Poetry and boxing …

… All a Matter of Tense | Commonweal Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave lull.)

The collection opens with an epigraph from Sonny Liston: “Some day they’re gonna write a Blues song for fighters. / It’ll just be for slow guitars, soft trumpet, and a bell.” Here, Ryan has taken two sentences spoken by Liston after defeating Floyd Patterson in 1962 and broken them into two lines. By treating Liston’s speech as if it were poetry, Ryan allows us to see that Liston’s speech is poetry.