sla review: johnson, the sporting muse

THE SPORTING MUSE: A CRITICAL STUDY ABOUT ATHLETES AND ATHLETICS

Reviewed by David Allan Evans, South Dakota State University

OCTOBER 30, 2004 archive

"The one thing you cannot fake is the body," wrote James Dickey in his journal, Sorties, in 1971. Good poets have always known the truth of Dickey's words. And yet the Cartesian mind/body split-even though neuroscientists have relegated it to the status of alchemy and astrology-persisted for centuries and still persists, and one result of it is that poetry about sports and play does not command as much respect as poetry that purports to be about "higher" or so-called intellectual subjects. This prejudice is often accompanied by another prejudice against sporting events themselves. How can one take football seriously, the argument goes, let alone poetry about football?

Don Johnson's new book should help further to put the damper on the old, stubborn, wrong-headed Cartesian duality, on the prejudice against poetry about sports and play-and even on some false notions about poetry itself, whatever its subject matter.

There are at least three reasons why I consider this book valuable. First, Johnson brings considerable scholarship and passion to his subject. He is probably the foremost authority on sports poetry, and has been one of the main persons responsible for making it a legitimate sub-genre worthy of study. Second, he provides some useful distinctions among many sports, especially the big three American ones: baseball, football, and basketball. And third, he provides quite a lot of specific examples of first-rate practical criticism, always in a graceful, lucid style. For instance, in his basketball chapter he discusses a poem by Dennis Trudell, in which two guys are shooting baskets in the darkness. The speaker of the poem, who, according to Johnson, has "wordlessly floated into the game," is alternating shots with the other guy, a stranger:

Trudell's entire poem is suffused with softness: the failing light with its muted colors and shadows, the relative quiet (neither man speaks) and the slow, fluid movements of the players. The poem itself illustrates perfectly the marriage of form and content as its short, three-line stanzas flow into one another with the ease of the shooter's style, the fluidity of the speaker's taking up the game, and his smoothness in ghosting away, uplifted, as if the ball hung against the evening sky . . .

Not only is there a scholar behind these words; there's also a fine writer-a rare combination. Johnson's appeal, like that of all good critics, is at the same time analytical and intuitive. This combination can come only from a person who has a genuine feel for all kinds of sports as well as for poetry itself. In the Introduction, Johnson sets one of his main goals in the book: " . . . to determine whether or not there are broad, common attitudes and values which both reflect and color our views of a given sport." Through references to individual poems throughout the book, this is precisely what he accomplishes. As expected, he quotes from many poems and provides a context for his quotes, and yet, about a fourth of the way into the book I began to miss an accompanying anthology of, say, 50 or 60 representative poems. That would make an outstanding package.

Let me quote from several of the chapters on individual sports to give some idea of Johnson's sense of each sport's uniqueness.

In the baseball chapter he speaks of baseball poems as having a strong nostalgic content in a pastoral setting, and at one point what he says applies not only to baseball poetry but to the making of poems in general: ". . . we rely on our active imaginations to carry us out of the past into a creative present. We become what we say we will become, the central figures in our own myths, not merely re-living a past but creating a present in response to that past."

Football poems, according to Johnson, generate nostalgia and memories too, "but more often than not these memories are painful." Another quote from the chapter:

Football, like war, compels us to purge our minds of the brutality we have suffered as well as inflicted on others, so that we might convince our sons, whom we entrust to demonic surrogates [coaches], to re-enact our sacrifice. the grim reaper takes his place as the 12th man in virtually every huddle, and, to paraphrase James Dickey, it's a wonder any of us survive football..

For Johnson, basketball poems emphasize " 'the zone,' rising above physical or sociological limitations-transcendence." And from the same paragraph: ". . . writers of basketball poems tend to focus upon what remains rather than what has vanished or worn away, either by simply resolving to accept their diminished abilities or celebrating idealized versions of themselves which are enhanced by basketball's potential for intimacy."

There's also a chapter on sports poetry by women, in which Johnson maintains that female poets tend to emphasize community and a celebration of the body. He summarizes his ideas in the chapter's last paragraph:

. . . every woman quoted in this chapter, [provides] evidence necessary to prove that women don't kick, run, throw or write 'funny.' Their performance on the field or on the page needs no parenthetical qualifications or asterisk. The games in both instances are different from men's games, but both can boast of participants who have resisted marginalization, transformed perceptions and expectations, and demanded that they be seen as complete human beings.

Anyone who has read sports poems by such poets as Marianne Moore, Maxine Kumin, Grace Butcher, and Diane Ackerman knows that Johnson's assessment is accurate.

In his last chapter Johnson lists several main types of sports poems. Actually, with some fine-tuning, his list can account for a substantial chunk of the world's poetry, past and present, whatever its subject matter. The "memory poem, often about a childhood or adolescent experience on the court or playing field," reminds one of "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, and Wordsworth's childhood poems. The "action poem, one which attempts to capture the mood and movement in a game or particular play," reminds one of "Birches" by Robert Frost, and "The Dance" by William Carlos Williams. And the "celebratory poem, an effort to preserve for posterity the exploits of an heroic player or team," reminds one of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" by Walt Whitman, and so many poems that celebrate great people and their accomplishments.

Yet another type of poem Johnson deals with earlier in the book, in the baseball chapter, is the one about fathers and sons playing catch. This archetypal theme no doubt reaches back eons, and it can be found in countless poems and other writings, from Shakespeare's "Full fathom five thy father lies . . ." to the present day.

Johnson also discusses the reflexive nature of sports poems-their tendency to be not only about sport but simultaneously about other things. For example, a poem about tennis may be about a relationship or a marriage. Of course, all poetry-all art-tends to be reflexive. We are the quintessential reflexive animal. Anything we encounter or think about-a landscape, walking down a road, flying a kite, kicking a field goal-can be symbolic or metaphorical.

What I especially appreciate about Johnson's observations on sports poetry is that they make good sense in specific ways for the sub-genre itself, but also that they can be applied in a broader and deeper way to themes, ideas, and proclivities that go to the heart of human nature itself. Darwin was right: "[we] delight in competition." And Stanley Kunitz had a point when he said that "the best poems are body poems."

As Johnson's book convincingly demonstrates, the ancient and abiding agon underlying athletic competition, which has been dramatized and celebrated in hundreds of good and great sports poems, contains elements that are fundamental to our humanness

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