Maybe your students stayed up late to watch the Chiefs and 9ers battle it out in Las Vegas. Maybe you’re a bit under the weather as well: one-too-many ham and cheese sliders. Or hey, maybe it’s just a Monday in early February. You need a little something to ease you into the week.
Poetry is always the answer.
One of my student-athletes once wrote on his final exam: Life is hard enough as it is. Why did people invent poetry and make it even harder?
Duly noted.
I told him later in a conference that thing that all teachers say: you just haven’t met the right poem yet. He was not convinced.
And yet…
Sports can be the immersive, meditative theater where poetry is born. Read Wanda Coleman’s meditation on basketball and tell me any different. Or Kobe Bryant’s “Dear Basketball” .
Yes, it seems like everything we read in this class is about mutability and death. But what if I told you there were beautiful, sweeping, wonderful poems about sports … and mutability and death?
Here’s my short list for you to use this Monday for a quick write on the rush and the lure, the cheers and the jeers, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat…
And two more collections about baseball that your students might like:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/aisle-228-sandra-marchetti/19241017?ean=9781622889556
https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813198880/pretend-the-ball-is-named-jim-crow/