Sports and poetry—oil and water, right? Not so, suggests this Southeast Missouri prof
By Bryan A. Hollerbach
Photograph by Kit Doyle
In Keeping Score, which St. Louis’ Time Being Books published earlier this year, Dr. Robert Hamblin celebrates in serious verse a subject most people likely relegate to “Casey at the Bat”–level doggerel: sports.
“I’ve always loved sports,” Hamblin says, his voice still lilting with a Southern accent acquired during his youth in Mississippi. “I’ve coached, I played slow-pitch softball till I was about 50, I played pickup basketball games until last year, when my knee just eventually said, ‘You can’t play anymore.’” By turns witty and weighty, Keeping Score showcases that love, from boyish jubilation to “a more sober and mature assessment of sport,” in his phrase.
“Sports are beautiful, but they can also be very corrupt and damaging,” observes Hamblin, a professor of English at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, where he’s taught since 1965. “You’ve got parents out there driving kids halfway across the country playing in leagues and tournaments, and they wouldn’t drive ’em down the block to check out a book from the library. Kids come home, and the first question we ask is ‘Did you win?’ instead of saying, ‘Did you have fun?’”
The 49 poems in Keeping Score, Hamblin’s third collection of verse and second from Time Being, are grouped by subject: baseball, football, miscellaneous sports and basketball. They range from “The Dumb Jock Replies”—a prologue that recalls, in style if not in substance, “The Dover Bitch” by Anthony Hecht—to “Half-Court Advantage,” an elegiac reflection on shooting hoops with three old friends. Other memorable poems focus on saluting 1969 World Series star Ron Swoboda—whom Hamblin coached in his first teaching position, at Baltimore’s Sparrows Point High School—and playing “Basketball at 65.” (“It’s not full-court, it’s not really half-court,” he says. “We just kind of stand in one place and hope the ball comes to us.”)
Regarding the collection, whose individual poems were written over the course of 35 years, Hamblin praises the assistance of two men, the first of them Time Being managing editor Jerry Call: “For anyone to make available a small press with quality books like he’s doing, it seems to me quite admirable. I’m honored to be a part
of it.”
Also lauded: friend and fellow writer Louis Daniel Brodsky. (His namesake Brodsky Collection numbers among the world’s largest treasuries of William Faulkner material and occupies SEMO’s Center for Faulkner Studies, which Hamblin has directed since its founding in 1989.) “I was having trouble finding any kind of a theme or a structure or focus [for Keeping Score],” he recalls, “and L.D.’s very good at that. His notion is that a book of poems ought to have a coherence, a unity, a flow much like a novel.”
As his own poetic favorites, Hamblin almost necessarily names Shakespeare and, among moderns, Robert Frost. “I love Wordsworth, W.H. Auden, Richard Wilbur—a lot of those traditional ones,” he says. “I’m not as much into some of the Modernists like Eliot and Stevens. Somewhere along the way, it seemed to me we got away from that Wordsworth and Tennyson tradition … that poetry could be read and enjoyed and maybe even appreciated by the masses.”
With luck, though, Hamblin’s own work will help to bridge the contemporary divide between free verse and free throws, stanzas and stolen bases, trochees and touchdowns.
