School started this week, and that means football season is starting too. College games will be kicking off soon. We already see the high school players in their pads and helmets practicing in the afternoons. They look hot. I remember high school football games in Minnesota. There were no threats of heat stroke, at least not for the fans. People wore thick coats and wrapped themselves in thick blankets on those chilly fall evenings.
Whatever the weather, football and its excitement and its symbolism occupy the minds of many fans starting now. In honor of that, here's one of my favorite poems to teach - note the lovely use of proper nouns, dear students!
I am someone who values the role of sports in the modern (male?) psyche and considers the public watching of sports as essential to (our) human nature. (Sure, it can go too far - 8 hours of television golf? Three games in a row?) But it thrills us to cheer for a winning team: we are therefore winners. It crushes us to watch our team lose: we feel like losers. I still remember being shocked at how much I cared when I saw the Oklahoma Sooner crush the Ags in Norman back in 93 0r 94. (I was in Norman, in a stadium full of arrogant Sooners with all their national titles and blood red jerseys!). My reaction literally game from my gut.
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
by James Wright
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 grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.
4 comments:
I'm glad Oliver (and Allyson) will have Jason to teach them about sports. It's sad how lost it all is on me. I mean, I see it, I cheer it, and yet ... I just can't care about it. Sad, sad.
I'm with you, Elizabeth. I don't care about it at all--except for the Olympics. I know, that's akin to blasphemy to say--especially in East Texas, but it's true.
Oh my. This poem is beautiful, but the last line sounds so violent.
The jury is still out on the subject of wrestling, which rivals football here. Last year when they had a "wrestling day" for grade school kids, I conveniently forgot to mention it to Truman. I think my issues are with the uniforms as much as the possibility of injury.
"suicidally beautiful" is the best description I've heard... well for a lot of things, but especially for the feeling you get from Texas high school football.
It's such good language. Maybe I'll start using that one to describe mildly pleasurable, everyday things to my friends: "These fries are suicidally beautiful".
I'm all about how to win friends and influence people.
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