John Maloney’s “Good!” A short (14-line) poem encompasses the fast paced events within a Basketball game. The intense play-by-play imagery Maloney gives us displays his knowledge of Basketball and his love of the sport. There
The poem is narrated in a limited third person perspective of a player that gains possession of the basketball after a rebound. The poet focuses the narrative on the actions directly following him gaining possession of the basketball. The determination the poet feels to keep the ball in his team’s possession and make a shot is felt strongly through the poem’s lines 3-7:
...he dribbles, hounded by hands, calls the play, stops short, looking hard for a slant opening, fakes it twice, passes into the center—he lobs to the small forward, top of the key, a pick: (Good)
The speaker of the poem, a player on the court, has one thing on his mind, the game and the game
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The moment the poet would go for the shot. This one word is the climax of the poem. The dénouement within line 13 is beautifully constructed to show the tension felt when the ball hits the rim of the basket. “Will the poet make the shot?” “Will they miss and start the process all over again?” These are common thoughts going through readers’ heads during this line, as this is a make it or break it moment for the poet during his basketball game. Line 14 gives a sense of relief and triumph to the reader as they feel an empathetic accomplishment through the poet when the ball went in the net.
Written with rhyme, but no meter and lines containing 9 to 12 syllables, Good has a long and voluminous shape. Maloney uses smaller, more subtle rhyme scheme at the end of each line to give his poem limber form. He uses the last syllable of the last word to create the alternate rhyme scheme. As the length of each line changes throughout the poem, the lines create a visual of a basketball being
Joes High School’s total enrollment consisted of sixteen girls, and twenty boys. Ten of the boys that had enrolled there played basketball. All of the boys were over six feet tall. Lane Sullivan, the new coach of the basketball team, had never even touched a basketball before he started coaching. Sullivan had never coached anything at all before he started coaching the Joes basketball team. In order to gain knowledge about the sport, he got a book about it. He started coaching in 1927, but before the 1928 basketball season, Joes High School didn’t even have a gym. Instead, they’d practice outside on a dirt court, and two times a week they’d take a bus to the nearest gym, which was ten miles away. In order to play home games, the boys had to play in the local dance hall. The “court” was nowhere near regulation size, and the ceiling was so short that the boys couldn’t shoot an arched shot. The people who attended these basketball games had no place to sit and watch the game, the all stood around the edges of the court and on the small stage. Joes High School finally got their own gym around Christmas time because the people of Joes donated their time and material in order to make it happen.
In “Life Cycle” Dawe uses the mixtures of Juxoposition and slang to explain the idea of sport being like a religion, similarly Harwood’s “The glass jar” uses multiple techniques including metaphorical imagery, religious connotations and ambiguous meanings which support her idea of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Dawe connects religious connotations to the poem when he describes the sports players being “In the pure flood of sound, they are scarfed with light, a voice, like the voice of God booms from the stands” using the “voice of God” metaphorically, likewise, Harwood uses the sun ambiguously as light- symbolising security and having the characteristics of the Son or the Saviour. Contrastingly, Through the use of clichés Dawe has been able to connect sport terms with religious connotations when he describes the winning team “going up the ladder into Heaven”, correspondingly Harwood uses imagery such as “disciples” to express the child’s belief in the “pulse of light beside his bed”. Both poets used forms Juxoposition and religious connotations to emphasize the tone of the poem as Dawe connects a sports to religion, Harwood uses fear and relates it to good and
While reading the articles I found a connection in the poems Contest, The Jump Shooter, Day and Night Handball. All three of these poems followed a theme about growing old and gaining more wisdom about a sport. The message of these poems is that aging doesn’t change your ability to play a sport, because even though you may not be as strong, or as fast you still have more experience. These authors portray this theme through imagery. The poem Contest creates an image of younger athletes circling around her but she is still able to keep up with them because she has experience from previous years. In the Jump Shooter Dennis Trudell split up the lines of the poem differently because sentences are split into a few lines. It makes the poem feel more
The poem begins by introducing the main figure in the poem, a naturally talented baseball player named Hector Moreno. To the narrator, the game of baseball is more than just a simple game, “it [is] a figure – Hector Moreno” (6). Describing Hector Moreno initially as a figure closely associated with the game of baseball shows just how revered a person Hector is in the narrator’s mind. This image of Hector Moreno is quite concrete, but as the poem continues, the narrator expresses to the reader that his father died sometime during his childhood, as “his [father’s] face no longer [hangs] over the table” (18). Suddenly the image of Hector Moreno is not as concrete as it first appears, especially through the lines leading up to Moreno’s first appearance on the baseball field “in the lengthening shade” (4-5). The shadow of the narrator’s father over the dinner table when he was a boy has now taken the form of Moreno’s figure in the shade over the baseball field since the narrator’s father has died. This initial me...
