Robert Hedin, Michael Waters, eds.. Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xxii + 221 pp. $49.95, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8093-2530-6.
Reviewed by Ron Smith
Published on H-Arete (March, 2004)
Who will be the best readers of this antholo‐ of very prosy stuf. Some of the poets appear here, gy? Obviously, readers steeped in poetry and fas‐ sometimes necessarily, lineless. Lucilius's hard- cinated by what wise Homer (Englished here by boiled Latin epigrams, difcult to translate, are Richmond Lattimore) calls "the painful boxing." rendered by Humbert Wolfe as serviceable Eng‐ And they will be readers eager to savor the rous‐ lish prose. We have intriguing excerpts from Lord ing and rowdy, graceful and grotesque, excruciat‐ Byron's 1813-14 letters and journals and a pious ing and exalting encounters between the sweet prose analogy by St. Paul (I Corinthians 9:25-27). science and the essence of literature. William Heyen's "KO" is a pleasing two-paragraph And, I suspect, they will be disappointed read‐ conceit that's no doubt intended as a prose poem. ers. But they should not be ungrateful. Robert Among the best modern and contemporary poets, Hedin and Michael Waters have given us a book the typical forms are varieties of free verse, many for every substantial library, public and private. taut and perfectly expressive, many slack, clumsy, It's a book many of us will go back to again and imprecise. The volume has no terza rima, no vil‐ again when pugilism or poetry or their homage lanelles or sestinas, one Italian sonnet, a pair of and agon call out to us from our bookshelves. envelope-rhymed quatrains, some respectable couplets. Can't boxing be addressed in the full Here in one volume are 119 pieces, almost all range of forms available in English? Yes, but evi‐ of which do indeed take boxing as either their dently it hasn't been. subject or central metaphor. Not all are verse, and, despite the book's subtitle, certainly not all But all the non-poetry or non-verse in this an‐ are poetry, if by poetry we mean Coleridge's "best thology is not prose or even prosy. Perfect in Their words in the best order." A number of pieces not Art dances a tango for Angel Firpo (complete with only wallow in cliches but in their earnest, ab‐ musical score); sings out Bob Dylan and Jacques stract telling seem incapable of concrete showing. Levy's "Hurricane," Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom In Perfect in Their Art we have, yes, a fair amount Mancini," Leadbelly's "Titanic," and Paul Simon's H-Net Reviews
"The Boxer" (all sans score); and shouts and mut‐ >From the era of the great modernists, we ters a number of other pieces that qualify qua have Horace Gregory's slipshod "Dempsey, boxing but not really as poetry. Dempsey" and a number of popular songs (includ‐ Editors Hedin and Waters present a fair ing "That's What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem amount of doggerel, much of it in ballad forms. Will Wear" by Irving Berlin, born the same year Happily, some of it is inspired doggerel. Cassius as T.S. Eliot), but what about Eliot? And Pound, Clay/Muhammad Ali's "Clay Comes Out to Meet Frost, Stevens, Lawrence, Williams--or at least the Liston" (alas, only "recited by Cassius Clay," be‐ populists Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay? If cause written, we learn, by one Gary Belkin) gives this sounds ridiculous, remember that Alexander us the following delightful passage after Clay's as‐ Pope wrote a truly major poem about a game of tronautic uppercut of Sonny Liston: ombre. Among fne contemporary poets we do hear from Philip Levine, Dave Smith, Donald Hall, ... the punch raises the bear Clear out of the James Merrill, Robert Hayden, James Tate, Joyce ring. Liston is still rising And the ref wears a Carol Oates, and others. But we don't hear from frown For [For?!] he can't start counting Till Son‐ Ted Hughes, William Matthews, John Ashbury, ny comes down. Now Liston disappears from Charles Simic, Richard Wilbur, Charles Wright, view The crowd is getting frantic But our radar David Bottoms, just to mention a few obvious stations have picked him up He's somewhere over names. Perhaps some permissions were not forth‐ the Atlantic. Who would have thought When they coming. Still, as far as I can tell, the editors have came to the fght That they'd witness the launch‐ found most of what's fndable. ing Of a human satellite. Yes, the crowd did not dream When they laid down their money That Homage and elegy predominate, with elegy, they would see A total eclipse of the Sonny. that balanced complex of grief and love, clearly the most successful stance. Joe Louis is the hands- If the editors seem to be scrounging for mate‐ down winner in the homage-elegy category with rial, well, I'm guessing they are. Boxing has been a some thirteen poems. Next comes Jack Johnson mesmerizing, revolting, inspiring, sometimes with a half dozen. Ali and Liston elicit fve each. tragic form of entertainment and achievement for Other fghters commemorated or mourned in‐ about four millennia. So why have so few great clude Mike Tyson, Joe Frazier, John L. Sullivan, writers written about it? With its rigor, risk, in‐ Jake