The Best American Poetry

One of the Components is How Long You Are in the Air: On Poetry and Trampoline by Erika Meitner

(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.)

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MY HUSBAND AND I are sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, waiting for inevitable bad news. We are sharing the Olympic Preview edition of Sports Illustrated from July 23^rd because we’ve already read all the copies of People, Time, and Country Living. Over the last month, we have read every magazine in the waiting room twice over, except for this one, which is new, so we turn the pages together, and I try to figure out who is favored for Trampoline, a sport I agreed to write an essay on, though I know little to nothing about it.

For the past five years, we’ve lived in a mountainous part of Southwest Virginia — in the New River Valley, which is part of the Great Appalachian Valley. We are 30 miles from the West Virginia border. In our neighborhood, as in much of rural and suburban America, trampolines are a regular backyard fixture. They lie somewhere on the scale between ATVs and cars up on blocks, about on par with an aboveground pool. They are dangerous, the opposite of classy, and extremely fun. You can pick up a 15-foot round trampoline with a netted safety enclosure for $278 at the local Walmart in Christiansburg.

“You know the biggest story of the Olympics, right?” Steve says.

“No,” I tell him. I have no idea what the biggest story of the Olympics is. The enormous waiting room is empty but for us. The doctor has let us come during his lunch hour, so we can have more time with him. While we wait, a team of four hospital inspectors walk in with clipboards, looking like some kind of Olympic committee.

“It’s the competition between Blake and Bolt in the 100 and 200. Blake just works his ass off and Bolt claims he’s so good that he doesn’t need to.” Steve points to the pull quote in Sports Illustrated. “Nobody is going to run past me. I don’t worry,” says Usain Bolt, currently the fastest man on earth.

I am a champion worrier, but I was never a cutthroat opponent. As a poet, I am well-versed in failure. As a poet, I’ve found ways to compete sideways, take the less traveled paths. I write narrative poems. I write poems about sex and women’s bodies and babies. I write poems about Walmart. Apparently Trampoline gymnasts feel similarly. He Wenna, the 2008 gold medal winner in Women’s Trampoline, started as an Artistic Gymnast, but later switched to trampoline. In an interview, she said there were a lot of wonderful gymnasts in China, so it was very hard to become outstanding; I’m going to try Tramp, she said. One of my writing teachers, years ago, told me that it’s not his most talented students who go on to become career poets, but the most tenacious of them — the ones who just never stop.

I am tenacious. We have been trying to have a second child for the past three years. After cycles of medical treatments, and one disrupted adoption placement, we decided to try a last hail-Mary round of doctor’s appointments this month, where they found, years into our struggles, that my body has an injury from my son’s birth that they may or may not be able to correct. Some days, my body is an enemy, a source of shame; other days, I feel sorry for it, trying its best, not catching a break. “My self-betraying body needs to grieve,” writes Marilyn Hacker. There will be more travel and tests. There will be more waiting in doctors’ offices, in social workers’ offices. I have grown graceful at waiting.

It is Wednesday and I’m still trying to write this essay on poetry and Trampoline. I’m looking up terminology, reading about history. The trampoline was invented in the 1930s in a garage in Iowa by George Nissen, a University of Iowa gymnast, diver and inventor, who had, at one time, been a part of a traveling acrobatics act called the Three Leonardos. Nissen’s Spanish nickname while he was on tour with the act was "Campeón de Trampolin” — Champion of the Diving Board — and thus, the Trampoline was born and trademarked to the Nissen Trampoline Company.

SIX MINUTES AND ONWARD: WRESTLING, LONG POEMS, AND TIME by Oliver de la Paz

(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.)

