Dispatch from the Archives is a regular column about work previously published in Southwest Review. The magazine is the third-longest-running literary quarterly in the United States, and its archives date back to 1915. This edition looks at an essay from Amos Taub in volume 36, number 3.
Things poets tend to love: the moon, birds, horses, heartbreak, the phrase which is to say. Things poets tend to hate: football. During graduate school, I quickly learned a few important lessons on the dynamics of a poetry workshop. Bring poems with acceptable images of moons and birds and horses: Receive praise. Bring poems about football: Receive ambivalent comments about “not getting it.” Which is to say . . . poets tend to turn up their noses at sports.
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between poetry and sports recently. My own writing practice is informed by a running schedule, and my worldview is inextricably tied to team dynamics, hometown fandom, coming of age on a playing field, There is a deep history of athletic influence on poetry (think: Homer and the funeral games in the Iliad; think: Pindar’s epinician odes), and there are plenty of contemporary poets clearly looking to sport as muse—Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, Adrian Matejka. Our very own editor in chief, Greg Brownderville, is a poet and a college-sports fanatic, and here at Southwest Review, we’re invested in creative work that rewrites poetic norms, that vibrates with life. And what’s more lively than two bodies, colliding, caught in the pursuit of victory?
I took to the archives searching for creative work inspired by sports. I assumed there would be some short story about baseball or marathon running or swimming—and I’m sure it exists in Southwest Review’s history. But I did not dig up a story or a poem about sports; I found something better.
Amos Taub’s 1951 essay, “Poetry on the Sports Page,” makes an argument about poetry’s influence on sports journalism and, in turn, poetry’s influence on the daily reading by “the common man.” It opens with a statement about the permanence of poetry and poetic language: “The Muse (the important one) is not dead.” Taub goes on to suggest that while true poetry has become unpopular and largely ignored (and I’m sorry to report that this hasn’t changed since the ’50s), the average person “manages to satisfy his craving for the subtle sweets of poetry” in the sports section. He writes, “Poetry rides rampant over the sports pages from Narragansett to Santa Anita; from the Yale Bowl to Kezar Stadium; from Fenway Park to the Los Angeles Coliseum. Not poetry through sufferance or extension of the term, but literally: rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and assonance, imagination and imagery; hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, and all the rest.”
Taub is adamant that sportswriters are unlike any other journalists. He writes, “Sports page laborers are not primarily recorders of events. . . . The sports writer’s job is to entertain the readers. The fact that the entertainment may not be on a par with a romantic narrative by Keats or an epic by John Milton has no bearing on the matter.” The sportswriter draws on poetic language because it is gripping, rhythmic, charged with energy. Taub pulls example after example from professional, collegiate, and even local youth sports coverage. A headline like “BRUISING BEARS BLAST BADGERS” or a lede like “It was a long afternoon for the favored Oklahoma Aggies—they were astounded and pounded by Kansas 55-14” hit the alliteration and rhyme in a way rarely seen in the economics section of the newspaper. My favorite moment in this essay is when Taub calls attention to verbs: “The glittering array of sports verbs is apparent on any well-operated sports page during the major seasons as teams topple, rout, trip, conquer, top, ax, biff, bowl over, bump, drop, dip, clip, cop wins from, dump, finish, fell, whip, scuttle, sink . . .” and the list goes on and on and on.
Taub’s essay is fun. It’s smart. And even if most of our contemporary sports news takes the form of video clips, this piece left me reimagining a relationship between sports and language. So who was this guy? I’d never seen his name before, though it turns out he appeared in Southwest Review two years prior for an essay on Navajo poetic translations, and his University of Arizona master’s thesis, “An Analysis of the Traditional Poetry of the Yaqui Indians,” was referenced in a few other papers. Other than that, his name is missing from any database. Further searching led me to his obituary—from summer 1951. This essay, this issue, must have already been sent to the printer in the same season Taub passed away, at age thirty-one.
It’s perhaps cliché, but I can’t help but recall A. E. Housman’s poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away / From fields where glory does not stay, / And early though the laurel grows / It withers quicker than the rose.” Taub finishes his own essay on a note of memorial and transcendence. He collages news headlines into an ending that reads as if it’s a found poem: Each great achievement becomes like “a museum piece,” each victory “another golden moment” of “fire and brilliance.”
I’ll be carrying this lyricism into the summer—specifically, to the FIFA World Cup, the most watched sporting event in the world. Dallas will be hosting nine matches (a tournament high), and our city will be flooded with fans from around the world. And yes, I’m excited for the fevered rivalries, the glittering superstars, the dramas on the pitch. But what I’m really craving? Those subtle sweets of poetry.
Hannah Smith is a poet from Dallas. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Quarterly West, and elsewhere.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
