Introduction to poetry.
Smith, Ron
In 1950, Poetry magazine's new Editor was asked by a Time
reporter what his editorial policy would be. Karl Shapiro, stunned
("horrified," according to the magazine's current
Editor), said he'd "never thought of a literary magazine
having a policy." Shapiro thought his job was simply to choose the
best poems sent to him. Period.
Of course Aethlon, founded in 1983 as Arete, is not the venerable
Poetry mag, founded in 1912 and home to, among many great poems, T.S.
Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
"Prufrock" would never make it into Aethlon--unless that
ball J. Alfred yearned to roll toward some overwhelming question could
be construed as a bowling ball. We have a policy.
The poems that appear in Aethlon typically have both mimetic value
and intrinsic worth: they describe sports moments or dramatize sports
action as well as expressing formal skill and verbal ingenuity. The
selection made here is drawn from, by my count, a pool of 447 poems
published for the most part by my predecessors, Bob Hamblin and Don
Johnson. Aethlon XXVII: 2 was my first issue as poetry editor.
Besides presenting "the best words in the best order"
(Coleridge's definition of poetry), an anthology of this sort
should strive to represent as many sports as possible. Here we have
skating, skiing, boxing, swimming, fishing, hunting, basketball, pole
vaulting, running, horseback riding, soccer, cricket, football,
racquetball, golf, bowling and even curling. And, yes, we have baseball,
the once and future great American pastime whose suitability for poetry
seems endless.
In trying to represent as many sports and poets as possible,
I've tried to minimize nostalgia and hero-worship and pieces that
attempt to fly on one striking image or a single stanza of fresh
language. I've preferred the more or less fully realized poem, a
unified work of art (however artfully ragged) with a beginning, middle,
and end. Regretfully, I've had to exclude long poems, such as Jim
Harms's fine "Sandy Koufax," and some delightful poetic
sequences, in particular those by Thomas Reynolds and Linda Kittell. I
hope readers will seek them out in earlier issues.
Rereading the poems here, I see that the selection has achieved a
remarkable balance of positive and negative: the joy of playing with the
pain of losing, the energies of youth with the wisdom of age, the mostly
pastoral with the occasionally gritty urban.
This is a volume primarily for teachers and students. Those
searching for influences might consider matching, say, David Allan
Evans's "The Pole Vaulter" with Robert Frost's
"Birches" or Joseph Bathanti's "Drought" with
William Matthews's "The Hummer" or (to stretch a bit)
Dave Smith's "Vacant Lot" with James Wright's
"Autumn Comes to Martin's Ferry, Ohio." Predominant
"external" forms here are variations of what is unsatisfyingly
called free verse, but there are a number of traditional forms, which
could yield a unit on the sonnet (see the poems by Peckham, Mitchell,
Meyer, Bluestone, Junkins) and the sestina (Annucci and Cone). A unit on
contrasting healthy with unhealthy competition might deal with
Davis's "Indiana Love Song" and Evans's "Barry
Edwards." Solidarity is often celebrated (and interrogated), but so
is the Wordsworthian solitary, especially in the fishing poems. Aethlon
has published a multitude of poems about fathers imparting life-lessons
through sport to their sons--and, increasingly, fathers to their
daughters, and mothers to all their children. Bathanis's "The
Deer in Barns," Bathanti's "Drought," and
Ritterbusch's "Sixth Grade Buckets" are moving examples
of this theme.
The voices here might not sing to poor Prufrock, Dear Reader, but
they will sing to us. Let us go then ...
Ron Smith
Poetry Editor
4 December 2013
