Poetry can work its magic

The magazine comes every other month, and for some reason it arrives at the newspaper's post office box.

With every issue, my routine is the same. I cut off the plastic outer wrapper, shake out the lap cards with renewal information, and turn to the table of contents.

The magazine is called Poetry, and I've taken it for a number of years now. It's the best-known and best-funded national poetry publication today.

And while I don't always like the poems I find there - some leave me scratching my head, others disappoint - the standard is high enough that at least a few times a year I come across a piece that takes my breath away.

Checking the table of contents is a way of finding out if any of my old favorites are in an issue: Billy Collins, Richard Wilbur, A.E. Stallings, A.M. Juster, Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, X.J. Kennedy, Donald Hall.

It's also a momentary fantasy. Like a lot of scribblers, I've submitted my own work to Poetry over the years, a process that begins with high hopes and ends with a lesson in humility.

Still, turning to the table of contents, it's easy to fantasize momentarily that I'll find my own name there.

What I didn't expect to find in the latest issue is a name so well known beyond the realm of rhymes and verse: John Wooden.

Yet, there it was: John Wooden, page 346, "The Great Scorer."

It was an essay by the legendary basketball coach, the man who epitomized the Hoosier game and who died this month.

A coach. In Poetry. It was enough to make me turn instantly to page 346.

Over the past several years, the magazine has invited people from various fields to comment on how they've experienced poetry in their lives, how they've connected with it, how they've learned from it, how it may have changed them.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who read the eulogies after John Wooden's death or ever listened to an interview with the man that he had something to say about poetry as well as basketball.

"A teacher never knows what stays with those he or she is teaching," coach Wooden wrote for the magazine.

"You do your best using the tools at your disposal. Poetry was one of those tools."

High-brow readers might sniff at some of Wooden's choices. He grew up on the likes of James Whitcomb Riley as well as Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Whitman. And he didn't hesitate to quote the hackneyed Grantland Rice if it would fire up a team or get it focused on the task at hand.

But so what?

That's the thing about poetry, Wooden wrote, it "works its magic in many different ways."

Even more directly, he said, "The rules of poetry are and should be flexible; good words in good order is good enough for me."

That's a definition worth holding onto.

Thanks, coach.[[In-content Ad]]