North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts
N C L R ONLINE
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HONORABLE MENTION, 2016 JAMES APPLEWHITE POETRY PRIZE BY PAUL JONES
Basketball is a Kind of Poetry
Basketball, the round ball, the brown ball, the rock, in an alley oop, an air ball, an assist, one on one for a one and one off the backboard to the hotshot, the ball hog, the pistol, to the big man with a baseball pass, off the bench and to the baseline out of the box and one for a buzzer beater, a bonus from the bricklayer; double dribble, double double, double nickel, double team, double bonus, finger roll for a field goal, a floater to the forward for a four point play after that flagrant foul, that break away on a fast break followed by a fade away; the guard guns a granny shot the center pivots when he’s hot, half court jump shot heating up; lay up, lay-in, then laid out in overtime, in extra minutes;
PAUL JONES is a Clinical Professor on the faculties of the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Media and Journalism at UNC Chapel Hill. He is also the director of a nearly twenty-five-year-old project, ibiblio.org, dedicated to sharing free information and open source software. In his spare time, he has been a strategic advisor on Informatics for an international health group. He has published poems in a cookbook, in two travel books, in an anthology of love poems, and in The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008). Another of his poems from the 2016 competition was selected for second place and is published in the 2017 print issue of NCLR.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Apologies to Dana Gioia and credit to Rasheed Wallace Stevens
A Nod to Thelonious #2 (acrylic on raw linen, 47x45) by Murry Handler
palming in the paint when he should be posting up over the rainbow for a rim shot after a run and gun against the man to man; up and down for a turn over; then a swish, a swat at the air; a trey, a travel, a turn over, a slam dunk, then on the rim a tip in, another nailed from the perimeter; nothing but the net then drop the dime, the whistle says we’re out of time.
A native of Bangor, ME, MURRY HANDLER settled in New York City as an art student eventually achieving a career as an award-winning illustrator and designer while continuing to pursue his fine art. He studied at the Franklin Institute of Art, figure drawing with Joseph Kelly at Pratt Institute, and painting at the Workshop School under the late Joe Hirsh. His teaching credits include the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons School of Design, both in New York City. His work is exhibited nationally in both solo and group shows, and it appears in national and international juried competitions. His work is in private and corporate collections around the country and is being noticed and collected in Europe and Scandinavia. He is a member of the Society of Illustrators in New York; FRANK Artists Collaborative in Chapel Hill, NC; Allied Artists of America in New York; and The Durham Art Guild. His work is represented by FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill. Currently he works from his Pittsboro, NC studio. See more of his work on his website.