The End is Wide Open
A reflection on Denis Johnson's poem, "Why I Might Go to My Next Football Game"
With football season rushing to a close (and only having watched but a few moments of the NFL playoffs now that I find FA Cup soccer and following my beloved Arsenal’s grip on the top of the table in the British Premier League more engaging), Denis Johnson’s poem “Why I Might Go to My Next Football Game” came to mind. Click on the link, and give it a quick read, then come back if you would like to hear a little about what I think of it.
The poem is an Ars Poetica (after Horace, I believe), or a poem about the nature of poetry—one of my favorite forms. In it Johnson weds both the experience of first sexual awakening and watching a football game (American football, that is) to the fundamental nature of poetry.
That opening line, “sometimes you know/things:” with its colon suggests that the whole of the remainder of the poem is a restating of that idea, that sometimes we experience things that bring us deeper into an understanding of ourselves and the world around us. This is the beginning of art, of poetry. And this first line is one of the few abstractions we find in the poem—the rest mostly grounded in imagery and experience, metaphor, simile, strings of similes, metaphors inside of similes….
When the little girl tells the boy-poet she “liked” him, his way of seeing is “suddenly” altered, and a rush of figurative expressions begin: he feels “stuffed like a swimming pool with/words, like I knew something that was/in a great tangled knot.” The simplicity and directness of the opening lines, the charming story we all know something about, first “love,” makes a shift toward a concurrent feeling of wanting to unravel and somehow find a way to express this universal human experience in language. I love that first simile, “stuffed like a swimming pool with words.” It is such an impossible image to see or imagine fully, denying any kind of visual or logical handholds. How can words “stuff” a swimming pool (not "fill up with words,” or not even “overflowing with words”)? The imagery itself is perplexing yet somehow fitting especially when followed up with the more graspable simile “like something…in a great tangled knot.” And the poem itself is a gathering of words, is “stuffed with words,” so here the poem makes its first formal gesture toward being a poem about poetry, an Ars Poetica. And that string of similes continues with the recognition that the emotion is “too big, or like the outside too/everywhere,” which then quickly returns to the immediate memory of the experience, Johnson postulating that all of this rush of emotion wasn’t really so “big” after all, not so “like the outside” and “everywhere” but more like the “inside” where he kisses her. And perhaps it is both things all at once, small and tangible, vast and mystifying.
Even then, in that moment of contact with the “mystery,” it remains still “too big…too well hidden.” And the poet turns to tackling her to try to find a way toward grasping (literally and figuratively) the mysterious source of the emotion he has encountered by tackling her on the playground, punching her, trying to find his way toward this thing that remains “soft” and felt, yet somehow still out of reach. And now the poem more emphatically becomes a poem about poetry and the metaphor of “tackling” mystery is set down as the job of the young poet. An aside: I can remember one of my own boys in daycare biting a little girl. One of the teachers there told me it was common for this to happen—children biting, hitting, tackling other children. She told me it happened when they really liked another child and couldn’t figure out what to do with that emotion.
But Johnson now quickly turns the poem back to the title, leaving us with a very different metaphor for the nature of poetry, the thing he now understands about it—that it is more like “an old man wrapped in a great coat” who “remains standing after each play, who knows/something” that first line of the poem returning here toward the end. Poetry is about knowledge, about finding a way to express that knowledge meaningfully. But all the man offers is the same question/answer three times, “whydidnhe pass the other/end was wide open! the end/was wide open! the end was wide open!” This is better than tackling, than being out there on the playing field and wrestling with that “great tangled knot” of mystery. To observe carefully. To “remain standing” at a distance. And notice the last words of the poem—the end of the poem is in fact “wide open” in that Johnson isn’t attempting to provide a simple answer for what he knows, for the mystery he has encountered for his meditation on the nature of poetry. He leaves us with this simple image and the metaphor for what it is to be a good poet: to watch the game (life, one’s experiences, the things you “know”) from the stands, to holler out (write your poems) though perhaps no one is even listening. They are all too intent on what is going on on the field, and those on the field are too lost in the act of playing the game.
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A fantastic poem 👏
You have an unusual ability to help the reader understand the power of words, in verse or in prose:) The teacher in you will not recede quite yet, if ever!
i love this poem