In my experience, those who bring a poetry collection to a bar and those who go to a bar to watch the big game are mutually exclusive. Assuming my audience consists of the former, it’s in terrible taste to begin by asking the much-asked sports question: who is the greatest of all time, the G.O.A.T? While it’s not a poetic question — there is no such thing as a G.O.A.T. poet; the notion is on its face ridiculous, as we poets can hardly agree on a canon (there are countless canons) — it is still a very good question, as it provides a basis for a reply and in trying to answer it we find ourselves on a quest.
To say who is the G.O.A.T. is to define greatness, to canonize exemplars. Soccer claims Messi, Ronaldo; football chants Brady, Rodgers; gymnastics has its Biles, tennis its Djokovic. And basketball? Kortney Morrow selects her champ: LeBron James, King James. She makes him a sonnet crown, demystifying the man, the myth, the legend, embedding a new legend, a new myth, and a new kind of man — an us.
Poets putting their all into moving audiences can come across as saccharine, exploitative, their poems can feel like diminishments instead of essentializations, yet I read Morrow’s “Colorway Crown,” from its first line to its last in an absolute huff. At one point, I asked aloud with total excitement, “Is this about LeBron?” I repeated her one-liners back. I started to wish I had a bowl of grapes to further my fruitful reading. I was genuinely moved, and I’m not chagrined to say so.
Perhaps poets are people who need the whole shebang to really feel it, well, in Morrow’s poetic diadem, she throws the whole kitchen sink, or at least it feels like she does. In truth, her crown’s pretty traditional. It looks like an alley-oop, but it feels like a buzzer-beating half-court shot. It’s all commas, periods, capital letters, a dash here and there. Poems appear regular (quatrain, quatrain, quatrain, couplet), each bears a simple title (New Heights, Fruity Pebbles, Carbon).
Never-the-motherfucking-less, it pulses with presence. I want to take a picture of every page and send it to my bro Max. Max loves basketball the way only a bro can, the way only a poet can love a poem, with pure admiration.
Actually, since I am the kind to bring a poetry collection to a bar, I did send every page to Max. (Shoutout to Estabreeze.) I knew I’d need an expert to help me dribble through Morrow’s basketball epic, an apt word, for an epic has at its core a hero. This word — hero, a four-letter word if ever there was one — brings to mind that now-extremely-problematic literati Thomas Carlyle. What makes Carlyle problematic is that his ideas, like that inconsolable syphillitic Nietzsche, are credited with giving rise to fascism; in their defense, any person put on a pedestal runs the risk of becoming an idol, then a false god, then the cult leader of a suicide society, but these abberations are the vile side of a sunny coin; this is the hill I’ll die on, reducing anyone to their most heinous extensions is the kind of knee-jerk reaction only puritans and half-wits and X can tolerate.
Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, And the Hero in History (1840) contains a lecture on “The Hero As Poet,” where he says of the poet, “[They] could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless [they] were at least a Heroic warrior too.” Morrow is our heroic warrior poet, and LeBron her heroic warrior.
A hero means more to all times ahead than to their own times. Thus: G.O.A.T: greatest of all-time. The reputation of such a person increases with time in part because they swear away their own times, own people, own lives. This makes them imperfect historically — for whoever wants to know what ‘really’ happened; they exist as scraps, stories, second-hand, pure apocrypha — yet perfect as heroes, who are never for themselves but always for their people.
“[The hero],” Carlyle says about Dante, “is world-great not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep.” Morrow promotes her hero, LeBron James, who puts Cleveland on his shoulders, a Cleveland that vis-a-vis LeBron James becomes an exemplar of a just world history.
But before we get into history, let’s start at the start. LeBron’s recruited straight out of high school at the age of eighteen, and the world of sports speculates that he will be the one to break the Cleveland curse, the city’s 55-year championshipless losing streak. Years come, go. In 2010, there’s a great hype that this time it’ll be the Lebron James versus Kobe Bryant championship, but it doesn’t happen. The hype fizzles. It’s the game that never was.
His name becomes shorthand for a broken promise. He is the homegrown kid who let everyone down. He rips off his jersey, and commentators ask if this is the last time he’ll rep the Cleveland wine and gold. For a long time, it is. He breaks his contract, and goes to Miami to learn how to win. He begins a player empowerment movement, and becomes the bane of Cleveland fans; people burn his jersey in protest. (A government ordinance read that should Dante enter Florence he is to be “burned alive.” Progress is a pendulum.) Cleveland removes his multi-story mural.
