Written by ANTHONY GUERRA-FLORES
This story originally aired as part of Carolina Connection, the UNC student radio newscast from the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, on Dec. 6.
At the basketball courts near Cobb Residence Hall, Gabrielle Calvocoressi leads a group of about eight students in a friendly shootaround. She’s the one wearing a Big Bird t-shirt that matches the colors of her orange and white striped ball.
Each week, Calvocoressi — who is an English professor at UNC — meets students on the basketball court for poetry recital sessions she calls “Oh Shoot!” Nobody keeps score in these games. Calvocoressi wants them to be non-competitive. What she hopes is that students will use the sport to explore the openness of poetry and decompress a lot of the baggage that comes from such a competitive sport.
“I like to think of ‘Oh, Shoot!’ as a place also where, just like a pickup game, who knows who’s going to show up,” says Calvocoressi. “But we’re all going to learn a lot.”
“Oh, Shoot!” is English professor Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s game where players use their bodies to create the movement of poetry through the rhythm of basketball. (Photo via Anthony Guerra-Flores / Carolina Connection.)
And this can mean a lot of things. Sometimes students discuss the stresses of academia; other times, they’re celebrating writing a new draft of a poem. Calvocoressi wants this time to be full of movement that helps not only her students, but also her own poetic craft and her disability.
“I have a visual disability called nystagmus, and I thought, ‘Gosh, I want to do that [exercise].” I started to do it, I started loving doing it and I also thought, ‘How am I going to find time to do it?’ And I realized, both myself and a lot of people I know – including students – often don’t have time in their day to move their bodies around outside.”
She says she loves when students feel in tune with their bodies and feel confident in a space that is at times very cutthroat.
“People really talked about gym class and how painful that space was for a lot of them,” says Calvocoressi. “Part of the pain is I really wanted to do it. I had a basketball hoop at my grandparents house and I would play all day long, all day long. But the moment I went to school and got on the basketball court, nobody wanted to play with me.”
Alexander Gast calls himself the “Oh, Shoot!” power forward and is in the Senior Honors Thesis for Poetry at UNC. He says “Oh, Shoot!” falls right after his thesis class and allows him to de-stress after a long day.
“Getting to talk about poetry with people who care about poetry in a goofy basketball setting is such a joy,” he says. “Sometimes we don’t even talk about poetry — it can just be hanging out outside with people you love. So, I guess it’s getting to practice a thing I love in a completely different medium.”
Gast, after all the three-pointers, often reads to the entire group the poems he’s been working on throughout the semester. He says it’s rewarding.
“When I’m giving a reading or even just getting workshopped in class, I always care about it so much that I always get super anxious,” Gast describes. “Then all of sudden [having a prompt at “Oh, Shoot!”] like, ‘read a poem you’ve never read aloud before,’ or ‘read a poem that reveals something about you,’ and being surrounded by people you love who are all sweaty from doing layups… it’s a ridiculous medium to get to read your own work and share it with people. And ridiculous in the best of ways.”
Luna Hou is a recent UNC Grad working on her MFA. She loves how her poetry and hook shot contributes to this small community of writers.
“A poem lives on the page,” Hou says. “But to be able to hear it in the air and have it live in community with other people in other forms…it’s so magical to revise your work in that lens and sort of try [it] out.”
And after a long day of dribbling, reading, prompt-making, and jumpshotting, the perfect swish makes everyone feel the confidence and support of “Oh, Shoot!” Calcocoressi says that is her favorite part.
“[What] we all look forward to is that feeling: cheering each other on and also being like, ‘We’re here, we get to be here,'” she says.
Calvocoressi doesn’t confine her poetry to the basketball court. After a recent “Oh, Shoot!” session, she went to The Center for the Study of the American South on Franklin Street to be celebrated for being a National Book Award Finalist for her latest collection “The New Economy.” But she says she’ll be back on the basketball court soon, and she’s always happy to meet new players and poets.
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