Handshake

As someone who once wrestled, what I appreciate is the narrative of the match. The ritual. Wrestlers receive points for putting opponents into predicaments. Wrestlers attempt different moves and holds on their opponents — the leg sweep, the hip throw, the headlock. There are different styles of wrestling — freestyle, which is the type of wrestling I learned, and Greco-Roman, which forbids the use of foot or leg sweeps, as well as grappling below the waist. Most people know about the pin, which is also known as the fall. Many people know about takedowns, which means bringing an opponent from a standing position to a position of vulnerability on the mat. Points are scored for aggression but also for ambition — moves or holds that may put the wrestler at risk of getting pinned. The circumstance of the encounter between wrestlers happens on a soft, even plane. There are zones on that plane. The passivity zone. The central wrestling zone. Out of bounds. Combat occurs within these zones as the wrestlers move in and out of passivity, into the core. The wrestlers watch the referee. They watch the scoreboard for the time. They watch each other. The event consists of two three-minute periods. Whoever wins the most periods wins the match. If the match is tied by the end of the second period, the match goes into overtime or "the clinch." There are three opponents in wrestling — the self, the other wrestler, and time.

***

Another poet told me that poems were like tattoos. That you needed to "go big or forget about it." I will never get a tattoo on the inside of my ankle. I've seen guys at the gym with an inked barbed wire tattoo around their biceps and no other ink. A half-commitment. If I were to get a tattoo, I would get a massive tattoo on my back. On my high-school wrestling team, there were guys who had no necks and bodies that looked like tree trunks heavy with graffiti. They pulled crackling old wrestling shoes from their lockers. Their shoes creaked when they shoved them over their ankles. They all had scars. Muscle aches. Beside them, I was unadorned.

First Period

I was in constant discomfort in high school because I was the worst wrestler on the wrestling team. In my yearbook, someone has written "you" on my picture with the team. Honestly, though, I'm not sure that's me. We were told to put on our "mean faces" and to place our forearms against our knees, pressing them so the pressure of the knee would push the meat of our arms outward, making us look thicker. I think I'm smirking a little in the picture, maybe grimacing.

***

I pace when I'm in the midst of writing a poem. I step away from my desk. I distract myself. I move. I have a morning full of ritual. So much of my time before actually writing is committing myself to the ritual of sitting down. William Stafford wrote every morning just after waking up. I can't do that. I have to check off items in boxes. The morning itself needs to find a fixed form. In wrestling, it's important to be unpredictable. During the handshake ritual, I'd jog in place before shaking my opponent's hand. I'd roll my head along my shoulders. I'd crack my knuckles. I'd loom. Here, though, the poems always manage to dictate their own pace. There is never enough time for them so we must devise a structure for them. A way to size them up. A way to pull them down and hold them tight.

***

My wrestling singlet was standard issue. It was made from a nylon/lycra blend, so it stretched but it didn't breathe. The singlet is a piece of equipment with purpose. It not only needs to cover up the private areas of the wrestler, but it needs to cling tightly to the wrestler's body in order to prevent an opponent from using the singlet for the purposes of grappling or taking down the wearer.

I wrestled in the 130lb/60kg weight class. My build was problematic for my singlet — for the sport. I had short legs, a long torso, and very little muscle, so my singlet stretched tightly around my inner thigh and crotch region. The straps dug tightly into my shoulder. It felt like someone had taken the soft leather pocket of a slingshot — the part where you place the projectile — pulled the elastic straight down as if preparing to shoot a pebble at a flock of high-flying game birds, and hesitated with the elastic at full stretch. All of the team's singlets were hand-me-downs, and in every singlet, there was the ghost of someone else's body. I'm sure Olympians have tailored singlets, and I imagine the fit on theirs won't be an impediment to their wrestling abilities as my singlet was to mine.

***

The sport of wrestling is a ready metaphor for struggle. If you are dealing with personal turmoil, you can be described as "wrestling with something." You can be "grappling with issues." In T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," after a lyrical deluge, Eliot is left with "the intolerable wrestle/With words and meanings . . . ", wondering whether his poetic efforts matter.

***

At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Rulon Gardner, an American who grew up on a Wyoming dairy farm, defeated Alexander Karelin. Karelin was the gold medal winner in Greco-Roman wrestling for the 1988, 1992, and 1996 Olympic Games. He hadn't lost a match in 13 years. They were a study in contrasts. Gardner was doughy. Baby-faced, but recognizably a man shaped by work on a farm. Karelin was chiseled. His muscular abdomen looked engineered. He had nicknames: "The Russian Bear," "Alexander the Great," "The Experiment." He had a signature move called the "Karelin Lift" where he would hoist an opponent from the mat, straight up into the air, and slam them back down to the mat. It was an uncommon move for the 130kg weight class because it required immense strength. Karelin had defeated Gardner in previous bouts, but what won the day for Gardner was his guile. He had studied "The Russian Bear's" technique and knew that elusiveness would be the key to winning the bout. And so Gardner moved. Twisted. Prevented the Russian from grabbing his singlet and executing his signature move. Because Karelin lost his grip on Rulon, he was penalized a point and thus lost the gold medal.