Diction is used through out the poem Execution to effectively portray the Coach's character through out the story and the battle he is fighting with cancer. In the story the game of football was used with an extended symbolic meaning representing the game of life. At the beginning of the story Hirsch used phrases...
In the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young” the author uses rhyme to show the readers how the glory of the runner came and went in a dramatic way. By having rhyme in “To an Athlete Dying Young” it allows the irony in the poem and the meaning that poet A. E. Housman is trying to convey, really stick with the readers. In stanza three, “away” and “stay” and “grows” and “rose” make that stanza really stay put in the mind of the readers.
To conclude, the poem “Ex-Basketball play,” is a poem that shows the reality of life. It reflects the nature of life in the real world and it helps people who have a dream and want to pursue their goals to go for it. The poem was formally organized and provides a number of figurative languages that helps to bring out tone of the poem.
"Characteristics of Modern Poetry - Poetry - Questions & Answers." ENotes - Literature Study Guides, Lesson Plans, and More. Web. 09 Jan. 2012. .
What defeats Rabbit in real life is the absence of a counter part for the basket in basketball. Rabbit loves the games because they create and clearly define goals, the way to get points, becoming first rate, a success. Contrastingly, the real world does not tell him what that something-that-wants-him-to-find-it is (Markle 46). Rabbit does not have the ball, he does not have the key to the goal in his hands. But thr...
...slapshot from the point. Two minutes later the puck broke loose from one of the other team's defensman and landed on our most talented player’s stick. He is not only as fast as lightning but can also stick handle around any NHL team blindfolded. He made a quick move to the left, and then to the right. He took the shot which went top shelf on the right side. The second I saw the net move I knew we had done it. The underdog team defeated the 1st ranked team in the state championship game for Missouri high school hockey. An uproar from the mob of people could have been heard from two miles away. I couldn’t believe we had done it. We beat the odds, and took the cup. I felt shivers travel down my bruised and cut body. The hard work did pay off, for we had done it. The tears were flowing like the water dropping from the Niagara Falls. We were State Champions.
In conclusion the poem Harlem uses figurative language to explain the feelings and thoughts of the
“The odds of a high school basketball player making it to the “next level” to play college basketball (DI, II, or III) is slim. In fact, only 3.4% of high school players go on to play college basketball. Taking it even further, only 1.2% of college basketball players go on to get drafted in the NBA” (Winters, 2016). There are two types of players in the game. There are the kids who play basketball because they are athletic, and all they are seeking to gain is the recognition and awards. They want to be known. Those players are self-centered, they do not play for the team, and generally don’t play because they love the game. These are the types of players who don’t usually go on to play at the next level. On the other hand, there are the players that absolutely dedicate their life to the game of basketball just because they love the game. That is what coaches are looking for in a player, and that is the kind of player I am striving to be.
Everyone wants to get better at something, but some want it more than others. In “How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium”, the narrator wants to get better at basketball, so he wakes up everyday at 4:30 to go with his dad to his work. Everyday, the narrator would wait 3 hours in his dad’s car until the gym opened, only to sit on the bench and watch the other men play basketball. Finally, one of the best players, Dante, tells the narrator he can play but he’ll get “smoked”. However, the narrator proved him wrong. The narrator learns that if you persevere, work hard, and have confidence, your dreams may come true. In How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place
In the last line of the second stanza, the subject enters dramatically, accompanied by an abrupt change in the rhythm of the poem:
When Bobby sat down his basketball as a symbol of his childhood and it rolled away. Bobby was going to go play basketball but he eluded it because he has bigger responsibilities. He sat his basketball down to go get his responsibilities and take care of them. Bobby is not exonerated anymore. Bobby's basketball times are slowly expiring. Afterall that's what being a “real man” consists of when your childhood rolls away.