Friday night lights: high school football players “gallop terribly” against each other, both the arty, abstract version (or is it just a bad photo?) and plain old family album realism.
You can find James Wright’s poem at poetryfoundation.org:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177228
I’ll try to make this the last Wright poem for a long while. But it is now officially autumn, and I did see part of a high school game last Friday. Moreover, I grew up in or near towns like Martins Ferry on the Ohio River—often as not, steel and coal towns.
An obvious question arises: can serious art center on football or other sports?
Before you offer your final answer, the answer you must stand by for the rest of your life, you might want to watch the documentary film, Go, Tigers, which centers on another Ohio team, the Massillon High Tigers of 1999. Massillon’s is a legendary program, like those in Pennsylvania or Odessa, Texas. I think Go, Tigers succeeds in the way any serious work about sports must succeed: it makes itself about more than the sport itself—sport as metaphor, sport as vehicle, sport as revelation of character, sport as sociology, politics, even art. Maybe I could argue that this film and this poem are also about England, India, and China--anywhere the children of industrial centers, large or small, try to find their way.
If you hate organized sports, especially at the high school level, Go, Tigers should both challenge and confirm your thinking. So too might “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” and it’s a lot shorter and easier to get to.
* * * *
Posts