La Motta, Max Baer, Evander Holyfeld, Ken escapable sufering, and mechanical (ergo, aes‐ Norton, Jack Randall, Hurricane Jackson, Billy thetic) elegance it would seem to be a natural sub‐ Conn, Boom Boom Mancini, Kid Paret, and other ject for poetry. And certainly we see here that celebrated names, as well as a number of anony‐ Homer, Pindar, Virgil, Lucilius, and others have mous dreamers and thugs. Poems of homage gen‐ found it so. But even the extant material from erally disappoint if not disgust; their celebrations those ancients is dishearteningly skimpy. And tend to be simple-minded and their ironies trite. It why didn't, say, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Mil‐ is notable that unknown scrappers have often in‐ ton, Burns, Wordsworth, Keats ever give us at spired better poems than famous boxers. least a stanza? (No, fencing doesn't count.) Even the muscular Christianity of the Victorians ofers Many of the poems in Perfect in Their Art are surprisingly little. The staggeringly prolifc properly tender, some are satisfyingly tough, Kipling published nothing at all about prize fght‐ some are luridly brutal, and at least one is tran‐ ing? Nothing? Luckily, Arthur Conan Doyle and scendently morbid (see Ana Istaru's "The Man John Masefeld fll the Kipling gap with two mem‐ Who Boxes"). The excitements, sorrows, and hu‐ orably Kiplingesque narratives. miliations of sexual love and social injustice fnd
2 H-Net Reviews natural metaphors in boxing. Kim Addonizio, We loved the chill Wayne Dodd, Joseph Duemer, and Michael Waters he gave us, our glowering pit bull we sicced best represent the former; Elizabeth Alexander, on all contenders, our looming shadow, our two- Cornelius Eady, Michael Harper, Calvin Hernton, time loser from Castle Frankenstein, Langston Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Phil until the "phantom punch," when he sat down Levine, Wole Soyinka, Richard Wright, the latter. wobbly as a dowager, leaving the foor to the lip‐ If amorous confict tends to bring out the senti‐ py punk from Louisville. We felt mental and paradoxical in poets, social confict tends to bring out the plain pissed-of and the betrayed, diminished, tongue tied by that way-too-preachy. Calvin Hernton's at times Gins‐ prattling dancer with the couplets and pretty face. bergian "Ballad of the Life and Times of Joe Louis, We wanted blood, teeth. Nothing fancy. The Great Brown Bomber" indicts and bellows Webb's "Boxing Lesson" concludes by persua‐ and sprawls for nine and a half pages; thank sively generalizing some of what the sport can goodness it creates at least one memorable mo‐ teach: ment when it fnds Joe Louis to be the "hero of all Civilization means overruling instinct: em‐ time / for all black men and women whirlwinding bracing the counter-intuitive, knowing the world, within the / gift outraged." that seems so fat, will curve if you sail far Perfect in Their Art is in fact full of memo‐ enough, that massive hunks of steel can fy, that rable moments. Alan Dugan presents a vivid im‐ staring death straight in the eye can save your age of a battered fghter in his corner: "[T]rainers life. whisper into his mouth while one ear / listens to Trethewey speaks evocatively of fghters who itself, clenched like a fst." Yannis Ritsos's "No, No" "dance away from darkness / wrapped up tight (translated from the Greek by Scott King), with its into fsts." Zimmer's hilarious, touching narrative fnal image from a sculptor's studio in which ath‐ "Suck it Up" gives us an unheroic, self-deprecating letes earn money posing as (one assumes) gods speaker disgusted by and riveted to "These tele‐ and demigods, manages simultaneously to defate vised Tuesday Night Fights." It is pure alphabetic and yet pay tribute to the heroic as it shows us luck that Zimmer's poignant, comic poem closes "that mangy dog, covered with ticks and scabs, / the volume so well. drinking dirty water out of the wash bucket / at About half way through the volume, the non‐ the base of the half-fnished statues of dead he‐ pareil Philip Levine manages to be both physio‐ roes." logically intimate and convincingly cosmic, both The anthology's most efective contemporary clinical and archetypal as he speaks of "the per‐ poems come from Phil Levine and John Skoyles fect right cross": (three each); Dave Smith, Eric Trethewey, and They say it's magic. When it lands you feel the William Trowbridge (two each); and Charles force of your whole body, even the deeper organs, Harper Webb and Paul Zimmer (one each). Their the dark fuids that go untapped for decades, the moving, funny, unforgettable poems deserve tiny pale microbes haunting the bone marrow, the reading and rereading--aloud and to friends, as intricate patterns that devised the bones of the many as will sit still for them. The ffteen short feet, you feel them fnally coming together like so lines of Skoyles's "Sonny Liston" hauntingly con‐ many atoms of salt and water as they form an jure the primitive, frightening mystery not only at ocean or a tear, for just an instant before the hand the heart of one man but also his--our--species. comes back under the chin in its ordinary defen‐ Trowbridge, too, remembers Liston (and Ali): sive posture.
