WAXING POETIC #2: “Slam, Dunk, & Hook”

Most skaters don’t think much of poetry. Among those who think of it at all, many seem to think it’s pointless, pretentious, or even impossible to understand. But like the impossible itself, poetry can get a bad wrap. It’s not so different from skateboarding, really. Style, rhythm, innovation, reverence for reference, beautiful lines — the qualities of a good skate part are the same stuff that make a poem worth engaging. To get it, maybe skaters just need to see it in their terms…

For the second installment of Waxing Poetic, the series that analyzes a poem from a skater’s perspective, Christian N. Kerr goes one-on-one with Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem about basketball and blocking out life’s trash talk, “Slam, Dunk, & Hook.” 

How does skateboarding relate to basketball? Let me begin to count the ways. For one, there’s the jumping. Two, there are the shoes, a crossover going back as far as the Jordan 1-soled search for Animal Chin. There’s the mutual appreciation for maple trees, the favoured hardwood for NBA courts and almost every ply of any deck worth skating. There’s the fact that skate spots seem to border public basketball courts as a rule, bringing us into occasionally too close of contact. There’s Koston in the Kobe ‘fit, Wade in the Jason Kidd jeans, that whole Tiago x Kawhi campaign, and so on. Pro ballers can kickflip, and pro skaters can ball, at least well enough to shine at the annual Bunt tournament. 

So, if skateboarding is like basketball, and basketball is like skateboarding, a poem about basketball is also a poem about skateboarding. That’s at least one way to look at Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” which speaks so much to the skater it could be titled “Slide, Bomb, & Grind.” Its forty short lines of free verse pull the reader into the poet’s memories of playing streetball as a kid. Child’s play, and it reads as so — vivid and familiar, pulsing with sensory detail, slang, symbolism, and syncopation. But the poem’s no empty exercise in nostalgia; peril and pain elbow their way into the lines, raising the stakes of the elementary scene into something more enlightening. 

A brief bio to set the scene: Before becoming a poet, Yusef Komunyakaa grew up Black in Bogalusa, Louisiana, during the last gasps of Jim Crow and then served as an Army correspondent in the Vietnam War. These dark shadows of American history frame this poem, and a lot of Komunyakaa’s work, like a fisheye’s vignette. Come to think of it, “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” which was first published in 1992, a couple of years before Komunyakaa won the POTY (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry of the Year), is kind of like the Tim & Henry’s Pack of Lies (1992) of poems. The euphoric youth and exuberant invention are on display, warped through the curved lens of a wider perspective, the moments as fast and as fleeting as Sanchez’s flip tricks. In the reflection, we can see our ageing selves and, from a certain angle, our capabilities.  

“Nothing but a hot / Swish of strings like silk / Ten feet out.”

Skateboarding is notoriously hard to capture by the non-skater. You’ve seen the offenders, the “skater-in-sky” photo, and stiff text you can tell was typed out by fingers unfamiliar with the feel of griptape. Even publications that boast of having “the best writing anywhere” get it wrong. A few phrases in The New Yorker’s piece on Alexis Sablone at the Guggenheim call out for a cringe: “sailing down the ramp,” “she slipped while doing a Nollieheel (sic),” and “leaned like a surfer,” to start. The problems are plenty, but clear only to ears well-versed in skate-speak: sail isn’t right because it’s ABD as a synonym to send, used for hucking, not riding; slipped is odd if not followed by out on, and don’t get me started on the weird capitalization and closing of Nollieheel; and the final surfing comparison is hackneyed and, if it must be used, should be reserved for the fluid style of a Shin Sanbogi, not inattentively applied to the fitful power of Alexis Sablone, who carves more like a knife or battleship than a surfer… Pedantic? Perhaps, but that’s how you point out a poser.

Those that have found themselves caught in arguments over overcrooks and alley-oops know there’s a fine mesh of rules that govern our language, a lexicon and syntax that can only be understood through experience. And “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” starting from its triply homonymic title, shows that the writer knows ball. The poem seems to simulate the sport itself. Tried-and-true vernacular earned through hours on the blacktop is tossed around, “fast breaks” and “lay ups” repeat, and there’s a bouncing rhythm to it all the poet handles like AO, crossing over rhyming slang with compounded similes (“dribble, drive to the inside, / & glide like a sparrow hawk”). Structurally, the sentences often extend from line to the next without pause or punctuation, a trick of enjambment that flits your gaze back and forth as if you were sitting courtside. You're watching a pro at this fast-paced game of poetic language, making exceptional the same stock sayings you might hear someone like Shaq mutter at half-time. 

It makes me think that any given skate mag is filled with poetic parlance. To check, I randomly pulled from my stack at home the Thrasher with Nico Hirata’s wallie-nollie on the cover (ABD aside, how lovely does that trick sound, wallie-nollie) and opened it arbitrarily to the terrifically titled “Lunatic Fringe” section. A couple of lovely phrases immediately sung out from the captions: “BSA at WSVT,” with its cryptic concision, and the chanting cadence of “drop in, ollie, ride the plank,” a trinity of trochees with a final stress on the end that mimics the trick–incredible stuff. Komunyakaa, a child of church folk, often found inspiration in the holy books; it appears there's plenty to plumb in our Bible as well.

“...we could almost / Last forever, poised in midair / Like storybook sea monsters.”

