Pele’s Poetry Podcast: Episode 10 – World Cup football poems

The FIFA World Cup gives me and my co-host, Pele Cox, a golden opportunity to explore oral tradition and other strong but less obvious links between football and poetry. All in about the time it takes to get to a hydration break.

The perfect warm up for England v Ghana and Scotland v Brazil. But should we be red-carded for including not just soccer poems in our line up? You decide from the podcast stands. Or is it the bleachers?

Poems

• Football Poem, Henry Pye
• The Game: Christmas Day 1914, Ian McMillan
• The Footballer’s Prayer, Paul Cookson
• Ground, from the book Still by Alan Buckley

Notes and further reading

There’s some confusion over the author of the Football Poem by Henry Pye that Pele read. It certainly wasn’t written by the English poet Henry James Pye. The satirical work seems to have first appeared in 2006 in Inscape, a literary magazine published by Brigham Young University in the US. So it may have been the work of an academic there. Some reports suggest it’s the work of the Canadian poet, Tom Wayman. Do please help us solve the mystery. Are you Henry Pye? If so get in touch

I mentioned Disabled by the WW1 poet, Wilfred Owen. Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1893 and died just a week before the Armistice in November 1918. The poem describes a solider who’d lost his legs in the trenches recalling the days when he’d actually liked a bloody smear down his leg as a badge of footballing honour and youthful virility.

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