The American poet Robert Pinsky suggested that poetry was just as physical or bodily an art as dance. Octavio Paz spoke of poetry as one way of reconciling the body and the mind.
No surprise, then, that, at least since the early Olympic Games, poetry and sport have been linked. There’s no shortage of very fine poems about exploits on pitches, courts and courses. But can twin careers as a sportsperson and a poet flourish within the same mass of mind and muscle, of brain and brawn?
The image of poets and writers as sedentary folk bedecked in tweed is somewhat punctured upon discovery that Ciarán Carson played minor hurling for Co Antrim or when we consider that Albert Camus played in goal for Algeria.
Carson has said that he sees hurling as an art form, one not far removed from writing. He draws parallels between hurling and writing in the imagination of space and the unfolding of epic stories. It’s true that bounteous measures of passion, energy, beauty and rhythm are common to both disciplines.
After a Saturday with Dublin literati, the poet Louis MacNeice woke "sodden and late" and attended Croke Park for the thunder-and-lightning All-Ireland hurling final of 1939, the day the second World War was declared. His detachment from Ireland reveals itself in his mistaking the Kilkenny team for Kerry. MacNeice was more of a rugby man, as is clear from his fine poem Rugby Football Excursion.
More recently, poets have taken to the GAA with relish, including Paul Durcan, who has written wonderful poems with Gaelic games at their core. In We Believe in Hurling he eulogises the game, describing the visit of an isolated soul to a rural pub to watch a big match.
Martina Evans, Theo Dorgan, Billy Ramsell and Tom French have also written poems about the GAA.
Table tennis features in another Durcan poem, A Spin in the Rain With Seamus Heaney. We find the poets, on a break from a summer school, playing a game in a neglected classroom, "no mean strikers of the ball", locked in companionable combat.
Many readers will empathise with the "half-trained", "stiff-hinged" runner evoked in Colette Bryce's Great North, fearing that any minute they may be "overtaken by a pantomime horse".
The Irish-American poet Billy Collins plays off a golf handicap of 17 and finds it quite the sleeping aid: "a few imagined holes of golf / worked much better than a thousand sheep", he writes in his poem Night Golf.
We might not know about the enticingly named sport “chunkey” were it not for Paul Muldoon’s poem of that name. He describes the Native American game as an intriguing “mash-up of buzkashi and road bowls”.
Further curiosity is aroused by Ian Duhig’s poem that depicts the boxing bout between Ingemar Johansson and Floyd Patterson: “The night Johansson won, / a commentator summarised / Floyd Patterson: / feet of a ballet dancer, but chin of / a poet . . .” The lines set us to wonder what a poet’s chin should look like.
The flow of influence is not all one way, and poetry inspires top sportspeople, including the Tipperary hurling manager, Éamon O'Shea. In May you can see and hear him at the Source Arts Centre, in Thurles, in conversation with Durcan, one of his heroes. Maureen Kennelly is director of Poetry Ireland
