Nothing But Knit
Every single one of Mark Craver's books is a machine of crushing beauty.
Just about every poem of his that I've read is an almost unbearably
honest re-structuring of human relationships--to others, to the natural
world, to self, to history. His voice and his stories are so absorbing at
times that it's breathtaking to look closer and find a highly skilled
technician at work, often with some very intricate, difficult forms
without sacrificing function. His second book, aside from the proem and
final piece, are all sonnets and sonnet crowns. There are letter poems, a
sequence of abecedariums, sestinas, prose poems, a long poem that opens a
book (a gutsy move) alternating between free verse and prose, and now,
with Team First Team Last, a literally moving epic prose poem. The
vehicle for the book, and the impulse behind it, is the Hayfield Hawks
basketball team. Craver has taught English at Hayfield Secondary School
in Alexandria, Virginia since 1985, and followed the Hawks as timekeeper,
poet, and fan since 1991.
In the prologue, stressing the book as an epic poem, Craver tells us "The
subject is the subject of all epics: language and the way we use it to
record and absorb deeds of historical, national, religious, and legendary
significance. The deeds stand by themselves like poles in the blacktop of
history but it is in the saying of these deeds that they become true and
real." Nietzsche believed the true test of an artist is the creation of a
"dream sphere" and Craver's book is just that: in the telling and the
reading, this story becomes real--I am enveloped in another place and
others' experiences each time I open the book. And it does seem to have a
kind of swirl and blur to it since it is not a chronological narrative-
time and place have been shifted around and sifted through in order to
re-enact the true processes of memory. As for the epic-ness, he begins by
invoking his muse: "I call on the ghost of Ronnell Felton to help me tell
this story true and real, without ego. None of the names have been
changed. These people said these words and did these things. That's what
they are." This honesty, this gesture of honor, is an integral part of
Craver's voice and style.
Team First Team Last does have a recognizably classic symmetry.
Bookended by a prologue and epilogue, and with an interlude right smack
dab in the middle that begins "This book is finished", its twelve
chapters suggest the cycle of hours, months, and in this alignment with
the passing of time, imply mortality. Ronnell Felton is the heart of this
meditation on mortality and the passing kind of immortality found in
a young person brimming with talent.
At one point, Coach Brian Metress (also the school's Latin poetry
teacher) says, "Bill Russell may be the muse of all basketball, but at
Hayfield it's got to be Ronnell Felton." Later on, he tells Craver,
"Ronnell Felton is Hayfield Basketball. It couldn't be what it is
without him." According to Craver, "From 1991 to 2000, Hayfield posted a
182-56 win/loss record, an average of twenty wins a year in an eighteen-
game regular season" and much of that is due to Ronnell and, later on,
his brother Cornell. At one point, watching Ronnell play, Craver says "He
is not playing a game so much as he is playing with his own joy through
the game"-as if his joy was a tool he used to work on basketball, an
instrument on which he played its music.
Ronnell develops lymphatic cancer and dies. Since this happens in the
second chapter, the rest of the book is a kind of aftermath, but it's
neither a gush-grieving or false-ennoblement. What happens is the sport-
games, practices, quick hallway or bus conversations, and the occasional
post-game drink. The Hawks win, they lose, they struggle. Chapters
devoted to games and practices embrace the speed, agility, precision and
physicality of the game, becoming sensual experiences; there are also
bits of practical "texts"-rosters, exercise scripts, practice outlines,
thoughts and emphases of the day, drills, and pieces of Greek philosophy
with Heraclitus and Metress' own "tabula rosa" (blank slate) theory of
foul-shooting. We see coaches' devotion (Metress doesn't get much sleep
and admits he's probably not a good teacher, father, or husband during
the season), fans' love, a family's grief and move forward. It's in these
details, these fragmented, loving portraits that the book becomes both a
kind of athletic and spiritual artifact.
There is an implied poignance, an explicit generosity in watching men teach boys about character through basketball, and a little philosophy.
We see the men in service of the radiance of youth, and the boys as
students of time and each other. In the epilogue, Craver realizes "the
big fear is not death; the big fear is that I had become a high school
English teacher", but through the rituals of the game and its
participants, and his meditation and re-membering of them, he learns
"that being a high school English teacher is enough. It has always been
enough." He closes, or opens, "It's not about basketball. It's about the
intensity of attention given by men of passion to boys desperate for that
attention through a game that employs the hand, head, and heart to build
something true and elemental: character. It is this character that I
praise. What do we call that intensity of attention? That's my song of
love." Metress believes "the only way to build character is through
competition" and competition depends on a community, on a team, on the
movements on a gleaming court.