LeBron becomes the villain of his hero story. In Miami, at first, he comes up short, and hits his low. But he does rise up, he wins a championship with the Heat. He returns unwelcome. His past fans see him as cocky, they’re insanely angry, full of hate. They throw batteries at the court. It’s the first time, and probably the only time, that this arena has ever felt such ireful vitriol. The hate turns to joy in 2016; donning the wine and gold, he wins, he cries on court, he delivers the sports version of a speech, “Cleveland, this is for you!”
The city puts his mural back up. The original had him facing out, facing Cleveland, making him the face of Cleveland; and it came with this tagline, “We are all witnesses.” But this new mural transforms him. We see him from the back, his arms are spread out like wings. His jersey reads Cleveland ‘23. We see the back of his jersey, not because he has turned his back on the city, but because by becoming its hero he has given the city its own face. Its own fate.
Back to the poetry of it all. Like that mural, Morrow’s crown conjures a lasting image by balancing the hero with the people, by making the people the hero. In America, where we have a robust hero-worship machine, this may ring as phony. Her subject (which is never LeBron alone but LeBron vis-a-vis Cleveland, LeBron as a symbol for a world full of realized potential) focalizes LeBron and in so doing emerges as an unsung us. It’s this us that is perfectly in tune with what is powerful in poetry.
Then, the real question is —how does she get to us? That is, how does she use poetry to turn the singularly heroic LeBron into a plural and equally heroic we? Wherefrom this power? How does her poetry surpass the limits of witness and enter into the realm of invigoration? How does she give us a new sheen, the sheen of the new, how does she rub away our rusted history?
“Hope,” she begins, “is a kid stepping onto a court.” Hope is an atemporal, intransigent human quality. When we hope for things to be as they were, that’s nostalgia. When we put our hope in the present, that’s agency. When we hope for the future, that’s pure hope, its purity founded in the fact that it is untouchable (the future is never here, never had; hard to grasp).
Morrow doesn’t critique hope-as-nostalgia so much as eviscerate it. The entire first section of Run It Back is an attack on nostalgia. She wants readers to focus on the present, the future. Her verbs don’t lie. At the start of the crown, they’re present progressives, i-n-g’s, either happenings or proceedings: “tossing,” “landing,” “rallying,” “soaring,” “seeing.” She invokes the past as a place from which we move forward: “growing up in Cleveland means finding a way out of amber rust, the color of defeat.” Her past, when invoked, is pregnant with the future: “Still, we dreamt of a rebirth.”
Whereas hope gloms onto a time, witness is timeless. Morrow writes in her fourth sonnet, “Look at all the ways / He put on for us. Put on five playoffs … put on six hundred / & forty muscles, he put on every / position.” Morrow declares “Look.” She says look, I say show me.
I am shown the traces of the past, their trajectory. I see the seasons summed, the impossible body’s improbable feats. But is this timeless? Her verbs don’t lie. Here, “put” is past and present — in an even-further extension of our realm of reference, let’s take Young Jeezy’s 2008 anthem and its you-know-it-if-you-know-it hook, “I put on, I put on, I put on, I put on for my city, on-on for my city” — Jeezy, LeBron and Morrow are all putting on, placing the pressures of the past into the present and pushing the present into the future! (At last! A critic so bold to exclaim!)
With each repetition, there’s a shift in the look of time. Jeezy’s hook could be reworded, losing, for all of its grammatical gains, all of its catchiness, “I did put on, I am putting on, I shall put on, I do put on for my city, on-on for my city.” Extending the atemporal ebonics to Morrow’s lines has a similarly clunky result (“He be put on for us. He did put on five playoffs … he does put on every position”). That clunkiness is the arcane fault of formal English, which is forever losing ground to the succinct speech of the righteous vulgarati.
Her seventh sonnet, “Orange Box,” acts as a volta and begins in the present perfect tense: “We all have / had a block before, we have all been blocked.” A block — by way of imposition — implies a way forward, a sought-after elsewhere. To be blocked on all sides it to be boxed in. That basketball technique (Box in! Box in!) is telling: it indicates that the steps you have taken have brought you to a place with no escape. No way forward, no way out.
