… and I still have never watched a Super Bowl, though I’ve wandered through rooms at many parties where it was on. I’m too old now, but I liked to play the game—I played in YMCA leagues and have 3 high-school varsity letters in football—I just never much liked watching sports on TV or even live. Howard Nemerov , one of my favorite American poets of the last century, wrote a fabulous piece which comes close to my own feelings. Here are the last two sections of ”Watching Football On TV“:
VI
Passing and catching overcome the world,
The hard condition of the world, they do
Human intention honor in the world.
A football wants to wobble, that’s its shape
And nature, and to make it spiral true
’s a triumph in itself, to make it hit
The patterning receiver on the hands
The instant he looks back, well, that’s to be
For the time being in a state of grace,
And move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.
VII
Each year brings rookies and makes veterans,
The have their dead by now, their wounded as well,
They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame,
They have the stories of the tribe, the plays
And instant replays many times replayed.
But even fame will tire of its fame,
And immortality itself will fall asleep.
It’s taken many years, but yet in time,
To old men crouched before the ikon’s changes,
Changes become reminders, all the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.
I have to say that among American poets only Richard Wilbur delights me more often than Nemerov. Here are a few poems short enough to quote in full as sources of that delight:
“Creation Myth on a Moebius Band”
This world’s just mad enough to have been made
By the Being his beings into Being prayed.
“Route Two”
Along Route Two I saw a sign
Standing out in a swamp. One line
It spoke that might epitomize
The ambition of Free Enterprise:
Save While You Spend. As if one saw
A way to beat the Second Law
By pouring money down the drain
As long as it was one’s own drain.
“New Weapons in the Old War”
Is it for Satan’s, God’s, or Nature’s uses
That men and women have proximity fuses?
Like teleological rockets when they meet,
Each one ignited by the other’s heat.
“The Common Wisdom”
Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes
What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether
Fray but not break, and that they stay together.
One should be watching while the other dies.
Buy his Collected Poems. You won’t regret it.
6:56:39 PM 
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