Poets are word athletes, and the poems they make are word performances. Good poems are not static but dynamic—they dramatize the motions of life. For instance, we admire a “good move” in a game or in a poem. Larry Bird suddenly fakes out a defender, leaps in the air and lifts the ball off his fingertips toward the basket — swish. And a poem, near its end, suddenly “turns” and concludes with a powerful flourish. We appreciate both poet and athlete because we have witnessed a moment of grace.
Because poetry is so gestural arid physical, it is difficult to analyze. We can like or dislike a poem long before we “understand” it; this is because our response is only partly a matter of conscious thought. The great poet/scholar A.E. Housman illustrated this truth when he wrote:
Watch children listening to nursery rimes. They don’t listen passively; they listen physically as the lines are chanted. They respond not merely with their minds but with their bodies, and that is exactly the response these body poems are intended to elicit.
A poem is nothing if not physical. Stanley Burnshaw in his book The Seamless Web writes:
But words are also biology. Except for a handful of poets and scholars, nobody has taken time to consider the feeling of verbal sounds in the physical organism. Even today—despite all the public reciting of verse, the recordings, the classroom markings of prosody—the muscular sensation of words is virtually ignored by all but poets who know how much the body is engaged by a poem. (206)
“Poetry in motion” is a cliche often used to describe an athlete performing. The phrase aptly illustrates the fact that sports or any kind of graceful movement can be appropriate subject matter for poetry. In other words, sports have a built-in fluidity and encantatory quality that we naturally associate with poetry, and vice versa. (When I use the word “sports” in “sports poems,” I include, along with the usual definition of “games with rules,” the looser senses such as “an active pastime or recreation” and “to play and frolic.” If a poem works on the basis of some physical action—if that is what it is “about”—then it qualifies as a sports or body poem.)
The mature athlete in motion, like a good poem in motion, is (another cliche) a thing of beauty. We appreciate the lively precision of a dive by Greg Louganis or a vault by Mary Lou Retton. The performance becomes memorable in the same way that a poem’s lines stay with us long after we have heard them read or have read them ourselves. Seeing a perfect dive or vault over and over on instant replay is equivalent to repeating aloud the lines of a great poem.