***

Imagine how long six minutes must have seemed to Gardner. Watching the clock as six minutes move achingly slow. The match actively stopping time. The agony of the body and of the mind's awareness of the body has ways of stretching minutes into hours. The long, fibrous muscles stretched taut, pulled by the arms of another.

***

We'd chug whole packets of sugar to gain a short speed burst prior to our matches for our "Angry Six Minutes" as our coaches called it. We'd skip meals. We'd run wind sprints or vigorously jog in place. Once, I wrapped Saran wrap around my waist, wore a thick fleece sweat suit, and ran up and down bleacher steps for 15 minutes prior to a wrestling match in order to lose a pound. Our coach gave us chewing gum and had us spit into cups to cut down our water weight. Drinking water was forbidden. Thirst was weakness but a gulp of water also meant the difference between one weight class and another. While I didn't see it or hear it firsthand, some of my teammates swore some of our other teammates were binging and purging themselves. We spent much of the wrestling season angry and faint.            

***

When I look up from the computer screen or the notepad, the world changes. When I perform the same task of drafting a long poem, the day carries with it particular expectations, but the day is never the same. Sometimes, there's laundry. There are always dishes to be cleaned, but sometimes pans. My sons need help getting dressed. The world's chores spill from the window. So then you look back at what you've done on the screen or notepad and wonder whether it was truly enough. But the day moves forward and before I know it, the trajectory of the poem I've been chasing has veered off in another direction. The poem slides past my grasp.

 Second Period

The condition of a wrestler in relation to his or her opponent is governed by the condition of his or her opponent. To be a wrestler is to inflict intentional discomfort on the self for the glory of mastering one's body in relation to space. To wrestle means to encroach upon someone else's physical space, hold your position within that space for a set duration, and prevent the opponent from interfering with you as you control his or her space.

***

THE GOALKEEPER'S SOLITUDE: A BAEDEKER FOR POETS by Lytton Smith

(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.)

for CM, KT, and the rest

11.

El Loco. El Gato. Fatty. The Panther. The Bullet. The Loner. Odd-woman-out. Safe-as-houses. Shot-stopper. Calamity. Golden Gloves. The Black Octopus. Butterfingers. The Oaf. Green Giant. The Outsider. El Chopo. De Muur. The Guardian. Die Katze. The Lighthouse. The Bear. Tiny. Little. Flash Lightning. Stretch Armstrong. Kamikaze. The Magician. Lone Wolf. Last Man Standing. The Stranger. Last Line of Defence. Numero Uno.

You are called any or all these names. Some are a mark of respect, some a sign of your opponents’ fears. Others are badges of shame, past errors carried into the present.

You are never simply the goalkeeper.

You don’t have to be mad to play here, so they say.

10.

Here is a line: a point that stretches visibly across space.

Some cross themselves before beginning, some look to the heavens. For my part, I like to feel the line’s width, to tread its distance. I sidestep 12 yards right until I can touch the goalpost, jump to touch the crossbar. Turn, sidestep, repeat on the other side, so I am centered in the goal-frame. There’s safety in the line.

A line: a point that becomes visible by its edges, by what happens at each terminus. Even the prose poem is written with a sense of how the line breaks, of the white space that borders each edge. A turning, returning.

9.

The goalkeeper has been exiled from the rest of the pitch for a forbidden desire: to play football with her hands.

She spends her days at the line-edges of being. Her existence is a study in lines, a life in rectangles not of her making: the six-yard box, where her word is nine-tenths of possession, lies inside the penalty box, where her hands conjure the course of events.

Transgress the lines of the box if you must. ’Keepers have done so and turned goal-scoring heroes. Or they have become dispossessed. To stray beyond the lines is to imply you are through with your visions, that you wish to join the mêlée.

