When I was eight, my parents sent me to basketball camp, and that One Year, I was good at it. Not prodigy good, but As Good as the other kids my age. So my parents planted a basketball hoop next to the end of the driveway. They bought me a ball. My uncle was connected to The Celtics, so I got to go see two games up close with my friends. Like, Bird/McHale/Parrish/Ainge/Johnson era Celtics. I realized I was never going to grow into one of these giants, so I lost my heart for the game. I still played HORSE with my friends, and shot free throws, and had the occasional half-court matches that were literal streetball. I moved on to tennis, which I became Good Enough in. In reading Clint Smith's Counting Descent, I realized how many collections I've been reading this year contain basketball poems. The previous generation of poets that I read seemed more focused on baseball, and I think I'll get to that discrepancy in future posts. But basketball comes up so often, and in such different ways, that I decided I should devote a post to examining basketball poems. Not providing an essay of why *I* think basketball poems are important, but giving a series of questions and discussion prompts about when basketball appears and why. Again, not to provide answers but to get readers talking. I've chosen the following poems to focus on: Clint Smith: Full Court Press Hanif Abdurraqib: All The White Boys On The East Side Loved Larry Bird Sherman Alexie: Defending Walt Whitman Jon Sands: The Show John Murillo: Practicing Fade-Aways Janae Johnson: My Court 1. What do you know about basketball? I don't need to know the statistics you know. Do you know statistics? Do you watch the game on television? Do you play it? Did you used to play it? Why did you stop playing or watching? What basketball terms do you know? Do you have a favorite player? If you played, is there a move or position you were known for? There is no shame if you have no basketball experience. This is simply to remind yourself of your own knowledge before we go further.
2. Write a poem about your experience with basketball. It is perfectly acceptable for your experience to be "I have never cared about basketball, and don't want to think about it." 3. How is basketball important to the story in Clint Smith's "Full-Court Press"? Not just in general, but in the language he uses in the first two stanzas of Part 2, where the first stanza is a group of kids playing basketball, and the second is a group of kids sitting around after basketball. 4. Describe an experience where you were in a group of people whose primary relation is a game, sport, hobby, or fandom. Is the language different from your usual day-to-day vernacular? 5. In Hanif Abdurraqib's "All The White Boys On The East Side Loved Larry Bird", he talks about being referred to by a racial slur as a small price to pay/for my name in the newspaper. Discuss a time where someone boosted your signal but used dehumanizing language to do it. How did you feel and how did you react? Were your feelings and your actions at odds? Have you ever used language that you later realized was dehumanizing or insulting when your goal was not to hurt someone? 6. In Abdurraqib's poem he opens with how Larry Bird put his finger up to celebrate before the 3 even went in. Talk about a time when you celebrated prematurely. Did it work out for you? 7. In Smith's poem, a group of people come to his neighborhood and bring hate speech that they intend as both playful and hurtful. In Abdurraqib's he goes to someone else's neighborhood/school and they throw the same hate speech but with no playful intent. Which hurts you more: when someone brings hate to a place where you usually feel in control? or when you are vulnerable in a place you have no allegiance to? 8. How has hate manifested itself in an activity you love? Has has it changed your relation to the activity? Are you more protective of it? Less interested in it? Do you feel the need to love the activity but detach yourself from the other people involved? 9. In Sherman Alexie's "Defending Walt Whitman", he plays a fictional game of basketball with a famous poet. Bring a famous historical or fictional character into something you feel passionate about. It should not be a person already associated with the activity. So, you can't play basketball with Larry Bird but you could play Chess or Call Of Duty with him. You can't race against Florence Griffith-Joyner, but you can play Scrabble with her or work together to solve a puzzle. 10. Alexie talks about the high number of military people involved in the basketball games on The Reservation. Is there a demographic crossover in the activity that you love that isn't expected? Maybe there are a lot of comic book fans on your hockey team? A lot of divorcees and widows in your poetry slam community? Don't examine Why the circles in the Venn Diagram overlap, just celebrate all the people who show up in the middle. 