Poetry Helps Kevin Navigate Adolescence in Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs

“Boys don’t write poetry. Girls do.” That’s the complaint early elementary schooler Jack lodges at his teacher when she gives her students poetry journals in Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog. Despite his misgivings, he gradually comes to appreciate poetry, expanding his knowledge and practice of it in the sequel, Hate That Cat. If he were to continue his experimentation with verse, I imagine he might end up rather like Kevin Boland, the eighth-grade narrator of Ron Koertge’s Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs.

Like Jack, Kevin keeps a poetry journal, but it’s not for school. It’s just a way for him to settle his thoughts. “All writers need journals,” his dad explains to him when he gives him the blank book. This novel is that journal, a collection of mostly free and blank verse poems but also several formal poems, including a pantoun, a sestina, a villanelle, several haiku and imitations of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. “Hilarious, but Hiawatha really got into / our cells,” Kevin says, commenting on the distinct rhythm of the resulting poem, the two-page On the Shores of Gitchee Gumee Middle School, perhaps my favorite of Kevin’s efforts. “It was two days before we could talk / like normal human beings.”

Shakespeare is the nickname that Kevin earned as a poetry-penning little leaguer in Shakespeare Bats Cleanup, which preceded this novel. I picked this one up when it jumped out at me in the Young Adult section of the library and was dismayed to realize that the original book is not in our system. One of these days I would like to read it, but the sequel provides enough background information to make it a stand-alone read. We know that he lives in Los Angeles. He recently lost his mother to illness, and his father is beginning to explore the dating scene. We know that Kevin has a cute girlfriend named Mira; we don’t get the details on how they hooked up, but at this point, their relationship is faltering. He loves poetry and baseball; she is a budding environmentalist. Neither has much knack for pretending to share the other’s passions.

Baseball doesn’t figure as prominently into the book as poetry does; I get the sense that it is a bigger part of Shakespeare Bats Cleanup. Kevin shares the exhilaration of making a great play and the aggravation of having to deal with an equal-opportunity heckler. Still, his primary focus is on poetry, particularly once he meets Amy, the offbeat daughter of an independent bookstore owner. (When she introduces herself at the shop’s open mike night, she implores him to call her Trixie but never explains her preferred pseudonym; might this avid reader be a Trixie Belden fan?) Amy understands him in a way that Mira doesn’t, and while he’s begun to dread his phone conversations with his girlfriend, he eagerly anticipates e-mails from Amy, who proposes that they become online poetry pals.

Kevin is a very likable narrator. He’s a kind boy with deep thoughts who’s still struggling to adjust to a world without his mother in it. He worries that when he moves on to high school next year, he might not be good enough to make the baseball team, and even if he does, it will become a much more high-pressure sport. He mulls over Mira and wonders whether they are naturally drifting apart and what he should do about it. He pours out his angst sometimes, as in the “poem” What Was I Thinking?, which is simply the title repeated ad nauseam. Kevin comes to really rely on his poetry journal as a place to work out his conflicted emotions, allowing him to spew venom on the page when he needs to instead of launching it at the object of his ire. Perhaps his father anticipated the anger he would stir up by dating again, and that motivated him to give his son an outlet.

Kevin’s voice is realistically earthy, but with an artful edge demonstrating that he is in love with words. I especially like his metaphors, which draw from his everyday experiences with quiet grace. “The sky / is all eyes-down like it’s just been yelled at / unfairly.” “Sadness is a big dark bus / with a schedule of its own. / But when it pulls up and the door / opens with a hiss, you pretty much / have to get on.” “I love my thesaurus. I like / to think about all the words / in there, cuddling up together / or arguing. Montagues on / one side, Capulets on the other. / Synonyms and antonyms.”

Along with providing an engaging story of grief management and budding romance, the book invites readers to craft poetry of their own. Kevin discusses the various poetry forms in such a way that giving it a go feels natural and almost irresistible. It certainly made me want to flex my poetry muscles again. Meanwhile, Kevin’s reflections on the art of poetry are as insightful as any I’ve read from established poets. “I’m basically a good kid,” he writes. “But imperfect / enough to be interesting. // Like a good poem.”

He thinks a lot about poetry, learning from the masters and adjusting for a modern era. “It’s one of those almost-summer evenings / when the moon comes up a little before the sun / is down. ‘O impatient orb,’ the old poets / would say. // But I’m a new poet, so I’d say, ‘What are you / doing here so early? The party doesn’t start / until nine!’”

While he wrestles with a lot of it on his own, he listens intently to his eclectic English teacher, Mr. Beauclaire, and incorporates his wisdom into his writing. “He calls rhyme a benevolent bully because it’ll make a poet / look hard for just the right word and then maybe he finds / an even better one!” Mr. Beaclaire also advises, “’Don’t worry so much / about what it means. Pretend poetry is chili / and you’re starving. Would you ask what chili means? / Just eat it up.’” Kevin likes this, but he also qualifies it later during his correspondence with Amy. “Sometimes I read poems and I don’t get them. // I might not totally get yours, but it’s not like / it could mean anything anybody wants it to. // I hate it when people say that. A poet works / a long time on something. Then some bozo reads / it and says, ‘Boy, that sure reminds me of the time / I detached my retina.’”

Words matter to Kevin. If they matter to you too, I highly recommend Shakespeare Makes the Playoffs, whether you’re 14 or 40. Sink into the unvarnished artistry of his words, and who knows? You may just be inspired to put pen to paper yourself.