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Contests : Sports Poetry & Prose Contest : Advice
For this contest, we understand "sports" broadly to mean an activity involving the competitive pursuit of physical excellence. This naturally includes team sports like baseball, and the one-on-one combat of martial arts, but can also encompass solo activities—weight-training, for instance—where the athlete is striving to exceed a personal best. We consider cheerleading a sport in its own right, like gymnastics, as well as an element of the sports environment. Your entries can be about any such element—the players, the fans, the owners, the collector of Red Sox bobblehead dolls, the guy who drives the Zamboni—as long as the sports connection is central to the narrative. But what about...
...dance? If your piece is about a dance competition, or emphasizes the athletic aspects of a dancer's training rather than the pretty tableaux, it could fit our requirements. We would consider "Black Swan" a sports movie, because it explores the punishing physical demands and winner-take-all competitiveness of professional ballet. "Billy Elliot" is on the margin.
...fishing? The Academy of American Poets includes Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" in their list of sports poems, and who are we to contradict the Academy? Be aware that activities that are merely a hobby, without a demanding physical element, are less appropriate for our contest. That said, if you sent us The Old Man and the Sea, we'd probably give it a second read.
...high-stakes poker? Probably not. That's a game, not a sport.
...competitive eating? No, that's a stunt. Sorry, Adam Richman.
We're less interested in writing that merely uses sports metaphors to explore an unrelated topic. Such metaphors are so common in popular parlance as to have become clichés. Rather, show us situations where watching or playing a particular sport brings up emotions and insights whose resonance extends far beyond the game.
Sports Movies We Like
In these films, sports provide the occasion for a character or a community to confront larger issues such as racism, sexism, body image, cultural heritage versus assimilation, poverty, and what it means to grow up. They're also well-told stories filled with dramatic tension, memorable images, and humor.
- Bend It Like Beckham
- Black Swan
- Coach Carter
- Fever Pitch
- Jerry Maguire
- The Karate Kid
- A League of Their Own
- The Natural
- Remember the Titans
- Rocky
- Seabiscuit
- When We Were Kings
Need more? Check out this BleacherReport.com list of the top 100 sports movies.
Suggestions for Further Reading
- The literary journal O Sweet Flowery Roses published an entire issue, Finishing Hammers, dedicated to poetry about mixed martial arts (MMA). Contributors include Winning Writers past prizewinners Charlie Bondhus and Gerardo Mena. Read this issue here.
- Janet E. Aalfs is a martial arts teacher, poet, and feminist activist. Her poetry collections include Bird of a Thousand Eyes (Levellers Press, 2010); Reach (Perugia Press, 1999); Full Open (Orogeny Press, 1996); and Of Angels and Survivors (Two Herons Press, 1992).
- In this July 2010 feature from The Guardian newspaper, UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has collected sports poems from such well-known authors as Billy Collins, Wendy Cope, Lavinia Greenlaw, and Paul Muldoon.
- Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali, edited by Robert Hedin and Michael Waters (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), includes contemporary authors such as James Merrill, E. Ethelbert Miller, Philip Levine, and Yusef Komunyakaa.
- Otto Penzler, series editor of The Best American Mystery Stories, has edited a number of sports-themed mystery short story collections, including Murder on the Ropes (boxing) and Murderers' Row (baseball). Notable contributors to this series include Thomas H. Cook and Joyce Carol Oates.
- A former jockey, Dick Francis wrote a number of bestselling mystery novels, all of which have some connection to the world of racing, but are about much more than that. Some of our favorites were The Edge, Reflex, Proof, and Longshot.
- Madeline Blais follows a season in the lives of the Amherst high school girls' basketball team in her book In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle (Grand Central Publishing, 1996).
- Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1991), edited by Don Johnson, includes well-known authors such as Gregory Corso, Gail Mazur, and Robert Penn Warren.
- Other sports poems to enjoy online: Marisa de los Santos, "Women Watching Basketball"; B.H. Fairchild, "Old Men Playing Basketball".
These poems from past Winning Writers contests will give you an idea of how sports poetry can go beyond "Casey at the Bat":
- Christina Ginfrida, "Lt. O'Malley" (finalist in our 2009 War Poetry Contest)
- James K. Zimmerman, "Score: Kipling 1, Keats 0" (honorable mention in our 2009 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest)
- Paul Hamill, "Day Sailing" (most highly commended in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest)
Click here to enter the current Sports Poetry & Prose Contest
Jendi Reiter
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