11. Alexie's poems includes images of the players and what they look like both on and off the court, while Abdurraqib's focuses more on the terminology of the court, and the aftermath of the games. When it comes to an activity you're passionate about, what's more important: the paradigm of the activity or the people who participate in it? 12. In all three of the poems so far, personal culture has intersected with the culture of basketball. We all have some cultural identity that affects the way people see us: race, gender, ethnicity, age, religion, sexual orientation, different physical abilities, etc. Instead of just writing about how you think people see you and the activity you are passionate about, ask a dozen or so people you know, but you do not know through your passion/activity, to describe the type of person who participates in your passion/activity. How do their imaginings of the type of person who likes your activity differ from the way you see yourself? 13. In Jon Sands' "The Show" a group of sixth graders taunts him and his friend for being old people playing a young person's sport. Has someone else ever made you feel that you were too young or too old to love what you love? Have you ever been the person either mocking someone for not being age appropriate, or think you were kindly dispensing wisdom to someone that you believed was not age appropriate to their activity? If you've been both, have a conversation across those two times. 14. In Sands' poem, he was older being taunted by a younger generation. In Smith's, a group of older kids invite him to play. Talk about a positive experience you've had when someone from a different generation either invited you into their activity or activity-based clique or when they complimented your skills in a way that made you feel that you were transcending generations. 15. In Smith, Abdurraqib, and Sands's poems, the person playing has been driven to self-examination by an outside force. Forget those people. Why do you continue to do what you love? 16. In John Murillo's "Practicing Fade-Aways", he discusses both the times he is alone practicing basketball, and the time he is playing with others. When you were invested in your passion (which might be now, but might be in the past), did you practice so that you could look better when you participated in the activity, or was the practice what you loved but you did the activity to justify the time you spent practicing? Do you love the work or the performance? (Both is an acceptable answer, provided you can prove it's true.) 17. In the opening stanza of Murillo's poem, he describes a court that's been well-used and mostly worn away. Do you tend to find yourself attracted to an activity that's new or has recently experienced a resurgence, or do you like something that's not currently en vogue or at its peak relevance? 18. In the third stanza of Murillo's poem, a player he admired is stabbed to death. Has someone you were close to ever disappeared from the community built around your activity? It doesn't have to be tragic (though that's valid). Maybe they just got tired of it before you did. Or maybe they were so skilled that they moved up to a level you can't/couldn't achieve. How did their absence change the way you felt about the activity? 19. Janae Johnson's poem deals with the erasure of gender in basketball. As he never heard of Cheryl/just Reggie refers to two for the most famous, Hall Of Fame players in the game, Reggie and Cheryl Miller. There is a massive blind spot in fandom when it comes to gendered sports. Apart from the Olympics, womens' sports are rarely televised or commemorated in trading cards or video games. Write about a gender experience within your passion. Maybe it's an inspirational story, maybe it's about a time you messed up and didn't give proper respect. Go somewhere unexpected (as long as it's not problematic). 20. Gloryhounds are the worst part of team sports/activities. Even when they're talented, watching one person dominate a field is only fun for so long. What's the worst gloryhounding you've ever experienced. 21. All of these poems seem focused on the narrator's passion for the sport that they are playing in. Only Johnson and Abdurraqib's draw the larger world's mythology of the game into their poems (Larry Bird at the beginning and end of Abdurraqib's poem, the Millers in Johnson's). Write about an important moment in the activity that you love that doesn't involve yourself or someone you know personally. 22. Ok, now take the incident from Prompt #21 and draw it into your sphere of experience, either as metaphor, allegory, or parallel to your own involvement. 23. Write about the day you stopped being actively involved in this activity you loved. If it hasn't happened yet, imagine what it will take to convince you it's time to move on.
