A Note on Sports Poetry
Regardless of one’s particular interest in sports, the elements and associations of American sports are undoubtedly cultural staples—perhaps even the most uniting factors amid such a culturally complex nation; images of baseball stands full of fans donning hot dogs and popcorn, football stadiums brimming with brightly-painted faces and adolescent pastimes centered around schools’ winning teams will appeal to most Americans. Such palpable images make for natural, instinctual poeticism, a trait harnessed through the unofficial genre of sports poetry.
Perhaps the most famous example of a sports poem is 19th-century poet Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” a ballad of a lackluster fictional baseball team and their most valuable player, Casey. The poem is a more obvious example of the “American sports poem,” depicting a now-trite trope, the underdog team, as well as star players and small towns; the fictional setting, Mudville, is nondescript enough that real towns from California to Massachusetts have claimed to be Thayer’s primary inspirations.
In recent years, poets have relied less on genuine spectacle in American sports culture, a facet still new to Thayer in the late-1800s, opting instead to subvert those tropes or channel their sweeping cultural associations into highly digestible personal images. Sasha Debevec-McKenney writes in “YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A PRISON!”: “Sometimes you have steady hands and French braids. / Sometimes you slide too hard into second on purpose. / It feels as good to get the bloody knee as it does to kick yourself in the shin. / You wait for the bottom of the ninth to lay your blanket out in the sun. / Admit it, Sasha, the sun helps.”
True to the modern sports-poetics lens, Debevec-McKeney utilizes familiar childhood images to reconcile adult anxieties. She snarks to herself, “the sun helps,” a sentiment shared by many adults so far-removed from the routines of sun-baked Little League practices and precious recess hours.
Another example from Kate Rushen, “Venus & Serena Play Doubles On Center Court,” more blatantly tackles issues of race and class: “I settle in to enjoy the match. / What is the commentator saying? He thinks it’s important / to describe their opponents to us: one is “dark,” / the other “blonde.” He just can’t bring himself to say: // Venus & Serena. Look at these two Classy Sisters: / Serious. Strategic. Black. Pounding History.”
Rushen, like the aforementioned Debevec-McKenney, grapples with modern issues through the timeless nature of sports culture, though her commentary relies less on hazy adolescent images and more on the growing development of sports celebrity, exacerbated by increased opportunities for women and people of color to make names for themselves in the chaotic sports landscape. Venus and Serena Williams are some of the most recognizable names in sports right now; their namesakes alone are enough to garner attention to the poem, which then twists immediate reactions into sobering reminders of the ongoing issues in the field in which the sisters dominate.
A final example, “Love Game” by spoken-word poet Angelo Geter, reads: “Love is the only competition worth living and dying for / So we run suicides / Cause sometimes you have to kill the person you are / In order to birth the lover you’re meant to become.” This poem is more mawkish than the previous two, relating through its eleven stanzas images associated with televised sports, recreational practices and Olympic games to the chaotic ordeal of falling in and maintaining love. Though its themes are perhaps less socially crucial, its associations serve as another indicator of how deeply relatable sports imagery can be, even to the more inattentive members of a sports-dominated society.
Though sports poems often go overlooked given the breadth available poetry, its imagery is ripe with specificity and thus immense potential; the genre is certainly an unsung staple of American poetry.