Facing a claustrophobic past, her crown jukes its volta. There are grown men who are “shocked,” there is talk of a “false prophecy”; she speaks of “losing.” If you know your history you will never be shocked; false prophecy is an impatient one; losing can only happen when you insist on holding on. Her poem, which fights for that atemporal new tomorrow, cannot bear the heavy past — no one can — and relents to, or rather accedes, the present tense, which holds forth an adventurous future. To bring this future about, the “hero leaves home.”
In the hole without home, her poem begins to fragment: “Our stories.”; “Options.”; “Anger hot, admonishment swallowing fire.”; “To heal?” Fragmentation happens when we do not live in the present, that is, when we relinquish agency. It takes nearly four sonnets for the poem to congeal again. It does so with the appearance of two key words: angel; and, free. True, not all things with wings are angels. LeBron is the angel of Cleveland, then he is its fallen angel. Saintly, then luciferic.
In “City of Angels,” she writes, “What if we were all free agents — untethered?” Her tapestry of time rebinds a sentence at a time. Her sentences span lines, and appear more and more like a narrative. Through her invocation of freedom, Morrow becomes a character with a narrative equal to LeBron’s. Her narrative binds the man, the myth, the legend to the narrative of the city, such that the narrative is no longer one of him, herself, or the city, but of freedom, which is found in the now. This is epitomized by her antepenultimate, “New Heights,” which invokes a we five times, plus an our, and to top it all off an everyone.
Her recapitulating sonnet completes her lyric. A lyric poem is the unfolding of an exclamation, said Paul Valéry; Morrow unfolds her wings, her city’s wings, exclaiming: “If we were all free agents, untethered — / taking all our talents to multiply, / against all odds, dream what we could witness.”
Dream what we could witness: this is a paradox. A fruitful paradox, and I will broach it, but first, echoing her title as well as the sonnet crown form itself, looping ending to beginning, I want to run it back, and I mean way back. In 2021, John Murillo penned a sonnet crown, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” partly about the 1992 Watts riots, and hugely about being black in America. His sonnets each start with a quote, including this one by his fellow sonneteer Terrance Hayes, “This country is mine as much as an orphan’s house is his.”
To quote back to back, a critical hat on a hat, Murillo writes, “free / to wax heroic. Deep. As bullet holes / through Panther posters, Huey’s shattered throne.” In Morrow, and in LeBron, who is belovedly called King James, don’t we have a reforging of that shattered throne? Isn’t that panther painted with new stripes? I will answer these rhetorical questions with another rhetorical question. Hasn’t LeBron, by forging forward, by being a Cavalier, by bringing the Heat, made not just a house but a mansion?
By contextualizing Morrow, through White man Carlyle and his heroic Dante then through Murillo and Hayes, I’m making a humble demand for history, a particular type of history where there is joy for the once-down-trodden. Dante dies in exile, indeed, but his lyric lives on forever. Murillo’s poem is explicitly a refusal to mourn. Morrow’s history is a jumping-off point, a past rehabilitated by the present. It is common now to look upon the present and despair, though it always has been.
Annie Dillard, a favorite kook of mine, wrote, “The good times, and the heroic people, are all gone. Everyone knows this. Everyone always has….The mournings of the wise recur as a comic refrain down the vaults of recorded time…. Already in the first century thinkers thought the world was shot to hell. Paul of Tarsus, living then too, called his days “these late times.” Almost sixteen centuries ago, Augustine looked back three centuries at the apostles and their millennialism: “Those were last days then; how much more so now!””
It is perfectly plausible that insisting on a happy history is not just cringe but repugnant. How dare you, haven’t you walked these streets, haven’t you seen the latest War? I respond to you who are repulsed by the potential of a positive future with Morrow’s concluding paradox: “dream what we could witness.” She is asking us to believe in the impossible — to dream, to enter rapid eye movement, to rejuvenate; yet also to witness, to be clear eyed, to stay focused, to recuperate.
She is true to this ask. She has taken a real place and point in time, tracing Cleveland and its people and herself through LeBron, and she has done so religiously, that is, in such a way that the eye is totally trained on the object of attention, in order that this attention may provide a way forward. She is saying: run it back, learn the past, leave the past in the past, then don’t ever, ever look back. With this caveat: if you must return, if you have to come back, then make it a comeback.
Emiliano Gomez
Emiliano Gomez (aka E) is an artist from California. He attended the MFA in Poetry at Notre Dame; he has poems in swamppink. He is working on Copacetic while traveling the U.S. and writing sonnets.