8.

It is all a matter of voice. You will need to throw your words as much as the ball. No one else sees where you are, what you do. Your worldview is architectonic, it superintends. You are tasked with communicating your vision to the rest of the team.

Yours is the barbarous yawp and also gentle talk, the thunderous roar and the whisper in the ear.

As Team USA beat North Korea by a goal to nil, we see little of Hope Solo (named at birth a goalkeeper). Her teammates hear from her constantly. The goalkeeper is a mynah bird. Her power lies in what she can do to others with language.

Sports Desk (Olympic Edition): On the Ghost Sports: Baseball. Ripatrazone and Campion.

Today Poetic/Olympic Coverage continues at The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Best American Poetry. We're starting a series within the series in which we consider sports that have been and no longer are a part of the Games. We're calling them Ghost Sports and today it's baseball. Here's a moving meditation by Nick Ripatrazone and some brilliant hilarity by Peter Campion.

Foul Ball: On Baseball and Poetry

By Nick Ripatrazone

The dugouts are empty and the bats are silent: there is no baseball in the London Olympics. There will be no baseball in the 2016 Berlin games. Baseball has merged its international governing body with another spurned sport, softball, for their 2020 bid. It pains me to hear Softball Federation President Don Porter’s admission that they will try to find ways to make both sports “more attractive and interesting.”

            Some major reasons for exclusion include the sport’s popularity in the Americas and Asia but more provincial following in Europe, concerns about drug testing, and the absence of Major League Baseball players. Yet a more implicit trait that appears to have doomed baseball’s chances as an Olympic sport--relatively slow, long games with moments of muted drama--is the same element that makes baseball so beautifully poetic.

            Baseball, even when played in the most urban of locations, is a reminder of the pastoral. The field is geometrically pleasing: batter and catcher boxes, on-deck circles, the manicured diamond centered with the pitcher’s mound, the dirt infield and the grassed outfield, stretching to the fences. That back border is hard, but other borders, like foul lines, can be straddled and crossed. Soft grass and rough dirt can both stain bodies. The bases, though fixed onto anchors, are sometimes upended. Home plate is often buried. It is a static field in almost constant flux.

            Fiction and film have romanticized the game, but poets have given the mythology further refinement and form. Marianne Moore, who threw out the first pitch of the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968, finds “excitement-- / a fever” in the unexpected nature of the game. Unlike basketball, with set hoops, and football, with end zones that must be reached like conquered land, baseball hinges on the relationship between pitcher and batter. If baseball hits bat, the ball springs, and the action follows that white blur. For a sport billed as slow and steady, the movement can be swift and erratic. In “Writing and Baseball,” Moore finds a connection between the unpredictability of both arts, and her uneven structure pushes forward the breakneck lines: a “leaping” player “snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest, / one-handing the souvenir-to-be / meant to be caught by you or me.” Moore’s witty poem is framed by her epigraph: “Suggested by post-game broadcasts.” Baseball is a game clothed in commentary from raised booths and rows of seats: a world covered in words.

            Fernando Perez, the first Major League Baseball player to be published in Poetry, writes that the world of baseball is infinitely splintered and complicated. Minor league players are like itinerant bards, “slouched on a bus, watching small towns roll by matter-of-factly like stock market tickers,” even, as he quotes Ginsberg, “‘shopping for images’ in a Wal-Mart.” Perez knows that “eventually my prime will end” and baseball will “slowly break my heart.” He turns to poetry “because it is less susceptible to circumstance,” and yet he is “not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other.” A baseball player, he wants the worlds of poetry and baseball “apart.”

