Geffrey Davis has a post up on The Head & The Hand about how boxing influences his writing process.
As I advanced and began to spar, I recognized an even more necessary link between boxing and writing: like crafting individual poems, I had to “revise”—(re)assess and adapt—each time I stepped into the ring. Not only are no two opponents the same, but also you are always a different version of yourself from day to day, from week to week. That constant flux demands an impromptu nimbleness:—an ability to read the instant and react to the object(ive) before you as a moment-to-moment self . .
Good stuff. I often feel like I can better understand an activity if I can relate it to my poetry practice. For example, screenwriting clicked for me once I began to see scenes as sonnets with turns and entire screenplays as poem sequences; settings and character shifts as the weaving of threads in a narrative poem. I had to put this type of writing that was less familiar to me in a language I’d already been reading and writing in so I could grasp its concepts and, for me, that language is poetry.
Maybe this is a matter of transcendence–those moments when you realize a thing has greater significance and may have a connection with ideas outside of itself. All the great metaphors are doing it.
Read the rest of Davis’ insights here
