I loved the student reporting on Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s “Oh Shoot” sessions because I love poetry and basketball. Poetry doesn’t have to be about basketball, of course, yet there is a poetry to basketball. It certainly helps if you are tall and rangy, like Caleb Wilson, but the game rewards toughness, quickness, and intelligence.
The best players are not always the biggest, strongest, fastest, or quickest. Instead, excellence might arise from gracefulness, generousness, or competitiveness (but not in the psychopathic way of other sports).
Basketball players and poets are shaped by their efforts out of the public eye, spending countless hours grinding and hustling, whether on the court or on the page. Both creative endeavors require the mastery of specialized skills and terminology, yet the most exceptional practitioners also challenge the rules. Both the volta and crossover dribble are about a change of direction. A game or poem can turn on a seemingly innocent move, like a back screen or line break, and the best plays and pieces are often the result of a deftness so subtle it can leave you breathless.
One might correctly speak of devotees to basketball and poetry because of their religious-like following and, more deeply, an abiding sense of spirituality to these arts. I resonate with what Yahya Frederickson, a Muslim American poet, wrote about the “moments [that] keep me connected to a spirituality, a higher power, a guiding energy of the universe to which we should listen.”
Watching and listening to the action on a court or during a reading, I intuited “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused” (Wordsworth) that is churning inside a pick and roll, a slant rhyme, a no-look pass, or an alliterative simile. We remember revelatory poems like we remember big shots; both make us stop and marvel, and afterward we are never the same again. And so: amen.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
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