            That could be the ultimate draw of the sport to poets: it feels like a mythological other, a well-groomed natural world that resists the occasional simplification and nostalgia that poets wish to drape on it. Robert Creeley, Perez’s favorite poet, laments: “The one damn time (7^th inning) / standing up to get a hot dog someone spills / mustard all over me.” In a sport where Babe Ruth is king, where The Pride of the Yankees inspires those who can’t stand the Bronx Bombers, hyperbole and humor equal a second reality, a pastime more game than sport. It is a game where rules are bent, where decisions of safe versus out, ball versus strike are handed down by umpires who sometimes shout, nearly mouth-to-mouth, with frustrated coaches. A game where pitchers might bean batters, where a thief of the infield--a base stealer--is praised by Robert Francis: “How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases, / Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird, / He’s only flirting.” Only in baseball can the grand and legendary, the progressive and monumental reside next to, and perhaps thrive on, the loopy, the subversive, the angry. Such power and possibility in these names: Jackie Robinson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter, Joe DiMaggio, Cecil Fielder, Pearce “What’s the Use” Chiles, Ty Cobb.

            Is this not poetry? Another pursuit mistakenly thought as passive, where the careful accumulation of image can create the tender or forceful. Archibald MacLeish’s “The End of the World” is not about baseball, but in the pageantry of this particular circus, I find correlation. The best moments of baseball and poetry happen “quite unexpectedly.” The “top” blows off when, distracted by an overfilled cup of beer or a vendor screaming about peanuts, we hear the bat crack against ball, and watch it disappear into the blue. We know the ball will return, but for now it remains unseen, while it “hung over / those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes.” Even the most lackluster popup can drop, like a ton, on the grass, and what happens next is controlled chaos: coaches scream, the bench clears, the winning run on second sees the absurd possibility of home. This is the movement of poetry: like “a piece of ice on a hot stove.”

            But what is that ice doing on a stove? Only Robert Frost knows, and we know he certainly loved baseball. It might have been his poultry farming background, the marriage of the pastoral and patience. He said that “nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write -- unless it be to have assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.” Frost thought of baseball as a form of prowess, and saw that as its “common ground” with poetry: both had “something to achieve, something to win or lose.” In the same way we are startled by a late-inning rally, we are shaken by a poem that prodded along until a charged final couplet, and perhaps we feel guilty that we did not see the beauty all along.

            An exhibition and demonstration sport since the 1904 games, medals for baseball have only been awarded in 5 Olympiads. It is unfortunate that such a storied sport is absent on the world’s athletic stage. Imagine, as poets are inclined to, the dramatic perfection of a gold medal no-hitter. Yet there is sufficient drama in a batter’s repeated foul balls as he battles against a determined pitcher on a full count, or the long, slow walk of a relief pitcher from the bullpen. The length of this game is what I find most beautiful and complex. Despite innings and outs, there is always the possibility that a baseball game could go on forever. This glimpse of the eternal is contrasted with the fear and pressure of the final out of the ninth inning. Even in the World Series, we know that these teams will live to play another day, but there is so much grace and terror in that moment before we all go our separate ways, before we take off our team’s caps and celebrate or sulk. We know that tomorrow the groundskeeper will mow lines of light and dark into the desolate outfield while summer help pull rakes along the infield. But in those tense final moments, the possibility of an eternal game can be snapped with a third strike, a caught line drive, a lazy runner picked-off at second. Calm cloaking intense drama. What else could we hope for in the world of sport?

 ***

Baseball Has More Game by Peter Campion

Today Poetic/Olympic Coverage continues at The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Best American Poetry. We're starting a series within the series in which we consider sports that have been and no longer are a part of the Games. We're calling them Ghost Sports and today it's baseball. Here's a moving meditation by Nick Ripatrazone and some brilliant hilarity by Peter Campion.

BASEBALL HAS MORE GAME

I’m not disappointed that the International Olympic Committee cut baseball from the London Games. They had good reasons, for sure. In the space on their schedule left by that languorous, bucolic pastime, they added a true spectacle of athleticism—golf. In fact, there was room enough for a second sport. Here, they thought to address another problem that the inclusion of baseball had underlined, the tendency of certain sports to favor one, dominant nation. So the I.O.C. dedicated the remaining time and money to an event certain to draw the punters into cross-cultural exchange—rugby sevens.

I’m convinced the committee made the right decision. Olympic baseball always seemed a put on, anyhow, a break from the real deal, a moment of enforced mirth that quickly grew tedious, like Pajama Day at school.

