In December 1891, just three months before the death of Walt Whitman, Dr. James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to the wall of the gymnasium at the YMCA International Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts. Taking up the challenge of his department chair to create some indoor recreation for the winter months, Naismith considered the formal rules of American sport and improvised. He built his game out of the materials at hand: a pastiche of conventions garnered from sports as diverse as rugby and lacrosse and punctuated with a discarded soccer ball and the peach baskets that the janitor found in...

Some poets talk about baseball as the most poetic of sports because there is no clock, but I think sometimes poetry needs a clock—that sense of urgency created by the seconds ticking down. For my money, basketball is the most poetic of the major sports. The problem is that my money doesn’t go very far, because when I played JV basketball at Fitzgerald High School, the only point I scored the whole season was a free throw after time had expired.

Basketball is also the most visibly sweaty of all major sports. The hot gym, the confined space, the...

Basketball was my first love. Or perhaps it was my religion, if religion can be defined as that which most governs your life. As a teenager, I played almost every day, sometimes shoveling snow off the schoolyard court in order to do so. Sometimes I played in the dark, a distant streetlight the only illumination. If there was no one to play with I played by myself, imagining opponents or just practicing my shots. By the time I was fourteen I was five feet eleven, and the only freshman to make the varsity high school team. But I remember the...

Buzzer beaters and miracle shots are nonexistent in poetry—every poem I’ve heaved into the mail with more prayer than craft or confidence has been off the mark.

Worse than a poem full of hot air, an air ball.

You need one to play pro ball.

You can write in only your undies, or in a coffee-stained Allman Brothers Concert T-shirt, or, better yet, in nothing more than a housecoat and dark socks, sans sports bra . . . no one cares.

Once you’re issued a uniform on a professional basketball team, you’re an official professional.

Until you publish a...

Lee Pierce looked like he knew his way around. When he stopped to speak to the guard at the initial Western Penitentiary checkpoint, Pierce told him who we were instead of requesting directions. “The Scared Straight basketball team,” my office mate voice-overed, citing a show that had made a small stir a few years before. “I’m pretty sure we’re all going to change our ways after this.”

A couple of guys laughed, but I didn’t. I was uneasy already, coming to play basketball at what I knew was a prison for men who’d committed more serious crimes than DUI and...

Margaret: David McKain and I met at Yaddo in the summer of 1975. I lived in Washington, D.C., and taught at George Mason University, where I had come up for tenure a year early but hadn’t received it. In fact, I didn’t really feel I had tenure anywhere. My first marriage had ended two years earlier, my housemate had recently married, and I was moving out of the house we’d shared for a year or more, and her husband was moving in. I was making new friends, and I had a first book in the making, but I was also...

In 1986, when our bodies could do such things, four of us would contort into a Pontiac Fiero, a matchbox two-seater loaned to us by one of the gambling regulars. Our parents could play mah-jongg all night, the plastic tiles like the feet of a small flock of birds clacking on a roof. While our folks rotated seats at seven different tables in a three-day, all-day, all-night marathon of five- and twenty-dollar games (cursing each other and themselves in at least three languages), we’d head out, more often than not, to play basketball in the middle of the night.

Me...

I distinctly remember, can still feel the amazement of, the first time. When I was growing, the local school system did not believe competitive sports were good for developing young girls—somehow were bad for our ovaries or, more likely, taught us to be confident and assertive. So most days we trundled along in gym class with some mild games of paddle-ball, a walk on the balance beam, a run around the track. The school’s one concession was a once-per-week after-school session of the Girl’s Athletic Association. There I got to play basketball full-court on the very same parquet where...

My father was quite a sports enthusiast—actually, the term “sports nut” would be more appropriate. He loved just about all of them—football, baseball, hockey, golf, even bowling. But the one sport that really got him revved-up was basketball. He never played the sport and he never went to see many basketball games, but he would be glued to the television set whenever a Boston Celtics game was broadcast. He followed their stats religiously and knew every detail, every nuance, of every player.

Why Boston? Why the Celtics? He was born and raised in Cleveland and visited Massachusetts only...

Growing up in Elkhart, Indiana—factories and cornfields sprouting on acre after acre of flat earth—the only poem I wanted to write was on the basketball court where we played pickup ball. No matter the weather. No matter how hot or how dark or how many mosquitoes howled around our sweaty ears.

