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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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I think it's hard to capture the grandeur of the game and the World Cup in a poem, but that's kind of what poetry is about. The difficulty and complexity and exhilaration of those moments of joy that can occur.
The people of Ghana love football. Commentaries, not just talking about this player passed the ball to that player. You are trying to picture what is happening in the stadium for your listeners and you want them to fall in love with the game.
Somebody will say a line of a chant and you pick it up straight away. Somebody could say a line of a poem and the same thing can happen. It's about being in a room or in a stadium or on a street. Everybody's feeling celebratory.
I'm Mark Wilberforce. I'm a writer and a lifelong Arsenal fan. But in this summer's FIFA World Cup, my loyalties are divided between Ghana and England. The tournament is hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. It's the first time the competition has been held across three nations.
For the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service, we wanted to explore the connections between language and the beautiful game. But with millions of words to choose from, would this task be even trickier than picking a World Cup squad from your country's best players? And who should write it?
Would a Brazilian poet be tempted to look back at the Great Pelé or a Norwegian get overexcited by Erling Haaland? In the end, we went for someone whose team isn't quite in the Premier League.
What I like about Barnsley FC is that I can get on the bus and go to the match and it's kind of a bit unfashionable. And over the years, it's had a good kicking. And every now and then, it surprises you.
Ian McMillan is a poet who lives in Yorkshire in the north of England, close to Barnsley Football Club, which chose him as their poet-in-residence 30 years ago.
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Chapter 2: What makes poetry a fitting expression for the World Cup?
You'll play teams from countries that you may never visit... They'll have different styles to the style that we play in, in England. You'll have teams that will surprise you with their amazing football and teams that actually won't be that good. And there they are, all together. The world gathers to play this game. That's what excites me.
I've been writing poetry for most of my life. And then in late 2022, I was appointed by California's governor to serve as California Poet Laureate.
Lee Herrick is now serving a second term. He was the first Asian American to be given the role.
I always felt like a little bit of an outsider having these two loves, poetry and soccer, here in the US. In my mind, they've always merged. With me, language, the imagination, creativity, joy, Those are things that I think of with poetry as much as soccer and football that can result in a poem or a goal. So to me, there are all kinds of parallels.
The World Cup often becomes a celebration of heritage as much as football. How much can sport help people to reconnect with family history and culture and identity?
You know, I was born in South Korea and I was adopted to the United States when I was less than one year old. So I didn't spend much time in the country. But I think that one thing that soccer or football can do is whether a person was born there and left after a week or a month, or they live there into their 20s or 30s, or they've got family in those countries.
For me, there's always been a sense of longing and missing the country from sort of a distant vantage point. I don't speak the language fluently, but soccer is its own language and way to connect to the culture. Of the roughly 40 million people here in California, about one out of every four people were born outside of the United States.
And so we're an incredibly diverse state full of immigrants and refugees and adoptees. I love watching people in their country's jerseys or rooting for their teams. It's really exciting to see that happen.
Have you actually ever been to a World Cup match before, Lee?
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Chapter 3: How do personal loyalties influence a poet's perspective on football?
commissions if you like where people asked me to write something very specific and this was but I found that I was getting stuck partly because the subject is so vast and then you have to trust your mind you have to trust your brain and then I thought well because it's for the radio this is before I start writing it because it's for the radio I want it to rhyme because rhyme is great on radio and rhyme
Somebody might be doing something else and they hear the rhyme. I think it has to have rhythm because for me, football is all about rhythm and poetry is about rhythm. And so then I just thought of the first couple of lines. The whistle blows and the game begins and the words begin and the song. And those four lines just popped in to my head. So I wrote them down and do a thing that I always do.
which is I write them down in my notebook and then I put them away and I forget them and I sleep on it. And somehow this kind of magic alchemy happens where the poem doesn't write itself because you were writing it, but the poem is forming itself in your mind, often in places that haven't got language in, in kind of impressions and images. And then I got up the next morning and
began to write it down. That was the first draft, but then I wanted within it a quieter voice that was maybe whispering in my ear at the same time that the more strident, rhythmic and rhyming voice was perhaps performing the poem. Then something's whispering in me a gentler voice. I wrote it in the poem in italics. And then again, left it, then went back to it.
And when you go back to it the next time, you go, who wrote this? What amateur? What person who's never written a poem before in their life wrote this? But I know, like a football match, it can be improved and things can happen within it if you leave them for long enough. So it was a really interesting experience.
process for me that to start with i was stuck and then somehow i became unstuck in terms of that being stuck process i mean we can relate this to football as well if a team doesn't have a particular desired performance and then they go through their halftime talk what's your halftime talk like so to speak
That's a great image. I hadn't thought of that before. The half-time talk, it is that because, as you say, you know, a team can be terrible in the first half and then come out in the second half and they're better. So my half-time talk is, come on, Macmillan, come on, you've done this before.