 And I have to admit: the rest of the Olympics has always felt to me like Pajama Day at school. Back in the summer of 2008, I tried to watch the swimming events and all I saw was splashing. In the middle of the spray were some heads, wearing these rubber skull-condoms, emblazoned with the flags of their nations. It was hard to tell if any one head was really in front. Then it was over, someone had won, some mutant with a torso as long as a Buick. The analysis and the advertisements must have cycled for hours.

 I also watched the running. This was easier to follow, perhaps too easy: the figures circled the track in their slender rows, like toy figures powered from remote control. There was no competition at all because there was nothing the slightest bit dramatic: the best runner was first, the second best was second, the third best, etc. The differences between them must have been pre-determined by genetics, since each had obviously received the ultimate training, the kind of care and attention that occurs mainly in neo-natal wards and missile silos.

The Olympics began to fill me with dolor. Was this really all that athleticism came down to in its sheerest forms? Trials of endurance and capacity? Freakish feats? How much, how fast, how far?

 How arbitrary! I could come up with this stuff and give it away for free. I mean, my brother once squeezed twenty five grapes into his mouth—I have the picture. No one gave him a medal. A friend of mine was skinny dipping in a Vermont pond a few years ago, when the cops showed up and started shouting through a megaphone. He had to run naked, the whole three miles to where we were staying, without being caught by the police or seen by the neighbors who were all out grilling their Oscar Mayer weiners. Now, that could make an incredible sport.

But here’s my best idea. Senior year of high school, my friends and I called ourselves “the science team” not only because of our elaborate experiments involving alcohol and THC, but also because of our dedication to finding any activity that cultivated the very best in the human spirit. And after one of our lab sessions, in the middle of a blizzard, we cruised the deserted streets of our New England town in a Ford Pinto. Whenever we found an orange traffic drum, we slammed it, head on. This required much more subtlety and skill than one might guess. Each of those traffic drums contains a sandbag, hanging from a rope inside, for ballast. When you hit a drum at optimum speed, from one exact angle, not only does the drum fly through the air, but its sandbag explodes, concluding the game with an exuberant, percussive crescendo, reminiscent of Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov.

 I am currently writing to the I.O.C. (the damn form’s around here somewhere) to recommend the inclusion of this sport in future games. It surely has the same intellectual simplicity as those other Olympic events. Personally, I think it’s more fun and entertaining. But I plan to submit my proposal for “Traffic Drum Slam Drive” in the spirit of diplomatic compromise. You see, having reached adulthood, I myself now prefer baseball. But you just can’t include a game like baseball in the Olympics. It’s too much too fast for those who enjoy the cruder fare provided by the Olympics.

It’s not only that scientists have proven there’s no athletic skill more difficult than hitting a baseball pitched at full speed. Indeed, such a display of talent might embarrass the frantic paddlers of men’s double canoeing or the hefty heavers of shot put—those human boulders who twirl and twitch in circles, with their hands scrunched to their necks like people in serious need of neurological treatment. No, it’s more that baseball has so many elements, intertwining in endless combinations. As if that weren’t enough, a whole other, intricate world lies beneath the surface of baseball. I mean the subjective, dream life that each fan brings to the game, so that the sport takes on a kind of collective unconscious, weaving around the central storyline. In this regard, following baseball resembles the pleasure of reading “difficult” poems or novels. And it would be inappropriate, slightly cruel even, to expect fans of the Olympics instantly to rise to this level of attentiveness—as if, when my infant daughter cried in her crib, I decided to read aloud fifty pages of The Princess Cassamassima instead of changing her diaper.

Maybe there’s hope, though. During the last few weeks, as all the Olympic previews and promos have popped across my television and computer screens, appearing with the mindless pomp and ridiculous solemnity of a Katy Perry video directed by Leni Reifenstahl—I have developed another modest proposal to bring baseball to the world. I’ve based my plans on my years of experience teaching poetry. So many intelligent students are intimidated poetry. They suspect hidden meanings everywhere, as if the poems meant to single them out and humiliate them—like Belgian waiters spitting in their bisque. I’ve learned to allay such fears by acting as a language teacher of sorts, by having my students concentrate on those simple formal features that are right there on the page. We consider them one at a time: voice, line, syntax, tone, plot, stanza. T his approach seems to work. And I think we could do something similar with baseball: we could break baseball down into small component parts, such as running from home plate to first, or diving for pop-ups.

