Jock Construct

What could a booming poetry culture look like? Sports:

Poetry should have the same kind of social acceptability and vernacular expertise as sports. After all, most American men, and many women too, are not just sports fans but sports intellectuals, with personal experience playing the games, statistics and facts at the ready, deep historical knowledge — all without ever having taken a course in the subject. People adore sports not as therapy or middlebrow self-betterment but for sports’ own formalist sake: I hate to admit it, but “l’art pour l’art” is a jock construct.