HAUS FÜR POESIE

Part essay, part memoir, Shane Anderson’s book After the Oracle (Deep Vellum Publishing 2021) reports back on a time of personal crisis and on an attempt to heal oneself, without ever succumbing to the standard cliches. The author Elvia Wilk writes: “[It] is resolutely not a self-help book, but it is also the best self-help book you'll ever read.” Incidentally, it is one of the most knowledgeable books about basketball in recent decades. Anderson was inspired by the four core values of the Golden State Warriors, which were introduced to the team by coach and former professional basketball player Steve Kerr: joy, mindfulness, compassion, and competition. Anderson recounts the rise of his favorite team (“the Warriors hit hyperdrive and entered greatness”) with a great sense for the physicality and beauty of the sport’s typical sequences (from the speed of the pick and roll and running and gunning to the glorious alley-oop or the rather prosaic tip-in). At one point, a virtuosic passing sequence that leads to a made basket is described in eight moves: “To really express the full glory of this play in writing,” Anderson comments, “would take five simultaneous narratives to chart each of the players….” When Anderson suggests that he would like to model his life on the Warriors’ core values, a friend replies: “Not to get all Yoda on you, but there is no try, do.” After the Oracle sketches this path.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, who will read a long poem about the soccer player Lionel Messi from his most recent collection Silver (Faber & Faber 2024) for the evening’s main reading, is a writer, sports columnist for the Paris Review, and sports editor at The New Republic. In addition to numerous poetry collections, he wrote the book The Circuit (Picador, 2018), which is dedicated to the 2017 tennis season following the four Grand Slam tournaments. Alongside David Foster Wallace’s String Theory, it is already considered to be one of the most important books ever written about tennis. Phillips shows that the marvelously iconic matches between Federer and Nadal on the tennis courts of this world in Melbourne, Paris, London, or New York are no less epic than the duels of Patroclus and Hector or Diomedes and Aeneas at the gates of Troy. Phillips will read from The Circuit as well as from a book currently in manuscript form: I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America. The author Lynne Tillman writes: “The Circuit is a tennis romance, and unique. Phillips knows the love. He is a sportswriter and poet, and remarkably, because tennis love isn't easy to explain, he has found the right supple, sometimes tactile, and tender language for it…”

Combo ticket for the afternoon: Combo ticket
The event will be held in English and take place at Clubraum.
Kindly supported by: Sportmuseum Berlin