🎾 Couples Doubles Tennis Lit Edition 📚
Poetry and tennis, apologies to Austin, and a tennis lesson served up as art...
Club Conversation 💬
Leaning into Literature 📚
Well, it was another full week and besides watching my son’s tournament in Fountain Valley, I only managed to fit in one lesson of my own. Hubby is still laid up, so no couples doubles for us yet!
But when you love tennis, you find a way to keep it in your life. This week, we’re reading about it.
On poetry and tennis 🎾
When poets are players ✍🏻
"I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." - Robert Frost
Did you know that poets including Philip Levine, Dave Smith, Galway Kinnell, have also been avid tennis players? It’s not terribly surprising, I guess, since tennis is such a mental sport.
My husband came across this fun blog post, written by poet Kate Daniels. At the time she was married to Geoff Macdonald, Vanderbilt’s longtime women’s tennis coach. Daniels and Macdonald have since divorced
Kinnell went so far as to write a poem called ”On the Tennis Court at Night” that begins:
“We step out on the green rectangle
in moonlight. The lines glow,
which for many have been the only lines
of justice.”
Kate Daniels was not, herself, a tennis player, but I enjoyed her writing about the parallels between the sport and the act of writing poetry:
“Both writing poetry and playing tennis – though one takes place in solitude, and the other in the presence of others, ranging from a single opponent to thousands of spectators – are profoundly solitary endeavors. Both require enormous reservoirs of personal discipline, years (decades!) of methodical practice and repetition, and robust abilities to endure alone-ness, to sit with failure and uncertainty, and to return to the same texts/matches again and again, re-imagining and revising. Both require, as well, the ability to read others psychologically, as well as to deal stringently with one’s own psyche.”
In an article he wrote for The New York Times, her ex-husband had this to say about poet Levine:
“On the way to the courts, we talked about tennis and poetry, two pursuits that are often labeled elitist. Phil’s attitude conveyed the opposite, that writing a poem or trying to play tennis well were deeply human endeavors, beautiful to work at because they were so hard to master.”
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart 💔
A searing essay on a wasted sports biography
A writing teacher of mine, Robert Morgan Fisher of UCLA Wordcommandos fame, found out about my love of tennis and insisted I read this essay by David Foster Wallace. Foster Wallace gave me words to illuminate and explain my general wincing at sports interviews and memoirs. But at the same time, Wallace handed me a deep sense of shame for failing to appreciate the heroism and art in the stories of our most astounding athletes.
(Apologies and respect for my neighbor Tracy Austin, but I’m sure she’s already read this one. )
Ever Hear a Serve Described like this?
1. The Service
The nerve to make a high toss and the sense
Of when the ball is there; and then the nerve
To cock your arm back all the way, not rigidBut loose and ready all the way behind
So that the racket nearly or really touches
Your back far down; and all the time to seeThe ball, the seams and letters on the ball
As it seems briefly at its highest point
To stop and hover — keeping these in mindThe swing itself is easy, forgetting cancer,
Or panic learning how to swim or walk,
Forgetting what the score is, names of plants,…
Robert Pinsky turns poetry into a tennis lesson, or the other way around, in this poem called simply, “Tennis.” Read the full version here.