Of course, we start with the fact that the winning team is named after a poem: Poe at the Superbowl. Then we add a poem-as-commercial, "God Made a Farmer," one of the more stunning moments of an evening mostly blah except the last-half play following the power outage, when the 49ers made it an interesting game. To my ear, it was poetry, Whitmanesque and rangy, and decidedly a poem, with its repetend, "So God made a farmer." That Paul Harvey, a non-poet, wrote it doesn't matter one bit. I know poetry when I hear it -- especially in a context as unlikely as America's low-culture fest, the Superbowl.
Hey, we had a wonderful plain-speech poem at the Inauguration, with Richard Blanco's moving "One Today." Why not poetry at the Superbowl?