Each of these tasks could become an Olympic exhibition sport until players and viewers, like new speakers of some foreign tongue, slowly caught on and integrated their knowledge of the separate activities. We really could pick any aspect of baseball—even spitting your tobacco juice the farthest, even pulling at your crotch as extravagantly as possible. (Having lived in Italy for a year, I’m positive this last event will find many foreign adherents.) Any of these endeavors has got to be as thrilling as such official Olympic feats as lifting metal discs while grunting, or throwing a pointy stick at a field, or thwocking a stone across a long sheet of ice with a broom. (That one may be in the Winter Olympics, but who the Hell knows.)

What do you say? I need some collaborators on this project. I myself am going to be useless during the next few days. You guessed it: the Red Sox are playing the Yankees in the Bronx, and Pedroia’s back, Baby!

Hoops! ON WOMEN’S BASKETBALL by Stephen Burt

It wasn't supposed to be hard. American women's basketball team has won gold at every Olympics since Atlanta in 1996, where U.S. success — anticipated and then realized — helped to launch the WNBA. The W, in turn — though teams come and go — remains the world's best showcase for professional women's basketball: this year's U.S. team had nothing but WNBA all-stars, including the three best scorers in the league, its strongest pure low-post player, and its two best point guards. The volatile, exuberant Diana Taurasi can score from anywhere on the court, and dominate almost anybody one on one, as long as she doesn't foul out; Seimone Augustus has cultivated what might be the purest, most beautiful jump shot in the history of the women's game, with Maya Moore's two- and three-point arc close behind. Sylvia Fowles, whose musculature reminds me of several comic-book superheroes, can hold a position like nobody else, and elevate like a military helicopter. As for the point guards, the players (often shorter than all the others) who bring the ball up the court and often control the flow of the game: Sue Bird has a legion of imitators for good reason, and Lindsay Whalen seems to have jet thrusters in her sneakers, the ability to pass through solid objects (e.g. defenders), and eyes in the back of her head.

Continue reading . . .

For Part 1 of the "We Can Be Heroes" Olympics series, click here 

The Games Continue: ON (POETRY AND) BOXING by Jennifer L. Grotz

I am not the first poet to fall in love with boxing. References to pugilism go back to Homer, but the English Romantic poets in particular took great interest in the sport, as have various literati from Melville to Mailer. Albert Camus and Ernest Hemingway, as well as T. S. Eliot and Lord Byron, in particular, participated in the sport; others, such as John Clare, were avid spectators.

Continue reading . . .

From the Archives: The terrifying poetry of ping-pong (by Mitch Sisskind)

No Olympic sport is more maddening than ping-pong (I refuse to call it "table tennis.") The way the ball will just nick the corner of the table can drive anyone mad -- especially poets, who are sensitive people by nature.

Kenneth Koch was probably one of the best ping-pong playing poets ever. Had there been an Olympic event combining the two disciplines, I'm certain Koch would have taken home the gold medal. I'm also certain he would have loved the challenge of playing ping-pong while reciting improvised sonnets, or whatever. Well, we will see that in the Upper World!

But Koch was not beyond criticism as a ping-pong player. I'm still kicking myself that I did not actually see the match, but I recall speaking with David Shapiro shortly after he had played Koch in the basement of the now-disappeared Ferris Booth Hall at Columbia. Koch had won the game, but David felt -- and I'm sure he was correct about this -- that Koch had, um, bent the rules a little. Specifically, it was my impression that Koch had tried to create distractions while the ball was in David's court, and I recall David using the term "flapping ostrich."

In Koch's defense, he very often acted like a flapping ostrich -- so should he be expected to stop acting like one when he played ping-pong? We'll have to leave that question to a higher authority. Actually, I believe Koch was also a pitcher on his high school baseball team (Walnut Hills HS, in Cincinnati) and I'm sure his wind-up was a sight to behold. In any case, I happen to believe that Koch was the greatest poet of the New York school, and I'm absolutely certain that he was the best ping-pong player. (But there were probably some good players among the Beats.)

