Fast Break

Basketball and elegies both inhabit formal structures while taking risks within them. While “Fast Break” does not follow a traditional form, its two-line stanzas provide a regular shape and a connection to theme. The pairs of lines and their interwoven assonance and alliteration mirror the duality of the game—pairs of players anticipating each other’s moves and functioning as one. A regular repetition of four stressed beats per line reads like tetrameter. Though using a loose metrical and stanzaic form to cement his poem as contemporary and conversational, the poet creates resolution and closure in the final lines—a traditional elegiac trait. Punctuating the poem as one long sentence keeps it moving faster than a traditional, meditative elegy. This choice also connects to the subject: the suddenness with which death can arrive, even in a life of perfection and vitality.

In the poem’s loose formal structure, alliteration and assonance knit together images and provide a percussive rhythm. Each two-line stanza features alliteration or assonance—often both. The structure replicates the call and response effect of interlinear patterns in Anglo-Saxon verse forms,