HAUS FÜR POESIE

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries in particular unearthed sport as a theme with all its private and socio-political implications. Most notably, cinema produced canonical masterpieces revolving around the fates of athletes: the encounters between “Fast Eddie” Felson and “Minnesota Fats” at the pool tables of Iowa (The Hustler 1961), the failed boxer and dockworker Terry Malloy (On the Waterfront 1954) in his irreversible descent above the rooftops from Hoboken to Palookaville, or the out-of-shape middleweight world champion Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull 1980), who begins dancing to the sound of a kettledrum in front of a mirror in a nightclub’s dressing room, are all unforgettable.

Private streaming platforms also frequently focus on sports: from the successful mini-series The Queen’s Gambit about the fictive chess genius Elizabeth “Beth” Harmon to the 10-part documentary The Last Dance, which traces the Chicago Bulls’ triumphant march to their sixth NBA title in eight years under the aegis of Michael Jordan and is in no way inferior to Shakespearean tragedies with regards to emotional impact.

Naturally, contemporary literature also has a long tradition of engaging with sports. Certain writers are practically inextricable from certain sports: John Updike, for example, is linked with golf, Marianne Moore—an ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fan—with baseball. In her poem, “Baseball and Writing,” she suggests: “Writing is exciting / and baseball is like writing. / You can never tell with either / how it will go / or what you will do.”

Such and other comparisons lie at hand partly because sports, like meter in poetry, dictate rules that must be followed. Robert Frost, for instance, polemically likened writing free verse with playing tennis without a net. The poet Natalie Diaz, who played professional basketball for a long time, writes, “The intense physicality of both basketball and poetry has at times made me ecstatic.” For her, the sport even takes on a spiritual dimension—“we grew up knowing that there is no difference between a basketball court and church”—and existential weight: “On the court is the one place we will never be hungry—that net is an emptiness we can fill up all day long” (from the poem: “Top Ten Reasons Why Indians Are Good At Basketball”).

The penchant of some writers for sports is little known and sometimes contradicts the stereotype the literary community has made of them. Samuel Beckett, for instance, played first-class cricket and is the only Nobel Prize winner in the Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack, the “Bible” of cricket. Walt Whitman, like Marianne Moore later, became fond of baseball (“base-ball is our game: the American game”) and of sports in general: “We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people.” Bertolt Brecht’s love of sports (especially boxing) was that of layman but in 1928, he confessed during a six-day race: “I’m for sport, as long as it remains so, because, it is risky (unhealthy), uncultured (therefore socially not useful), and an end in itself.”

Sports continues to captivate literature and poetry in part because they create their own specialized language, and unite, as if by chance, a number of themes: belonging, classism, racism, gender equality, and the deceptive allure of physical optimization (which even goes so far as to include illicit enhancements, such as doping with animal blood derivatives). Sports have also been instrumentalized time and again as a tool of propaganda in the service of totalitarian regimes, Leni Riefenstahl’s fascist work of art Olympia being but the most famous example.

On this day, all facets of sports will be illuminated—in numerous poetry talks and in a grand finale reading with nine poets, who all dedicate themselves to the topic in their own way. But it’s not just about boxing, baseball, basketball, climbing, cricket, soccer, ski jumping, or tennis—it’s about our contemporary world, with all its contradictions, revealed through this other “athletic” world.

The event will be held in English. German translations of the poems will be screened.
Kindly supported by: NORLA Norwegian Literature Abroad, Rumänisches Kulturinstitut, Sportmuseum Berlin, Traduki.

The event takes place at Kleines Parkett at the Berlin Academy of Arts.
Those who have purchased a combo ticket for the afternoon can buy a discounted ticket for the evening event here: Kombi-Ticket