The Scent of These Armpits: Poetic Thoughts on Sport
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Pub. Date: December 14, 2007
ISBN-10: 1419678736
ISBN-13: 978-1419678738
Edition Description: paperback, 304 pages

Reviewer: Joseph Powell, Professor, English, Central Washington University

I must admit that I was immediately attracted to Scott Melville's anthology by the title. It suggested a rather unsentimental compilation of poems and writing about the sweaty business of sport. He takes his title from Walt Whitman, that poet of lived life in its full sweep of triumph, sensuality, failure, contradictions, and generosity. Melville has a kind of Whitmanesque apprehension of sport that runs from a mawkish, unapologetic endorsement to wry, hard-headed examinations of its complexities and difficulties. Both the way he has organized his material and wide ranging examples speak to his abiding love of sports.

The chapters are divided into poems about the joys of sport, the drama of it, the various skills required, philosophizing about it, aging and death in sport, and wellness. Each of these chapters has twenty to forty entries, and every entry has a brief biographical note about the author. These authors range from the most obscure to the most famous writers in English. For example, there is a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. who died in WWII on a bombing mission, but sent home a poem about flying three months before he died, and there are poems by Vigil, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Yeats. Yet there is also a fair and just sampling of fine contemporary American poets who would be obscure to most Americans, but famous among poets: writers like C. K. Williams, Robert Francis, Linda Pastan, Donald Hall, Maxine Kumin, Peter Meinke, A. R. Ammons, Stephen Dunn, Gwendolyn Brooks, etc.

This project was clearly a labor of love that must have consumed thousands of hours of reading and research and note-taking and categorizing. The breadth and inclusiveness of material are matched by the inclusiveness of sporting activity. In the Preface, Melville says "I am broadly defining sport to encompass young and old, male and female, as they engage in and reflect upon their diverse athletic endeavors." Besides the predictable array of sports, he includes almost any activity that requires some physical output and may have an aesthetic attraction to participants like canoeing, dancing, fishing, juggling, skateboarding, sledding, stationary bicycling, and walking. His aesthetic principle for choosing pieces was that "all selections avoid obscurity and ring with a beautiful clarity."

He certainly delivers on this promise. Even the poems and scraps of prose that seem to be conventional in sentiment usually have redeeming descriptions of the activities they describe which make the reading worthwhile. Although these descriptions are often charming, my favorite section in the book is "Philosophizing About Sports," which looks at the underside of human endeavor and tries to make sense of it on the deepest levels. For example, in Pat Conroy's piece called "My Losing Season," he says "Winning is wonderful in every aspect, but the darker music of loss resonates on deeper, richer planes. . .Winning makes you think you'll always get the girl, land the job, deposit the million-dollar check, win the promotion, and you grow accustomed to a life of answered prayers. Winning shapes the soul of bad movies and novels and lives. It is the subject of thousands of insufferably bad books and is often a sworn enemy of art. Loss is a fiercer, more uncompromising teacher, coldhearted but clear-eyed in its understanding that life is more dilemma than game, and more trials than free pass" (118).

In a culture whose predominate values center on success, fame, and victory, we need these reminders that loss is a better teacher, that emotional drive is complicated ("See the son of grief at cricket/ Trying to be glad") (128), that "excellence is millimeters not miles" (112), that pain has its value. Ronald Wallace wrote a poem about a Miss Bricka who lost in a semi-final round in a Pennsylvania tennis tournament in which he says, "Bluely, loss/ hurts in your eyes—not loss merely, / but seeing how everything is less/ that seemed so much, how life moves on/ past either defeat or victory/ how, too old to cry, you shall find steps to turn away" (145). It is reading poems and prose like this that helps us find the steps to turn away with some dignity, some resolve, some lessons learned.

However, this book essentially celebrates motion, the joys of physicality unperfumed. It is a marvelous tribute to activity, our bodies in the act of striving, taking full pleasure in being alive no matter how old we are.