MyTabstart > Favorites Directory > Poetry > Short Basketball Poems
Take a look at TabStart's page that presents selected short basketball poems from a number of authors, including John Updike, B.H. Fairchild, and Louis Jenkins. The brilliant verse featured in the resources below celebrates the graceful beauty of basketball, itself, but more significantly perhaps the poetry here uses basketball as a way to demonstrate the complexities of the people playing and watching the game. Also provided here are a curated collection of poems that explore a variety of sports in addition to basketball.
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"Old Men Playing Basketball" - a Poem by B.H. Fairchild - The Poetry Foundation* presents B.H. Fairchild's "Old Men Playing Basketball" from her 1998 collection The Art of the Lathe. The narrator watches the old men playing basketball and remarks "Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout / at their backs." This poem's opening stanzas offer splendid imagery that basketball lovers will appreciate.
*TabStart favorite
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"Basketball" - a Prose Poem by Louis Jenkins - Providence College presents Louis Jenkins' "Basketball" from his 1987 collection, An Almost Human Gesture. Also included here is commentary on the poem from Jenkins himself in which he talks about the genesis and development of this poem over the years. Jenkins also discusses his feelings about the prose poem format and its advantages.
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"The Ex-Basketball Player" - a Poem by John Updike - The Auburn University website presents "Ex-Basketball Player" by John Updike. This page is in the form of a classroom poetry quiz, and it even poses a few questions asking the reader to consider various aspects of the work.
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"The Vietnam Vet Looks for His Son at Basketball Camp" - by Robert A. Fink - The Texas Tech University Press offers a review of the poetry collection The Tongues of Men and Angels, and it includes an excerpt from the poem "The Vietnam Vet Looks for His Son at Summer Basketball Camp" by Robert A. Fink.
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Sports Poems from the Academy of American Poets - The Academy of American Poets* offers a lovely essay that discusses poetry about sports, and it includes a list of about twenty sports-related poems by a number of writers such as Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, and Donald Hall.
*TabStart favorite
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Collection of Sports Poems - This page from the Yale University website presents several sports-related poems by writers such as Gregory Corso, Robert Pinksy, and Stephan Dunn.
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Essay on Sports in Poetry - This essay that discusses sports in poetry features excerpts from several poems including "Diver" by Robert Francis, "Mont Blanc" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and "For E. McC" by Ezra Pound.