Kurt Vonnegut encouraged people to write a very short rhyming poem, work on it with care, and then throw it away without showing anyone. I love this. Read the whole story here—totally worth it.
Why do I keep using baseball photographs as the featured images for these posts? For one reason, baseball season just started, as it does every April. I often think about something I heard once—how in The Waste Land T. S. Eliot said “April is the cruelest month” because that’s when baseball season starts. Must have been an Orioles fan.
Another thing is that there are always a million stories interweaving in sports, a metanarrative that is difficult to express or even truly wrap our heads around. There’s something ineffable about it, but it’s still accessible. We are conditioned to implicitly understand sports in a way that we aren’t with poetry.
But the biggest reason is that sometimes in baseball, and sports generally, a body makes a move that is so glorious—simultaneously elegant and impossible—that it transcends sports and becomes something else … and then it is over. That move, wherever it happens—in sports, art, literature—transports the player, the viewer, the writer, the reader, into some kind of Platonic world of forms where the medium doesn’t matter. It’s a fleeting glimpse of greatness. The feat is the message and the medium.
With that in mind, today I challenge you to find time this weekend to write a short, rhyming poem that is as glorious as that catch, and then just throw it away.