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And Dave Smith's "Blues for Benny 'Kid' disappointing, if not catastrophically bathetic. Paret" nearly weeps as it punishes us with: Even Homer and Virgil recalibrate when they They smacked your chest and crossed your present their boxing matches; they close down to arms because you fell down while the aisles flled the small scale of two men with their hands in the with gorgeous women, high heels pounding of air, both about to sufer, one about to fail. like Emile, the Champion, who planted his good It goes without saying that readers who scorn two feet and stuck, stuck, stuck until your brain mimesis will undervalue much that is magnifcent tied up your tongue and your breath. in this (and many other) books. The primal and the sorrowful ripple out to us The ritualized violence of boxing, its disci‐ from the men in a boxing ring. From the time of plined savagery, moves and pleases us in com‐ the ancient Greeks, terrible mutilation and risk of plex, unsettling ways, ways that perhaps only the death have been boxing's intimates, and poets delicate grandeur of genuine poetry can illumi‐ have honored and documented the courage, en‐ nate, commemorate, articulate, examine. From durance, cruelty, and sufering of boxers. By com‐ the ancients to Lord Byron to Phil Levine we see parison, the typical war poem and even antiwar that boxing has always been somehow both poem can seem doctrinaire, deluded, simplistical‐ wholesome and disreputable, both deeply shock‐ ly romantic. Homer, supreme poet of war and of ing and oddly comforting. sport, had it right from the beginning. In Book 23 But Perfect in Their Art could have been a of The Iliad, the trash-talking Epeios visualizes the much better book. Budd Shulberg, author of What detailed anatomy of the face when he says, of his Makes Sammy Run and the screenplay for On the opponent, "I will smash his skin apart and break Waterfront, has generously contributed a good- his bones on each other." Of course this is intimi‐ hearted foreword, but it's a foreword that seems dation, not atrocity, but it seems only one short oddly ill-informed. It begins, "You would have to step from the grisly tactile knowledge of physical look long and hard to fnd any poetry dedicated to damage of King Lear's "Bind fast his corky arms" football, baseball, track meets, hockey, or polo. Ex‐ and "Out, vile jelly! / Where is thy lustre now?" cept perhaps [perhaps?] for baseball, no sport has And here is Homer's concise, pitiless image of Eu‐ inspired such a quantity and quality of poetry as ryalos, Epeios's opponent, after he's been knocked boxing." The editors' Introduction provides some out: "[H]e spat the thick blood and rolled his head welcome historical information. We learn that over on one side." As Kenneth Patchen says, "Ho! "the frst sport to be flmed was boxing, in 1894" My hungry dogs ... / Inspect my savage house" and that "British Lads and Black Millers" is about ("Boxers Hit Harder When Women Are Around"). "Tom Molineaux, an ex-slave from Virginia who Of course, prize fghting, like most sports, can gained wide renown in England in the nineteenth encourage the ponderous pun and the preposter‐ century" and "is perhaps the frst poem ever writ‐ ous hyperbole. One poet in this volume refers us ten in which a boxer of African American her‐ to an old fghter "boxed in by loneliness" and tells itage is mentioned." But the introduction is, fnal‐ us that knocked-out sailors landed on the deck ly, rather cheerfully superfcial. "with a thud louder than the 16-inch-gun's blasts." The book's default alphabetical organization The best boxing poets, though, seem to agree with is particularly unfortunate. Chronological se‐ Joyce Carol Oates's comment in her book On Box‐ quencing (with dates cited) would not only reveal ing: "[B]oxing isn't really metaphor, it is the thing the surprising gaps in the tradition (not a single itself." It is signifcant that all attempts in Perfect poem from the Renaissance or from the Romantic in Their Art to create epic scope and sweep are period?) but would allow readers to detect and
4 H-Net Reviews appreciate infuence and implicit argument be‐ tween poems, to intuit sly parody and surrepti‐ tious allusion, to snif out both reverence and re‐ pudiation. I suspect that this book's best potential read‐ ers generally prefer their art nearly raw, their an‐ thologies lightly annotated. But Perfect in Their Art needs more scholarship to showcase its po‐ ems. Let us hope for a second edition of this wor‐ thy anthology. We need a fuller edition, an edition that provides key biographies and historical data. One that also overtly acknowledges and briefy, intelligently comments upon Virgil's debt to Homer. One that, say, not only glosses Lucilius, but even identifes Gary Belkin.
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Citation: Ron Smith. Review of Hedin, Robert; Waters, Michael, eds. Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali. H-Arete, H-Net Reviews. March, 2004.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9106
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