Basketball was eternal, infinite, like the stars in the sky, like Connie Hawkins’s hops and his ridiculously long arms. I suppose I learned more on the basketball court about what Galway Kinnell claims is the very ground of our making than I ever did reciting poems in...

I hang at the high school bike stands and lock my bike and then, pretending not to like my spot, unlock my bike and move it to another spot and lock it up again. I do this a couple of more times to come to homeroom with her already in her seat up front so that I can pretty much stare at her the whole homeroom period without anyone noticing. My friends, if they find out, will work me over. So I am careful sneaking good looks at her, like I’m putting a cape over her and drawing her to...

Today, as I drive through my suburb on my way to the market, I notice how almost every home has a basketball net either above the garage or adjacent to the driveway. I smile as I think how it’s just one more change in the landscape we now take for granted. I remember the Detroit neighborhood where I grew up where the only kids who had a basketball net lived in the wealthy neighborhoods. The kids in my neighborhood, on the other hand, had to make do with kick-the-can, tag, climbing trees and building forts out of nothing, scaling up...

As a young man, I was a basketball player, a point guard, who was also the coach out on the floor. Point guards are good passers, dribblers, and they run the offense. I could pass and dribble, and I was a scorer, too. I wanted to win, to be a champion, and I always played on championship teams. I learned that if I played the game unselfishly, passed to teammates when they were open, everyone would be happy and we would play better as a team. And we did. We played well together because we were all unselfish players. We...

The afternoon I bought my first record, “Red Rubber Ball” by the Cyrkle, I went to my best friend Jovita Becker’s house. She plucked the single from the sleeve and dropped it onto her turntable with a crunch of the needle as the sound of the Farfisa organ rang out, and we danced the Pony on the bouncy, wood floor of her upstairs bedroom. I went to her house often, late afternoons, after Catholic school, while her parents were still at work at their grocery store.

It was the first metaphor I understood to be a metaphor (The rollercoaster ride...

I know it in my intestines & in my brain. I realize it with what Emerson called “the flower of the mind.”

We are coming to the end of all poetry.

Not just these word-constructs we read in books or once in a while hear read aloud, but the way of thinking that integrates. The Concord master said that the poet is the one whointegrates,who intuits/knows/feels wholeness, interconnectedness.

By way of greed that seems often to dominate our nature, & by way of various cause-&-effect specters—exploding population, deforestation/ desertification, extinctions, diminishing resources—we are coming to the...

And what took place outside the court was that after we lost (yet another) close game to Reed City at home, the other starting post player and I left through the back doors of Manistee High and drove down to First Street Beach still in our jerseys, still with our ankles taped. We couldn’t quite shape words to whatever we were feeling, and ten years later, I’m still not quite sure how to pin those emotions to the page.

Instead, what I have is a memory of that night: the way we kicked sand on our way down to the...

When I was nineteen, the only thing that mattered as much as playing basketball was watching basketball. Indiana University in Bloomington, 1991, and the center of my campus was a monolith called the HPER. HPER is an acronym for School of Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, but for me, it was the name of the first basketball facility where I could play ball as long and as often as I wanted for free.

The HPER was miraculous: rows and rows of basketball courts and at any time of any day, there were people playing. Most days, those people included me....

It’s dark and probably rainy, the kind of soft drizzly rain Seattle did not invent but shares with Ireland, with London and Amsterdam. I have been walking north on Fifteenth Avenue Northeast from my dorm because it’s still dark out and this route is well lit. Now, almost to NE Forty-fifth Street, I make a right turn, climb a short flight of cement stairs from sidewalk to tree-lined parking lot, and am finally on the University of Washington campus. I am hurrying to be on time for a 7:00 A.M. class, Introduction to Basketball.

I cut across a large parking...

What is it about basketball? Someone once pointed out that it’s ridiculous to have a sport in which games are regularly decided by something like one one/hundredth of the total points scored. After a 106–105 game, how can we really say that one team is better than the other? Maybe that capacity for razor-thin margins is part of its appeal. So many things happen over the course of a truly competitive game, so many small successes and failures, so many points scored and shots made and missed; of all the major sports, it seems somehow the thickest with events,...