Then I put my shoes on and I'll go for a walk because the act of walking for me helps me to think that it's around the village that I've always lived in. So I see these familiar landmarks and in a sense, I'm not seeing them, but the poem is rumbling away in my head. I might text myself a word or two and it will start to get better.
I mean, the deadline helps, you know, knowing that you have to write a poem for a certain time really does help. It puts the mind really at its metal and it kind of heats up your thinking. I would always recommend to any creative person, go for a stroll sometimes.
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Chapter 4: What parallels exist between poetry and football commentary?
Yes, yes. In the middle of the week we're opening a new store, Vantaan Tammisto. Yes, I also heard rumors that there would be a makkara offer. In the middle of the week the grill is hot and we're offering makkara. Is there a lot of makkara there? Yes, there is plenty of it. And there are also a lot of opening offers. Are you coming to the Puilo Tammisto opening? No, no.
Naturally. You're listening to the documentary In The Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Mark Wilberforce and today we're exploring football and language.
I know there are some differences in the terms. I always think of the 18 or the penalty box as pretty common terms in American soccer.
Upper 90. And the upper 90 that you just referred to means the corner of the goal where it meets the crossbar, just for our audience that are not aware.
Because the US is much newer to soccer or football, and that being the biggest difference, I think, just what we call it, and we're, in my opinion, of course, very much a developing team, I noticed that some of the commentators try to adapt European language to show that we know more of the game.
You know, we might have a British commentator on an American broadcast to help lend some credibility to it.
So it seems like we might be divided by a common language across the Atlantic after all. Back in Barnsley, we left Ian to ponder his poem. Football has rules and it has boundaries, yet every match is unpredictable because people are unpredictable. So is poetry similar? And do the rules somehow create freedom?
I think so. I think poetry and football are so similar because they have rules that you can break. They have a shape. The football match has got 90 minutes with a break in the middle and a bit of extra time. And the poem has a shape. And, you know, I like poems with shapes. I like sonnets. I like haiku. I like villanelles. But then I also like the freedom of free verse.
But the idea that actually it's not that free because you end the line at the end of the line and there's this white space at the edge. You can sometimes write it for your voice. So that is a kind of form. And also I like a poem that surprises me. Suddenly, perhaps towards the end, there's an amazing line. You think, gosh, I wasn't expecting that. And it's just like that with football.
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Chapter 5: How does football serve as a connection to heritage and identity?
Just thinking about the different moods and moments of exhilaration and sadness and heartbreak that a soccer game or a match can include. It's very much in the drafting stage.
The goalkeeper in sunlight reminded me of a conversation that I had with Ian McMillan when he's working on a poem, which is called The World Cup is a Shining Poem.
It's interesting how the two of you are looking at this tournament as some form of beacon of light that will just illuminate not only the stadium that the game is played in, but more or less illuminating people's imaginations with the skills, the colours and the noises and the chants that we're expecting to hear at the World Cup.
I love that. And I love that he's writing about the light aspect of the game. My thinking with this poem is that it's almost like a goalkeeper is trying to catch rays of starlight or rays of sunlight. You know, I'm thinking of the goalkeeper as both beginning and end. How the goalkeeper is sometimes the centerpiece of a breakthrough or heartbreak. And just how massive...
The game is in people's hearts. It seems like a fitting analogy to use the sun and how much we rely on that for so many different parts of our life.
Many football fans might say they don't read poetry, but they create chants, songs and stories. Are football supporters already poets without even realising it? Football supporters are definitely poets.
They sing, they chant. I'm always overjoyed by the fact that it's a place where you can get a group of men singing who would never normally sing. You know, the women sing as well, but you get a group of working class men singing. Our song at Barnsley is just like watching Brazil sing. which it wasn't really, but we sang it to the tune of Blue Moon. We'd go, Brazil, it's just like watching Brazil.
It's just like watching Brazil. And then, you know, the way that people will come up with shouts and individual lines that are like a line of poetry. And what I also like is, like all oral poetry, It doesn't belong to anybody, it belongs to everybody. And somehow, you'll have seen this, the best chance seemed to just appear from nowhere.
Poetry does appear spontaneously on the football terraces. But Ian hasn't left his verse to chance. He's worked hard over his poem for In The Studio, and the latest version is in.
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