Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The Poetry of Everyday LifeStorytelling and the Art of Awareness$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness

Steve Zeitlin

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9781501702358

Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2017

DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM Cornell University Press SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.cornell.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Cornell University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in Cornell for personal use. date: 03 March 2021

The Poetry of Ping-Pong

The Poetry of Ping-Pong

The Art in Sport

Chapter:
(p.55) 4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong
Source:
The Poetry of Everyday Life
Author(s):

Steve Zeitlin

Publisher:
Cornell University Press
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0005

In this chapter, the author looks at the poetry of Ping-Pong, his favorite sport. According to Marty Reisman, the game of Ping-Pong died in Bombay, India, in 1952. Reisman, nicknamed “The Needle,” was favored to win the World Table Tennis Championship that day. The author says he has always loved Ping-Pong because you can get into a rhythm, hit the ball back and forth across the net for hours, with any racquet, and simply talk. Ping-Pong, like poetry, is a players' sport, not ideal for spectators. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, claims that there is palpable humor in the game. With Ping-Pong, the author insists that we are all capable of attuning ourselves to the hidden life of sports, a relationship that is about kinesthesia and embodiment.

Keywords:   poetry, Ping-Pong, Marty Reisman, rhythm, humor, sports, kinesthesia, embodiment, World Table Tennis Championship

Cornell Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.