"Shamelessly Brave": An Actual Poet Reviews Kobe Bryant's Retirement Ode

Everyone saw it coming. Kobe Bryant already had suffered the wear, tear, and airballs characteristic of an extinguishing NBA supernova. His retirement was just a matter of when. What no one expected, however, was that it would become a matter of how.

On Sunday, Bryant sent out a simple tweet, reading "Dear Basketball" that led the rest of us, startlingly, to a poem. Bryant could have departed on whatever note he wanted—shit talk, a simple sign-off, whatever. Maybe a stepback brick, while shouting "Kobe!"

Instead, he left us with an ode.

Sure, we all know Bryant as a baller. But how are we supposed to feel about his poetry? Are these simply scrawlings on a maraschino-stained bar napkin, five minutes before the start of a college town open mic? Or are we witnessing the dawn of America's next poet laureate?

In order to separate Kobe's literary wheat from his Trapper Keeper-jottings chaff, I got in touch with Brown University's C.D. Wright, an esteemed poetry professor at one of the country's top MFA programs. In 2011, Wright was a National Book Award finalist for her title One With Others: [a little book of her days] and won the National Book Critics Award for Poetry in March of that same year.

Sheepishly, I half hoped for some kind of Ivory Tower skewering of Kobe Bryant's stab at the ancient art of song. But what I heard surprised me—almost as much as Kobe's use of a poem in the first place.

"I thought it was kind of wonderful," Wright said. "I thought of Neruda's Ode to Things."

Wright came across as a sweet, obliging woman, who naturally spoke poetically, the words falling softly like leaves. And to my surprise, most of said words were directed at flattering Bryant.

I hadn't even prompted her for a comparison, but she went for it—straight to a Nobel Prize-winning poet.

"Neruda's poems are really simple," she said. "Ode to the seaweeds, Ode to the Large Tuna in the Market, Ode to the Woman Gardening. He used a very simple language. But this is not Neruda, this is Kobe Bryant."

Wright also didn't mince words.

"He's not pretending to be a poet. I think he just chose an interesting address," Wright said. "It's very stripped down. But it's very sentimental. But it's shamelessly so. I think the shamelessness is kind of brave."

Wright admittedly is not a huge sports fan, but she—like almost everyone—has heard of Bryant. Though she didn't know the particulars of his shoot-first, shoot-last game, she somehow grasped his essence: Bryant played with a shameless bravery. It seems he writes with it, too.

"It's pretty clean," Wright said. "It is very clean. There are very few adjectives. The nouns are mainly about the ball, or you, as a stand in as a ball. And the rest of it is love language. Just crooner love language."

I also asked about structure. If Bryant was mentioned in the same breath as Neruda—was he also operating on the kind of savant-level of a 12th century sestina-spouting troubador?

"It's a minimal amount of structure," Wright said. "First, there's the address, it's called an apostrophe. 'Dear Basketball.' The rest of it is in strophes, which are loosely formed stanzas."

"It's told in the first person. It's directed as an apostrophe is: It's directed to the object of its affection. In this case, it's the basketball. It's quite sweet, really."

I then asked about Bryant's choice to do a poem in the first place.

"Staging it as a poem endows it with an air of formality, a little decorum," Wright said. "It takes him out of the locker room, off the court, and permits him to return to the beautiful boy with the perfect ball, and all the joys that simple object can offer. It also allows him to be the grownup man in the suit. An unabashed, devoted fan who got to play a who-who-whole lot of ball."

"It's allowed him to tell us his origin story with no microphones, no cameras, not even a letterhead, a formal resignation. Just a few stanzas and eyes on the clock.

"He kept it very straightforward. He didn't shy away from what he wanted to express. I think that's very grown up. I think that's very manly."

When I told Wright that Bryant had sent the poem out to his 7.97 million Twitter followers, she laughed. "Well, these are not the numbers that poetry deals with," she said. I asked Wright if she could sign off on saying that he was the most-read poet in—at least—the past week. She wouldn't take the bait.

Feeling a bit shamelessly brave myself, I asked the one question I most wanted an answer to: If you had to give Kobe a grade, what would it be?

"No, no. That's not going to happen," Wright said.

"I know," I said. "I thought it was going to be a little tacky to ask. But I had to."

"Very tacky," she said. "And I give everybody A's, so don't ask me anyway."