Quick: What is the most watched sport on Canadian televisions?
Well, it’s got to be hockey, right? After all, that is Canada’s unofficial national sport. Riots ensued when the Montreal Canadians won the Stanley Cup in 1993. Hey, it’s hard to imagine Canadians rioting about anything! We’re talking about a country where a rebellion involved two guys marching down Yonge Street in Toronto until the summer heat drove them into a tavern.
Would you believe that ice hockey is not the most popular sport on Canadian televisions? It isn’t.
Okay, then it has to be Canadian Football League games. These are, after all, broadcast two or three nights a week on the nation’s networks during prime time. If it isn’t hockey, it has to be CFL football, right?
Nope.
Curling? The sport is more popular in Canada than anywhere else. The Briar and the Tournament of Hearts are must-watch events for any serious Canadian sports fan.
Nope.
Basketball, which was invented by a man who’d taught in Nova Scotia? Baseball, with the Toronto Blue Jays having won a World Series in 1992 and 1993? Golf? Tennis? Figure skating?
Nope, nope, nope, nope and nope.
The correct answer is the same in Canada as in the United States: National Football League games.
Why? Is it the hype surrounding the sport, culminating in two weeks of non-stop media Superbowl frenzy? Partly, but not fundamentally.
The meteoric rise in popularity of the NFL was due to one phenomenon: Fantasy Football. Not betting, mind you. That can be done on any sport; Las Vegas even has a line on CFL games. Sportscasters no longer mention the Vegas line, as Jimmy the Greek did two decades ago. It’s verboten. Instead, they talk about who you should sit from or insert into your FF lineup. Unlike the one-game or, through parlays, one-weekend commitment of a bet against the Vegas spread, FF requires a year-long commitment of redrafts, lineup selection, player pickups and waivers. In short, albeit in an odd way, NFL watchers “participate” through FF. People who couldn’t field a snap are involved on a week-to-week, if not day-to-day, basis in following the sport, all propelled by self-interest: winning their FF pool. FF enthusiasts speak of “owning” players that they’ve drafted onto their squad.
Fans “participate”, becoming “involved” in “owning” something. These keys are either missing or not promoted as aggressively in other sports and contemporary poetry.
Until the 20th Century, poetry was an integral aspect of everyone’s life. It was in virtually every newspaper and magazine. Popular poets were treated like today’s rock stars. They were the sex symbols of a more puritanical age.
Before WWI, children learned to love poetry through nursery rhymes, much as today’s kids do, minus the distraction of cartoons and superheroes. When they entered grade school their paths diverged from current experience, though, as children were taught poetry by teachers whose strictness may have reduced their students’ passion for the written word. No matter. When these youngsters reached puberty their fascination for verse returned with a vengeance. Why? Because poetry was sexy. I don’t mean sexy in its content, where Victorian prudery would require that any titillation be couched in euphemism, symbolism and innuendo. Poetry was sexy in its practice and proliferation. Reciting poetry as a parlour game or injecting quotes into conversations was a way to make oneself appear interesting: sensitive, sophisticated, intelligent and good-humoured. The best part of it was the fact that, as long as the content wasn’t bawdy, this could be done in front of parents without disapproval. The more forbidden the love, the more vital poetry’s role became. Given the aphrodisiacal nature of verse, even with established couples, it is hard to estimate how many of us owe our very existence to poetry.
Thus, when readers scanned those newspapers and magazines for the poetry columns, their interest was not always an aesthetic one. Like Fantasy Football fans who don’t care who wins the game as long as their players do well, poetry readers might imagine reciting these offerings and attracting the attention of a prospective lover. This might require “making the poem their own”: not just memorizing it but rehearsing its delivery. People would “participate” and became “involved” in “owning” the poem. There’s those three words again!
All of this needs to be recaptured after becoming unravelled in the 20th Century. What killed poetry? Opinions abound, but it seems clear that Julius Caesar and Benito Mussolini had fewer executioners. There is one common thread, though, that runs through all the conspirators: the written word. People continued to write about poetry but, except for university lectures, they stopped talking about it. They stopped reciting it.
The best and worst thing that ever happened to poetry was the advent of writing. Among many other benefits such as standardizing a text and facilitating its distribution, especially after the invention of the Gutenburg press in 1450, it meant that poetry could be preserved; it no longer had to be memorized. Ironically, this led not only to poetry’s rise but its decline as well. It no long had to be memorized.
In the last 100 years a new animal arose that, except for works-in-process, would have been utterly foreign to 19th Century and earlier audiences: the poetry reading. Not the recital or performance. The reading. For a 19th Century author to have to read their own poem from a published book would have been regarded as lazy and unprofessional. Would you watch a play or movie where the actors read from a script? Where is the realism? Where is the commitment? Where is the romance? The sexiness? How can poets burn their words into our hearts and loins if they’re not looking into our eyes?
If poets cannot be bothered to memorize their work how can anyone expect audience members to do so? Is it any wonder that, aside from Dr. Suess nursery rhymes and limericks about a man from Nantucket, the average North American anglophone cannot recite a single line of poetry written in the last half century? Compare this to Pablo Neruda’s experience in Chile. While performing in a sold-right-out soccer stadium–imagine that!–the aged poet apologetically announced that he wouldn’t be performing a certain poem because he hadn’t done so in a while and his memory was failing. Read it from a book? Unthinkable. No problem, though. The audience stood up en masse and recited it to him!
That scene encapsulates all we need to know about the state of contemporary English language poetry.