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Ariel Baker-Gibbs ruminates on moving, maps, and mountains after reading Sherman Alexie's What I've Stole, What I've Earned, which she has rated "top notch". Interaction With Sherman Alexie's What I've Stolen, What I've Earned
Ariel Baker-Gibbs i like packing more than unpacking. i like packing away things in boxes because everything fits together and i can look at all of it at once, even when it doesn’t make sense, like why would the head scratcher nestle so perfectly on top of a scarf that’s next to a bag of q-tips that are on top of books on top of a map. the map which was given to me by my mother’s childhood friend, whose husband died of a heart attack two days ago on the island. and the map is of the island. as a child i had gone on his fishing boat across the lines that i can see on the map, of depth and of height. the island is a mountain in the water, and the island is still a mountain. and we can see the lines as they appear on the cliffs and mountains of the island. we can see how real they are, how true. the island is still unresolved treaty land. this is also on a map. up here, the fishing town where i was born, bearing the name of the K’ómoks band, holding the round letters of Comox. the round circles of topography, the vertical conclusion of a mountain into thin air. this is how we do and how we claim. we say nobody knows who it belongs to, we just know who went there before and we know who goes there now. we draw it up, we write it down. we prevaricate. it feels like it belongs to us. it belongs by not belonging. it does not belong to us but we paid money for it. what it is worth to be in a place. to be soothed by its beauty, that soothed so many. to be not from it, but to come to it, even from birth. to love it uneasily and helplessly. we eat fish from the strait and potatoes from the garden and everything tastes like earth’s butter. we sit there and look at the same silhouette of the mountains behind the mountains as has been there for years and years and they remain etched on our retinas long after it becomes dark. that line stays. In Sherman Alexie's What I've Stolen, What I've Earned he toys with an unusual form of sonnet. There is no rhyme scheme. There is only a loose concept of couplets. It's one justified blob of fourteen numbered ideas. I've tried to be strict with my own ideas of coupleting and making the foot adhere to my idea of what a sonnet foot should be. I'm still not in love with giant justified blob with numbers in it, and I might reformat it later, but here it adheres to Alexie's visual formatting. Sonnet With Forgotten Phone Numbers
Adam Stone 1. She says she says she says that she is losing what she says her memory was because of her damned she says cell phone. 2. It used to be I needed to remember all of these numbers. Everyone close and familiar was a seven digit she says nickname. If they moved away they became ten she says and easier to forget. Now everyone is a picture if I remember to take it, she says a ringtone if I remember how those work she says but most often I don't answer my phone anymore because I don't know she says who anyone is. 3. She says a lot of stupid shit. 4. But maybe she's right this time. 5. She says also that she misses landlines and rotaries both on the phone and the road. There's something so satisfying she says about circles How you never know when you're finished with something or when something is beginning. 6. She says she misses typewriters even though all the letters are on the keyboard of a computer that can remember things that even 1980s typewriters couldn't hold in their memory. 7.That's just it she says I don't want to trust some machine to remember how I felt while I was typing a letter. I want to see the paper. She says. I want to see where I dented the paper. She says I want to see the stories scars as they happen. She says I don't want to watch it happen on some screen and wait for it to print out later. 8. I say You would have made a lousy x-ray technician. 9. She says something she says I can't hear because she says newfangled phones are always breaking up. 10. She says this over a 1992 barely cordless phone where all the numbers have been fingered away. 11. She doesn't say fingered of course that's my word. She doesn't acknowledge the physically missing numbers on her phone. It's the numbers in her memories she's concerned with. 12. She says click click she says static she says something I can't hear because she's moved too far away from the base. 13. The call cuts out which she will surely blame my cellphone for though I will be using it to check my bank account while she will be slamming her phone with her fist and pressing the useless buttons on the base. 14. She will try and remember where she put the notebook with my phone number in it because she can't remember which button on her phone used to say Redial. |
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