Laura Kolbe: “Before I became a poet and before I became a doctor, I became an athlete. Which wasn’t so very different than either of those—waking at four in the morning to train for track-cycling ‘nationals’ at the local velodrome, or later waking for the university cycling team and marathon team, I entered into days of laps and circles. ‘Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise,’ as Elizabeth Bishop had it. Meanwhile, I was having all the same moods and experiences as any other young person, and I remember how strange and necessary it felt to engraft those feelings onto form itself, trying to distill them into pure power of the legs. This was maybe my first awakening to poetry: seeing how life could be transmuted into something other than itself, be it racing or language, and feeling the shock of accomplishing that change.”
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley: “I am an elite level powerlifter (meaning top 1% of all competitors in the United States). Powerlifting consists of the bench press, squat, and deadlift. I love this sport because it’s you against yourself. Your opponent is an inanimate piece of metal, just as the poet’s opponent is perhaps—forgive the cliché—either the blank page or themselves, and certainly not other poets: both forge a strong community of fellowship around their craft.” (web)
A.M. Juster: “I was a three-sport letterman in high school (albeit a tiny high school) and was recruited by Yale to play soccer, where after three weeks I gave up the sport for the great books program and other distractions of college. Although my basketball letter was a charity letter, in my early 40s I did shoot for one minute at the halftime of a Celtics-Cavaliers game as part of a five-man team that defeated 32 other teams in the Red Auerbach Charity Shootout.” (web)
A.M. Juster is the guest on Rattlecast #62! Click here to watch …
Alex Hoffman-Ellis: “I have been playing professional football both in the U.S. (St. Louis Rams, San Francisco 49ers) and in Canada (B.C. Lions, Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Edmonton Eskimos) since 2012. I started playing football at the age of seventeen, earned a full scholarship at nineteen to Washington State University, where I started for three years. While playing this physically and mentally unforgiving game, I fight the culture associated with football daily. Football culture has always been of a ‘macho’ nature—suppress your sensitivities, endure as much physical pain as you can while staying on the field at any and all costs, eat, sleep and shit meatheadedness, pump iron and party in your spare time, sleep with as many women as possible (this is not limited to single players, either), etc. This is a sport where teams have chaplains, there’s regular, unabashed advertising for armed forces recruitment, and sexual assault offenders deserve second chances over those who protest what the national anthem represents (or doesn’t) to them. It’s not the forum you’d expect to find a free-spirited Jewish dude raised by liberal parents from L.A. But nonetheless, here I am, in all my sensitive, kind, laid back, highly opinionated, jewelry making, globetrotting, spearfishing, nature photographing, book reading, poetry writing, unapologetic glory.” (web)
Tony Gloeggler: “Is a ballplayer an athlete? My identity as a kid was being the best baseball player in the neighborhood. It was the one place I connected with my dad playing catch after dinner, him in a crouch and me with a Juan Marichael wind-up or hands on my knees at third base and him trying to hit one through me. The local hoods gave me a free pass because they played in the same leagues as me, and they knew I was better than them and respected it. I still hate running and exercising and when I went for my high school try out, the blue-eyed blonde senior captain laughed at me when I couldn’t figure out a four count jumping jack and my arms started shaking at my fifth push-up, but in my first intra-squad game, I threw one behind his head, stared him down, then struck out the side on nine pitches and was the only freshman to make the team. Also real good in schoolyard basketball and football, and I played all kinds of softball until I was 50. I think my poetry is affected by it in the sense that I work at it with the same kind of focus, and that time I no hit the rich kids school in the eighth grade CYO Cham-pionship game still means more to me than the time I got a poem in the New York Times. And even though I don’t do shit now, I’ll always feel more like a ball player than a poet or artist.” (web)
Daniel Gleason: “I started playing soccer at age eighteen when my family moved back to Tennessee from the Philippines, and ever since I have been smitten with sports. In college, I played goalkeeper and coached the team’s ’keepers after a chest surgery sidelined me. When I taught high school English, I coached the school’s soccer teams for eight years. Now I coach my six-year-old son’s team, and I have taken up a new sport, as well: boxing. For the last two years I have trained and sparred, and I have started doing some coaching, too. The discipline and creativity required for sports runs parallel with writing, and boxing in particular has so much in common with writing. I like to joke that I can’t tell the difference between them, that I literally don’t know if I’m boxing or writing.” (web)
Michael Estabrook: “I’ve pursued athletics my whole life from being on the swim team in college and taking kung fu at age 60. Never a professional athlete, but in one form or another, sports have always been an integral part of who I am: swimming, gymnastics, weightlifting, baseball, karate, Kung fu, tai chi, even yoga! Setting physical goals, and working hard to attain them, is critical to me feeling good about myself. In particular, feeling stronger produces greater energy and confidence, not only in athletics but in life in general, including writing poetry.”
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