January 16, 2007. I woke up early and, out of habit, sat at my computer—entered nba.com into my search engine to check the news for the day, to ascertain which games were to be played between which teams and when.

Then I slid into espn.com, yahoosports.com, foxsports.com, si.com, and a number of other sports sites. All the while, ESPN played on my TV as I worked at my desk: SportsCenter, Cold Pizza/First Take, Skip Bayless, Mike and Mike, the gods of basketball-mania spending the day arguing about players and stats and fact and possibility. And then the subscription to...

By midseason, they’ve finally figured out the three-man weave. The slap of the ball against the gym floor obliterates the grind of city traffic outside and comes close to erasing the scream of cargo jets settling toward the FedEx hub for the evening sort. I’m coaching my son’s fifth- and sixth-grade basketball team. They’re all fifth-graders, and a few fourth-graders “playing up”—we haven’t been winning much—and, what’s worse for them, they have a poet for a coach. But I’m also an old varsity basketball player who had the game branded on his consciousness at a young age, and...

I have been blessed by elbows. Elbows intentional and elbows incidental. Elbows brought forth in the fury of a rebounding scrum, and elbows caught flush from a seven-footer’s drop step. Elbows planted with eyes firmly set on their target and elbows flailing off balance until the face or shoulder or neck stopped its fall. Elbows fleshy and elbows sharp as swords. Elbows like tree trunks to leave a crick in your neck for weeks and ninja elbows that open your face without you knowing it. Yes, I have been blessed by elbows.

And I have been blessed by teachers in...

How’d it go out there today? Did you work on your left hand? Shoot fifty free throws? Tap a hundred off the backboard? Work the key?” Those were the words I’d hear, often hear, daily hear from my father. He was a basketball coach. I was the coach’s kid. I practiced. I practiced a lot.

My father was infinitely patient. I really wasn’t that good. But how I worked. And how I imagined. The clock was always ticking as I took jump shot after jump shot at the hoop fastened to the back of the garage. The “court” was assembled...

The minute I saw the basketball on the Queen’s University campus in Charlotte, North Carolina, I should have made myself scarce. Then before I could decline, five of us were looking for a court, a game in the air like a good image in a poem suggesting possibilities. Electricity. A thought arcs, breaks and backdoors, reverses. My matchup, Sebastian Matthews, quotes his dad, saying a good pickup game demonstrates “that particular balance between pattern and improvisation.” Is that what happened to us? With that “balance” in mind, I’ve been reading Sebastian’s poems again. How his long lines in “I Got...

When I was ten, I didn’t need to see a photo to know that my mother, a lanky beauty, had been an energetic and skilled basketball player, captain of her 1944, ’45, and ’46 high school team, the Clark Bars. The name itself intrigued me. Not only was it the favorite candy bar of my youth, but the reference to my mother’s maiden name, Clark, confirmed in my young mind her indispensability! Ah, to have a team, any team, named after you!

In our family games, she seemed effortlessly to arc the ball high above the driveway, then—swoosh!—straight...

This weekend our family will play in five basketball games. I will play in two and attend my daughter’s three select league games (plus her two soccer games), and her school’s basketball season hasn’t even started yet. One weekend we played eight games.

A few years ago I started dreaming I was playing basketball nearly every single night, waking up my then-girlfriend by diving for loose balls and banking turnaround jump shots. The strange thing about these dreams was that I had barely played basketball since eighth grade, twenty-five years before.

The dreams became so regular and the urge to...

On New Year’s Eve my family and I were in our nation’s capital, in a hotel less than half a mile from the White House. It was the first time my two sons, ages thirteen and ten, had been to Washington. We had spent much of the previous week walking up and down the Mall, checking out the museums and monuments. Along some streets, wooden scaffolding and bleachers reminded us that Barack Obama was soon to be inaugurated. Obama’s face was on the pins and T-shirts being sold by the outdoor vendors in the week’s spring-like warmth, on the covers...

Todd Davis is the author of four books of poems—The Least of These(2010),Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems(2010),Some Heaven(2007), andRipe(2002)—and coeditor ofMaking Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets(2010). His poetry has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor, onThe Writer’s Almanac, and by Marion Roach onThe Naturalist’s Datebook, as well as by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper columnAmerican Life in Poetry. His poems have won the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and have...