Here is a video of an intense ping-pong match. Don't try this in your rumpus room.

(Ed note:  A version of this post originally appeared on Wednesday, August 13, 2008)

Live from London! Limbering Up: John Keats as Handball Olympian by Lytton Smith

“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would […]”

Danny Boyle’s artificial rain cloud has given the rest of the troposphere an idea or two, and our late-arriving British summer is being edged aside by short showers which drum down on the Copper Box, a matchbox-shaped red-brown building on the south edge of theOlympic Park. As poet and Trappist monk Thomas Merton knew, the rain is a rumormonger, “all the speech pouring down.” We’ve experienced enough Wimbledons on this island to know “it will talk as long as it wants, this rain.” We’re used to listening.

Right now, this rain is talking about events inside the Copper Box, where Iceland’s men’s Handball team (silver medallists in Beijing) has just scored against Argentina. It’s one of those spectacular, made-for-replay Olympic moments where, without warning, something extraordinary happens. #18, Robert Gunnarsson darts into the inner D, the area patrolled by the goalkeeper. A team-mate’s wayward lobbed pass drifts beyond the heads of two Argentine defenders, bobbles awkwardly. Diving forward, at full stretch, headed away from the goal, level to the floor, Gunnarsson grasps the ball and flings it behind him, back over his shoulder, past the helpless, unsighted ’keeper, into the bottom corner of the net. No one saw it coming, least of all the Argentinians, and that’s why the rain’s telling it to the rooftops. Game on.

Continue reading . . .

Headfirst Into The Air (by Laura Orem)

The Olympics are here again, and I can’t rally up much interest. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I keep finding out who won and who lost each event before it’s broadcast (thanks a lot, New York Times). Maybe it’s because, as I’ve written before, there are no characters anymore; everyone is slick, smooth, and tediously decorous. No real drama, not even in the athletic performances, which are uniformly excellent and hinge on the tiniest millisecond.

I used to love to watch the swimming and diving events. I love to swim, even though I’m neither fast nor elegant in form. As for diving, it’s always been a mystery to me how you get good at it without breaking your neck. In fact, I will agree that, even now, of all the summer Olympic sports, diving provides the most suspense, because even a gold-medal diver can misstep or over-rotate, so you catch your breath until she safely slices into the water.

I learned to swim at age five in the Officers Club Pool at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. EA is notorious for two things: LSD experiments on soldiers in the 1960s, and a stockpile of deadly chemical weapons dating back to World War I that they finally disposed of only about ten years ago. My father was a civilian employee who worked on post. We lived in a development a few miles outside the gate, but as a little girl I spent a large chunk of my time on the post grounds themselves.

When I was a kid, no one talked about the tripped-out soldiers or the weapons stockpile; I’m not sure how much of it was publically known in the late sixties. There were “deadly force” areas tucked into remote corners, but they were largely invisible and you had actively go find them. For me, the post was a wonderful place, with shady, tree-lined streets, and deer so tame they’d walk right up to your parked car. There was a riding stable with horses you could pet, and a small airfield where, each 4^th of July, the Rec. folks put on a carnival complete with pony rides, a tiny ferris wheel with four cars, and about twenty-five ramshackle booths. You bought a bunch of tickets for five cents apiece, then you made your rounds. There was Pitch-Til-U-Win, where, if your aim was good and you were lucky, you could win yourself a small pink plastic poodle with sparkling blue eyes, and even if you weren’t, you’d at least end up with a Hawaiian lei made of paper flowers. There was the Wheel-of-Fortune, where if you were very very lucky, you could walk off with a stuffed dog with vinyl ears, and the Pick-a-Duck game, where you could win a straw hat. There was the Spin-Art booth, where you poured primary-colored tempera paint out of Tupperware ketchup bottles onto a piece of spinning cardboard and got your own work of art to hang up on your wall. The air was redolent with sizzling hot dogs (for the kids) and pit-beef sandwiches (for the grownups), and for dessert you had your choice of snowballs or cotton candy. Then, as darkness fell, your dad got the blanket from the car, and the whole family, smelling now of OFF bug spray, headed down to the grass field by the runway to swat mosquitoes and watch the fireworks.