[New-Poetry] The only football poem I know

[Michael Snider]

One of my favorite poets is Howard Nemerov — here are the last two sections
of his "Watching Footbal on TV":

VI

Passing and catching overcome the world,
The hard condition of the world, they do
Human intention honor in the world.
A football wants to wobble, that's its shape
And nature, and to make it spiral true
's a triumph in itself, to make it hit
The patterning receiver on the hands
The instant he looks back, well, that's to be
For the time being in a state of grace,
And move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.


VII

Each year brings rookies and makes veterans,
The have their dead by now, their wounded as well,
They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame,
They have the stories of the tribe, the plays
And instant replays many times replayed.
But even fame will tire of its fame,
And immortality itself will fall asleep.
It's taken many years, but yet in time,
To old men crouched before the ikon's changes,
Changes become reminders, all the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.



I posted last year at my blog (
http://www.mikesnider.org/radio/formalblog/2008/02/03.html#a769) about this
poem and about TV and the Super Bowl, so I didn't have to type in what's
above. I just don't have it in me to type the rest, right after a three hour
band parctice, but I do love the poem.  And James Wright's, too.

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Anny Ballardini
<anny.ballardini at gmail.com>wrote:

> It's an exceptional poem.
>
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:24 PM, <JforJames at aol.com> wrote:
>
>>  I've posted this poem before on Super Bowl Sunday. The Boss is playing
>> at halftime, and he's a poet.
>> Kurt Warner won a Super Bowl for the St. Louis Rams. Know QBing for the
>> Arizona Cardinals. The St. Louis Cardinals were my team growing up. Some
>> kind of sentimental triangulation going on. James Wright remains a
>> foundational poet for me since I first really understood what contemporary
>> poetry was or could be when I read his _The Branch Will Not Break_...
>>
>> Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
>>
>> In the Shreve High football stadium,
>> I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
>> And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
>> And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
>> Dreaming of heroes.
>>
>> All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
>> Their women cluck like starved pullets,
>> Dying for love.
>>
>> Therefore,
>> Their sons grows suicidally beautiful
>> At the beginning of October,
>> And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
>>
>> --James Wright
>>
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>
>
> --
> Anny Ballardini
> http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
> http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
> http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
> I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
> star!
>
>
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