scheduled the surgery a month ago, it was the first thing out of our mouths. August third? Are you fucking kidding? That’s exactly when track and field starts. My brother and I went online, sick to our stomachs, telling ourselves, as long as they’re not running the 10,000, but of course they are, it’s happening early Saturday afternoon, less than 24 hours after they cut into my father’s spine and attempt to fuse it with three new cadaver bones in his neck.

For almost a decade now, my father has been looking forward to this race. It was late 2002 or early 2003 when he first told us of the golden-haired choirboy from Central Catholic named Galen Rupp. Rupp happens to be a Portlander, like us, and since his first race he’s shouldered the expectations of the small but passionate community of people in America who care about running. People like my father. People, I suppose, like me. Here he was, finally, the boy who could do what Steve Prefontaine could not: medal in the Olympics and stay alive. Prefontaine, who occupies the same kind of psychic terrain as Che Guevara. Who lives on the walls of hungry teenagers. Whose arrogant pre-race chatter has been silk-screened on t-shirts. Whose mustache continues to make Nike millions. Who has his own rock. Being compared to one of the only martyrs in American sports cannot be easy, especially when you look and behave like Galen Rupp.

Continue reading . . .

On Poetry and Swimming by Alison Stine

MY HIGH SCHOOL didn’t have a swim team. We didn’t have a pool. We had a few hundred students in a single-story building just up the hill from the junior high, which was just up the hill from the elementary. A few miles away were the factories (GM, AK Steel) and farmland. I had a classmate who drove his tractor the last day of senior year (it took him two hours). We had a Biblically-successful boys basketball team who had come from behind, the underdogs, to win a state championship. The road to the high school was officially renamed ‘89 Championship Drive in their honor. Our mascot was the Minuteman. The girls’ teams were called the Lady Minutemen. We didn’t have a swim team.

Still, I swam, mostly at various public pools, every summer day of my childhood. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, we would leave after breakfast, bags packed with towels, my mother’s novels. We would stay at the pool until late afternoon, having eaten lunch there, hot dogs or hamburgers, pale half-done French fries in a paper tray. Only in the car would exhaustion hit. I would feel the sun then too, prickling my arms and the back of my neck. There is nothing quite like the exertion of swimming, a kind of peaceful burn, my muscles loosening as I leaned into the seat, the fabric damp from my suit.

What was swimming about then?

Continue reading . . .

Body Limits: Weightlifting and Depression by Patrick Rosal

(Ed note:  We're pleased to bring you the Los Angeles Review of Books coverage of the 2012 Olympics.  To read the complete series, click here.)

YOU LEFT YOUR KEYS in your car, the security guard on the phone told me. I said, Thanks, I’ll run over and pick them up. He added, Your windows were down. Okay, I said. And your door was open. I paused. … and the keys were in the ignition… and the car was running.

People who suffer from acute depression often describe a sensation of hovering somewhere outside themselves, watching. It sounds pretty cool, except it becomes a multiplication of terror when you’re used to lifting a knife if you tell your hand to lift a knife and putting it down if you tell it to put it down. It’s an eerie disconnection from the immediate world. You can’t seem to move anything, including yourself, and everything around you seems to be made of slate — slow and gray.

Another corrupting thing about depression, somewhat related to its bodilessness, is the way your sense of time distorts. Depressives talk about having running thoughts. Think of that rambling disclaimer voice in prescription drug commercials, multiply that rate of speech by at least a factor of ten, and fill the text with some murderous material, including rather inventive, albeit gruesome, applications for a bed sheet and a tall maple tree. The disparity in speed between what you’re thinking and whatever mundane task is at hand makes you feel like you’ve lost all agency. The suggestions of the voices you hear are numerous, swift, and convincing.

Well, with no job, I gave up my apartment and took residence on a couch in Jersey City, invited by my good friend, poet Ross Gay. We lived cheaply and it was good to have his company pretty much around the clock. I started reading again, Horace’s epistles, Larry Levis, and Rilke. We watched a fair amount of Dave Chappelle and Richard Pryor. The laughter might have been what I had hoped for, the first bump out of depression.

The last full nudge back into my body was much more subtle and took some time. It happened after Ross, who is a six-foot-four Division I football alum from Lafayette College, asked if I wanted to work out with him. Me?

I did join track as a freshman in high school. But one day at practice, the field coach, after learning my javelin distances for the day, cocked his eyebrow at me asked, “Can you run, Rosal?” Kicked off the javelin squad and dumped in with the sprinters, I finished no better than second to last in every B-heat of the spring.

As for lifting, I had no interest in it at any point in my life, the repetitiveness of it and the apparent vanity. I did play a lot of street and league basketball all through my teens and twenties. I was also a 20-to-25-mile-a-week runner for a few years. But weights, in my mind, were for meatheads.

In a little cove of a room that joined the bedrooms and the living room, among all our cluttered guy shit — bikes, books, rags, dirty t-shirts — Ross had three iron globes of increasing size and weight, painted black, each with a handle on it. They were kettlebells. They were Russian, he told me, as he picked up the biggest one, about 50 pounds., and started to swing it.

You know that movement that a bird in a cuckoo clock makes? Its body drops forward and down, seeming to dip its beak repeatedly into some invisible pool before it tilts upright again? Imagine that — except the cuckoo bird is six-foot-four and about 210 pounds and he’s gripping the handle of a 50 pound ball of cast iron between his legs before he pops up and the iron bell floats up. I called it Ross’s Iron Curtain Workout and I politely declined.

I don’t remember what it was that got me into that room, but maybe a week after watching him a bit, I asked if I could join him. It’s all from the hips, he explained. So I gripped the smallest kettlebell, a 20-pounder, by the handle. I kept my back straight, gave the weight a little back swing between my legs, drove my hamstrings and quads up and popped my hips out, squeezing my glutes at the top. I used my arms for nothing except to guide the weight, which just flew up, no problem. I was a natural.

That six-minute workout had me sore for a week. I moaned at every one of the 75 steps of the brownstone to my spot on the sofa. It hurt so bad, I had to laugh. It felt like someone was ripping my tendons from my joints. After time, I stepped up to a bigger kettlebell.

It didn’t take more than a month for both Ross and me to start doing more sophisticated movements, like releasing the kettlebell at the top of the swing and catching it again on its way down. Then we would do the swing and release, but touch our shoulders while the kettlebell paused mid-air. We were flipping the weight and guiding it in figure eights around our bodies. We were tossing the bell back and forth to one another, inventing tricks, whistling Sweet Georgia Brown. A few times the whole brownstone shook when we dropped one of the bells.