[BITList] Wimblewords

[John Feltham]

Adam Stoltman for The New York Times
 
Matt Harvey, 47, is the first person to whom Wimbledon granted poetic license.

By GREG BISHOP

Published: June 30, 2010

Excuse me. I’m sorry. I speak as an Englishman

For the game of lawn tennis, there’s no better symbol than

Wimbledon

 

So goes the first verse of the first official poem about Wimbledon composed by the first official poet of Wimbledon.

 

Talk about pressure. Most firsts at this tennis temple took place more than 100 years ago. First tournament, first men’s singles champion: 1877. First royal visitor: 1895. First overseas champion: 1905.

In 2010, Wimbledon introduced Matt Harvey, 47, the witty and somewhat overwhelmed rhapsodist charged with turning the tournament’s glorified traditions into verse. He is, and always will be, the first person to whom Wimbledon officially granted poetic license.

 

“I’m acutely conscious of the only thing I’ll ever come first in at Wimbledon,” he said.

If the idea of showcasing modern sport through poetry seems old-fashioned in our instant messaging, social networking, microwave society, consider the source. Wimbledon embraced replay and added a roof on Centre Court only last year. By and large, the essence of the tournament — all-white outfits, perfectly clipped grass, and strawberries with cream — remains unchanged.

 

Tradition separates Wimbledon not just from other tennis tournaments, but from most other major sporting events as well. An official poet fits here, perhaps only here, like the smiling stewards who guide fans into seats.

 

“It’s quirky and British and very Wimbledon,” said Martina Navratilova, who won this tournament nine times in her career. “They’re big into their poets. So why not?”

 

The Wimbledon Poet took a circuitous route to the tournament itself. Harvey tended bar and sold books and delivered organic vegetables door-to-door. He worked for a traveling hot tub and sauna company called Spa Trek and in a psychotherapeutic residential community. He also made handmade shoes, at least until the talcum powder prompted one too many sneezes.

 

While growing up in Ireland, Scotland and Twickenham, England, Harvey scribbled in notebooks as a teenager, often during class. At home, he consumed poetry, volumes and volumes of verse, and said he had too many influences to list. In his 30s, Harvey taught adult education. That marked his poetic turning point. But since the school already had a poetry teacher and a poetry performance teacher, he started PWP, or Poetry, Wordplay and Performance.

 

He often pulled students in front of the class and gave them random words and three minutes to write. He believed “all the deep and burning questions percolating around the chambers of your heart will find their way out, via random words.”

 

That remained the common theme in Harvey’s work, as he performed at colleges, conferences, cabarets, on BBC Radio 4, at gatherings of artists. He produced quickly.

 

The Guardian hired Harvey for its Work section, and he churned out poems on older employees and colleagues plagued with hygiene issues. At live gigs, he asked audience members to write sentences on strips of paper, then strung them together without transitions, churning out poetry in motion.

 

Harvey wrote books, too, self-publishing four times until a publisher selected his first collection (his next is due out in October). He had found his calling.

 

“It makes me absurdly and pathetically grateful to be making a living doing this,” said Harvey, who added that he was being paid, and not just in strawberries, for his work here. “I hesitate to call myself a poetry hack. But I feel like one sometimes.”

 

Harvey received the phone call, out of nowhere, a few months ago. The pre-eminent poetry organization here, aptly named The Poetry Trust, had recommended him to Wimbledon.

 

The tournament hosted poets in years past, but never on an official basis. Enter Harvey: self deprecating, filled with healthy anxiety, assigned on a one-time basis to wax on all things Wimbledon, but above all, able to write at impressive speed. A pinch-me job within a pinch-me job, he called it.

 

His charge: to write at least one poem each day (find them on www.wimbledon.org under Wimblewords), perform occasionally in front of crowds and answer an existential question: what is Wimbledon?

 

To that end, Harvey said he was focusing less on the players and more on quirks, traditions and curiosities.

Harvey seems particularly intrigued by Maj. Walter Winfield, who in 1874 supposedly patented a game called “sphairistike” — or lawn tennis.

 

“Terrible, terrible name for tennis,” Harvey said. “The game caught on in spite of that man! He deserves a look.”

 

Combining art as revered as poetry with the recent phenomenon of social networking, Harvey has enacted his old teaching style via Twitter(handle: @WimbledonPoet). He will ask followers to send a sentence about Wimbledon, then put them together, just as he did in his class.

 

Harvey is the first to acknowledge that his work at Wimbledon will not boost him into the stratosphere of poet laureates. Nor will it rival the line from Rudyard Kipling — “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same” — at the entrance of Centre Court. That is not the point.

 

The point is that Rafael Nadal plays obsessively with his water bottles and chair umpires dress like aristocrats and the grass itself is coddled and more revered than the best players. Wimbledon is a tournament for the quirky and the curious, and for the traditional above all else.

 

Harvey has drawn on all of that for inspiration, and if his plan unfolds, he believes his poems, taken together, will present a complete picture of Wimbledon and its charms. But first, like any respectable British tennis fan, he had an opinion about Andy Murray.

 

If he’s ever brattish,

And brutish and skittish,

He’s Scottish.

But if he looks fittish,

And his form is hottish,

He’s British.

 

Off he went to compose his poems, mixing old and new tradition. Only here. Only at Wimbledon.

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