An ancient skater once said, “You don’t stop skating because you get old, you get old because you stop skating.” The guy’s dead now, but there’s some truth to that logic. Skateboarding channels something wonderfully childish within us. Not that tired trope of us being too immature to buy a bed frame, I’m talking about naivety, not knowing what’s not possible. The parable of Cliff Kaufman’s unbelievable kickflip tells us that we can turn pure thought into reality on a skateboard. 

In the poem, the pickup games offer a similar portal into the make-believe. Their play takes on the exaggerations of mythology. Branded with “Mercury’s / Insignia on [their] sneakers,” they’re given godlike grace by their sponsor, the Roman god of trickery, luck, and getting money. Their performance is posterized, so stunning they seem to freeze in place like a snapshot, transcending time and its tribulations — “Forever Young” for real.

In this bewitched state, it’s easy to lose yourself. “The roundhouse / Labyrinth [their] bodies / Created” on the court conjures the Greek legend of Daedalus’ maze. Designed to imprison the Minotaur, it later confined its creator and his son, Icarus, whose attempted escape concluded in an illustrious crash out. The embodiment of youth thought he could “last forever / Poised in midair.” But supreme is the sun, the source of the gravity that drags even the highest of ollies back down to Earth. Every poster comes off the wall in the end. 

“When Sonny Boy’s mama died / He played nonstop all day, so hard / Our backboard splintered.”

In “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” one kid, Sonny Boy, goes so hard in the paint after losing his mother that he breaks the hoop, fracturing the backboard with the force of his pain’s transference. A skater would say he focused it, meaning we’ve enacted this scene so frequently ourselves that we've our own term for it. Millions of decks have been broken under misplaced stress. 

It’s funny because skaters love to say they skate to get away from all their troubles, that they can forget their broken home, broken heart, and bank account (also broke) while they focus on their switch tricks or whatever. But the skatepark offers no real sanctuary. Problems are internalized. Bail one too many kickflips, and the exercise can quickly become an exorcism that leaves their skateboard in shards. Ironically, this also breaks, quite literally, the spell the toy produces, forcing you right back into the real world woes you wanted to avoid. 

“Trouble / Was there slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm.”

The battles Yusef Komunyakaa’s been in don’t get a series on Thrasher or The Berrics. He’d faced poverty and racism in the small-town South and seen in Vietnam how soldiers were asked to kill for a country that considered them second-class citizens. His were colonial conflicts no one walks away from content. He knew that the American Empire induces certain evils. Ball all you want, no extent of exertion can fend off these lurking forces. The poem puts them on blast.

“Trouble” is personified as a policeman always waiting in the wings, weapon in hand. But brutality bleeds into the imagery almost everywhere — dunks that “exploded / The skullcap of hope & good / Intention,” a “metal hoop / Nailed to our oak” like a crucifixion, “Joy” a “lyric slipknot.” Even the “angels” are “bad” here. If you want to win, you’ve got to be more aggressive, box out, and break ankles.

Skaters know a little about not feeling wanted. Despite all the stickers, skateboarding is still a crime. Skate-stoppers proliferate, and concerned citizens are eager to escalate a kick-out into more serious charges. Trespassing, property damage, reckless endangerment — stop resisting! It’s a dangerous game we play; shinners are just the start. So, like the kids in Komunyakaa’s poem, we take on the tone of our terrorizers and turn it up. We bomb hills, shred bowls, kill spots; fashion ourselves as Menaces, Anti-Heroes, blind Creatures of Disorder. We tell ourselves life’s edge is rough and just go faster, it’s a Hellride after all. 

But the poem assures us the spot isn’t so bad. Sometimes, “girls” cheer “from the sidelines,” and everything becomes a contest of supreme prospects. Suddenly, the whole skatepark is going “metaphysical,” launching tricks like Cupid’s arrows and sticking them miraculously. Love — the deliverance of deep devotion — will have a skater send some crazy things.

“We had moves we didn’t know /
We had.”

After the fast breaks and lay ups, lay ups and fast breaks of lines 1 and 34, the poem ends with the enduring wow of a half-court buzzer-beater or after-black banger. The final six lines read like the poet is giving a post-win interview to the NBA’s Craig Sager or SLS’s Alex White. “We had moves we didn’t know / We had”, he says, astonished, basking in the glow of his team’s brilliance. They’d “spun / On swivels of bone & faith,” whipped around their first 540 and rolled away “Through a lyric slipknot / Of joy” into the breathless bliss of feeling Blessed to have survived. In watching the clip back, he realizes that “we were / Beautiful & dangerous,” two polar appreciations that power a confidence that’s game-changing.

But what happens when the game is over? When the trick is made and the part’s a wrap, where does all that incredible energy go? We’re urged to leave it all on the court, but that’s a mistake; we need to wield it widely, against the awful world’s demands. That’s what’s really dangerous, the disruptive potential of our collective might. 

There’s a joke that the CIA created skateboarding to divert radically inclined youth away from more consequential avenues of expression, a sentiment echoed by the artist David Hammons, whose work critiqued how basketball is often used to limit Black youth’s ambitions to the ten-foot height of the rim. His series Higher Goals installed towering hoops around New York (including at the Cadman Plaza curbs) as provocations to think bigger. Maybe skateboarders need to see an angle-iron ledge that’s many stories tall to be reminded to elevate our aim. We’ve got the props, it’s time to ramp it up.