Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, award-winning sportswriter Peter Richmond looks back on the moment his career took a remarkable turn, sparked by poetry from an unlikely source: Elvis Costello.
My ninth-grade English teacher, Mac, was appropriately English. He favored tweed jackets, sweater-vests, and tortoiseshell glasses, and spoke in a very Merchant Ivory voice—which he frequently used to emphasize to the class that the poetry of a handful of white European men from distant centuries represented the pinnacle of Western literature. Poetry, Mac said, in the exactitude of its language and form, held the key to the exquisite beauty of the literary promised land.
Mac was a great teacher, so I trusted him. But I could not untangle the words of Lord Byron and John Keats. “Lethe-wards had sunk” wasn’t the kind of phrase that made me want to know what Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” was trying to tell me. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I liked to read and write stories that had a narrative arc. Poems generally left me wondering why the sentences were randomly diced up; if they were even sentences at all. And so, for many years, I believed that until I found a way into the lyrical mysteries of classical poetry, I’d be forever deprived literarily, and a lesser writer for it.
