Beyond the Imagery of Sports

After a week's hiatus we returned to Christ UMC on February 7 to consider poems by Robert Pinsky and Jessica Greenbaum that contained central images of baseball and basketball.

Pinsky's multifaceted piece hinged on the relationship of three elements: the contrast between the Village and the City, a metaphoric baseball game used to encourage boys in learning Hebrew verses, and the fate of the "foolish, stupid boy" in that group, who may have learned more than the others.

In "Next Door" we were intrigued by "the space between the reader and the page" and what we inferred about the three people in the poem, especially Robbie Gross and the narrator. Our discussion of what may have befallen Robbie ("..his last June..") underscores the point about the reader's right to interpret: if Jessica Greenbaum had wanted there to be no ambiguity about that issue, she would have worded that line differently--and that would have made it less of a poem.

This Thursday, February 13, weather permitting, we will conclude last week's agenda with poems by Ellen and Martha, and one other. This may leave us time for only one of the two poems for Session #4. "Lot's Wife" contains some of the motifs of Pinsky's poem; Kathleen Graber's "The Drunkenness of Noah" seems to me the more complex of the two.