After Atalanta

A little bit of hockey. A little bit of a love poem. To A Sad Daughter  by Michael Ondaatje All night long the hockey pictures gaze down at you sleeping in your tracksuit. Belligerent goalies are your ideal. Threats of being traded cuts and wounds --all this pleases you. O my god! you say at breakfast reading the sports page over the Alpen as another player breaks his ankle or assaults the coach. When I thought of daughters I wasn't expecting this but I like this more. I like all your faults even your purple moods when you retreat from everyone to sit in bed under a quilt. And when I say 'like' I mean of course 'love' but that embarrasses you. You who feel superior to black and white movies (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca) though you were moved by Creature from the Black Lagoon. One day I'll come swimming beside your ship or someone will and if you hear the siren listen to it. For if you close your ears only nothing happens. You will never chan...

I, as the perceived target audience (women), received a brief questionnaire about my thoughts on sports memorabilia from a representative of a company that sells such memorabilia. OK. Fine. I understand a company's need to better understand its target demographic. I generally appreciate efforts to include and understand women as consumers of sports-related products and services. But then I realized rather quickly that the survey wasn't meant for me. Question one was fine: Would you purchase sports memorabilia (autographed jerseys, sporting goods, photos etc.) for yourself? If so, what type(s) would you purchase? Probably not. Not my kind of thing. Though I am currently carrying a vanilla chapstick with Gretchen Bleiler's name on it. Would you want to receive sports memorabilia as a gift from the man/men in your life? Wait, what man? My dad? Because I'm a dyke so he's pretty much "the man" in my life. Oh, this survey is for straight wome...

Because I was pretty much unabashedly crying in a coffee shop while listening to Frank Deford this morning on Morning Edition. (Seriously--more so than the story about the softball players who carried their injured opponent around the bases so she could have the only home-run of her career.) Deford told the story of the college senior Cory Weissman who got playing time in his last collegiate game--his only playing time since suffering a stroke in his freshman year. Read and listen to it here . (If those Folgers commercials stir something in you, though, I would take precautions before listening: do not listen to while driving, for example.) I could interrogate some of the finer details, provide some commentary. But I think I will just stifle the cynicism and take it as the feel-good story of the week.

Wislawa Szymborska died earlier this month . I was introduced to her poetry when I was in an MFA program by a professor who was himself quite a fan. I always liked her work and wished I could read it in the original Polish.       NOTHING TWICE translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses. One day, perhaps some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a ...

Robin Sparks was fired from both her jobs at Quinnipiac University in New Haven this week. Sparks is probably most well known as the volleyball coach at the school--not because the volleyball team was a perennial contender but because the school attempted to cut it in favor of competitive cheer. A lawsuit followed and in a still widely discussed decision, the judge ruled that QU could not use competitive cheer to meet its Title IX qualifications. This did not mean it had to keep volleyball; schools can choose which teams to field. But it did. The decision was mostly centered around the viability of cheer as a competitive varsity sport, with volleyball as the collateral damage. Sparks was at the trial but again it was mostly about the merits of cheer. And now she has been fired--from her job as a professor of public relations as well. The school claims it cannot provide the reasons why. They also added, not surprisingly, that it was not related to the Title IX case (details of the cas...

Alex Morgan is also proud of her teammates' bodies . And that is why she joined the cadre of other female athletes in proudly showing off her body in a photo shoot. This is Morgan in a photo USWNT: And this is a preview of Morgan from the photo shoot she did for the SI Swimsuit Issue. That's not a bikini, by the way. It's paint. OK. That is all.

I'm back and back in the groove--mostly. So here is the first Poetry Friday of 2012. It's by an Australian poet and it's about travel (or not). This piece is from Aitken's latest book Eighth Habitation published by Giramondo. The Anti-travel Travel Poem by Adam Aitken The anti-travel travel poem suggests the road romance & regrets the endless paperwork we left behind I dreamed of walking boots that wouldn’t lace anti-travellers can never get lost in a swamp of Choice we must take the American grid pattern endless military runways, the borders of Empire, take-off zone & rabbit fence keeping peace at the ruined city gate where crows consider life in a decommissioned bomber the line I have lain too long on the beach staring at the awesome winter surf is prelude to destruction & creation the anti-travel travel poem does not ask for directions on a road no one’s taken it is time arrested at six-ways crossroad where cremation crews put...

Well obviously. In case you stopped caring about the former #1 high school recruit was doing after she abruptly and amid great controversy left UConn several years ago without ever playing a game for the Huskies--here's an update. She's doing fine. Perhaps even great? She enrolled at Delaware. Played volleyball for the Blue Hens for one season and then joined the basketball team where she has had quite an effect--to put it mildly. And the media has not quite forgotten about her. This morning Frank Deford's weekly commentary focused on Delle Donne and her time at Delaware, the team's outstanding record, and her relationship with her family--specifically her sister who suffers from cerebal palsy and cannot see or hear. Many cite--along with extreme burnout--her relationship with her sister as the reason why Delle Donne could not commit to an intercollegiate career at UConn. He frames the decision as a noble one based on...