Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “Boxing and the Breath” and inviting the reader into your subculture.
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores. Today’s poem is “Boxing and the Breath,” and we’ll talk about inviting the reader into your subculture.
In America, poetry is the territory of academics and liberals, the kind of people who are more likely to go to therapy than to a boxing gym. I think we need more blue collar poems, so I’m excited to take you into the boxing ring today and share a subculture that you may not be familiar with. Here’s…
Boxing and the Breath
In boxing, it’s the breath that matters,
not the sideways shuffle, tuck and cover,
shoulder-to-the-ear-and-shoot-the-jab,
but the breath, that fragile flower in your ribs.
Caught against the ropes, gloves to your cheekbones,
punches falling like god damn hailstones,
you can still breathe. Exhale on the body shots.
Gulp air on the corner stool.
All of life comes down to this. Move. Breathe.
Stick. Breathe. The body won’t quit till you do.
Discuss:
As a poet, you’re a tour guide. Your job is to invite people into your world and show them around. And sure, maybe some of them are familiar with your world. Maybe, I don’t know, ten percent of my listeners here today have gotten in a boxing ring or sparred in the backyard with a relative or something like this.
But the reader may not be part of your subculture or your end group, and that’s okay. We can all understand each other because we have the same brains, and we’ve had the same brains as Homo sapiens going back 300, 000 years now.
A caveman or cavewoman could take you to those old cave paintings and explain that viewpoint. Even though you’ve never hunted or built a fire or whatever, you can understand each other because we’re wired for empathy. We can understand other human experiences as long as we take the time to explain them to each other.
So, in this poem, I’m trying to take you into the world of boxing. I want you to feel like you belong there for this short minute of a poem, even if you hate violence, or you’re a little ambivalent about getting punched in the face, which I think is a pretty reasonable position.
There’s something to learn about the world and ourselves through boxing, just like there’s something to learn through making tortillas, or riding horses, or trading stocks, or dancing ballet. We just need to show each other.
You can invite the reader into your world and share those insights in a couple key ways. One of them is no surprise if you’ve been following along on the podcast, and that’s sharp sensory details, or sensory imagery. Outside of bumper stickers and political campaigns, nobody really cares if you just make a statement. You need to put that reader into a sensory world, into a scene, so that he or she can feel it.
The second way is using specific words, either jargon or dialect, that are unique to your subgroup. Now, jargon is a specific vocabulary for a profession or a hobby, and dialect is a subgroup of a language, sometimes regional, sometimes ethnic. You want to use just enough of these words from jargon or dialect to make it feel real without shutting out the uninformed reader who might be part of the rest of the population that isn’t in your subgroup.
I’m using both strategies in this poem, sensory details and jargon. So let’s run through the poem, and I’ll point some of them out.
“In boxing, it’s the breath that matters. Not the sideways shuffle.” That’s a sensory cue. I’m trying to recreate for you the experience of one way to slip a punch, to get to the side of an incoming punch.
So we have, “not the sideways shuffle, tuck and cover…” Here we’ve got some boxing jargon.
A little bit of sensory cue: “shoulder to the ear and shoot the jab.” That’s a sensory cue and something that your coach might point out as he’s teaching you the steps of the punch. So you want to get that shoulder up to your ear or cheekbone so you’re protecting yourself from, say, a hook while you throw your punch.
Now, I’ll admit that boxing coaches have helped me with my footwork, my pivot, and they’ve sometimes made fun of my punches, but, they’ve never ever said the phrase, “the breath is a fragile flower in your ribs.” But it’s true.
“Caught against the ropes. Gloves to your cheekbones. Punches falling like goddamn hailstones”… Here we have more sensory cues. There’s not really any special jargon. There’s that cue that’s specific to the hobby or profession of getting the gloves up against the cheeks, but really I’m just trying to get you physically into the ring, in that uncomfortable moment of getting hammered with punches.
“You can still breathe. Exhale on the body shots.” That’s a little mix of sensory cue and jargon.
“Gulp air on the corner stool.” That’s a tiny little bit of jargon. We’re all familiar with that stool that a boxer uses between rounds to rest on.
“All of life comes down to this. Move. Breathe. Stick. Breathe.” And here we have some jargon again. Stick and move is an old boxing phrase. Stick means to stick that punch out there, get the jab moving. And move is just move before somebody punches you. I want those directions to be short and sweet, like your coach is hollering something out to you as you’re in the ring or you’re in training.
And then we have our closing statement: “the body won’t quit till you do.”
So, I would say the statements here—we’ve talked about image versus statement in some other poems—the statements that aren’t really either sensory cues or boxing jargon are, in boxing it’s the breath that matters. The breath, that fragile flower in your ribs. All of life comes down to this. The body won’t quit till you do. And the rest of the poem is pretty much either sensory cues or boxing jargon.
You notice that I’m not doing a lot of summary of the experience here. I’m not telling you a ton of things. I’ve got those four statements, which are carrying a lot of the weight of the poem, but I’m not making statements about the experience of boxing, like, It sure is uncomfortable to be in there with punches coming at your face. Man, it’s disorienting. It’s hard to catch your breath. And certainly not this lecture like, Breathing is one way to stabilize your emotions during a stressful event, even though that’s true.
I want to embed you in the scene. I want to put you right there in the ring so that you feel those truths in your gut instead, and then the poem can provide an answer or an aha moment.
Let’s hear “Boxing and the Breath” again, with a shout out to the awesome folks at Whimsical Poet Journal, where this poem first appeared, and listen for those two strategies that I’m suggesting you try in order to bring a reader into your subculture, or your in-group, whatever that is: sharp sensory cues, sensory imagery, and jargon or dialect that’s specific.
Boxing and the Breath
In boxing, it’s the breath that matters,
not the sideways shuffle, tuck and cover,
shoulder-to-the-ear-and-shoot-the-jab,
but the breath, that fragile flower in your ribs.
Caught against the ropes, gloves to your cheekbones,
punches falling like god damn hailstones,
you can still breathe. Exhale on the body shots.
Gulp air on the corner stool.
All of life comes down to this. Move. Breathe.
Stick. Breathe. The body won’t quit till you do.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, write a poem that invites readers into a subgroup or unique experience that you’re a part of. Use that combination of strong sensory cues and jargon or dialect to help the reader feel like he or she belongs there.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt. This season, I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. I’ll read you the whole book here for free, but I won’t stop you from buying a copy.
It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.