What Rhymes With Seimone Augustus?

In fact, that description alone would probably have been enough for me to pick Burt out of the Target Center crowd on our first meeting. He's kind of skittery and small and, on this day, weighted down by a flimsy canvas library bag slung over one shoulder. The bag is full of copies of his fourth book, Shot Clocks: Poems and an Essay for the WNBA (Harry Tankoos Books, 2006), a rousing, wry cycle of poems that celebrate the girls of summer and the fans who love them. It's hot off the press, and Burt figures that here, at the Lynx's 11th home game of the season, against the San Antonio Silver Stars, he's bound to run into people who will understand and appreciate the intersection of his two passions.

He may also be laying the groundwork for an act of either great bravery or utter foolishness: Before the Lynx tip off against the Seattle Storm on Tuesday, August 1, Burt will read his poems in an event room at the Target Center. It promises to be the kind of event that prompts recurring anxiety dreams and years of Freudian analysis. There Burt will be, presenting original verse to an itchy roomful of sugared-up children, perhaps in the shadow of two dozen Amazonian women in matching uniforms.

Burt, chair of the English department at Macalester, is getting good reviews for his other collection of poems to come out this year, Parallel Play (Graywolf Press, 2006), and has gained a reputation as a prominent young critic by writing in such journals as The Believer and the London Review of Books. Much, though not all, of his work touches on popular culture—or, as a positive review in the Washington Post puts it, "the flotsam and jetsam of American life." He teaches a course on comic books and is working on another academic book about adolescence and contemporary poetry.

He owes his fascination with the WNBA in part to his wife (a Connecticut native weaned on the reigning UConn women's team), in part to a strong sympathy for the feminist symbolism of it, and in large part, I'd have to say (after enjoying a couple of basketball trivia-filled hours together) to his talent as "a collector of obscure knowledge."

That obscure knowledge is valuable currency in the subculture that has grown up around the WNBA. Burt posts game recaps, analysis, and gathered bits of Lynx-related scuttlebutt on Women's Hoops Blog (womenshoops.blogspot.com), as well as on his own blog (accommodatingly.com). He also participates in a couple of discussion boards. Throughout the game, he sprints around the stadium and introduces me to a half-dozen or so people from the online community. (He knows where they tend to sit, but not necessarily their real-life names.) We meet two women—one trekked up from Omaha, the other from Colorado, just for the game—who had never met in person but report having IM'ed each other daily for about five years, mostly about women's hoops. It turns out Burt knows them, too, from the message boards.

"I included a rather optimistic poem about Vanessa in there," Burt explains to one fellow online fan, as he hands him a book. This gets a laugh, the inside joke being that Vanessa Hayden, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound center, is a player given to bouts of fine play and grand mediocrity. The poem, "Vanessa in the Underworld," also gets at the high highs and low lows of being a WNBA fan.

Past lowing shadows born to stand unseen,
We will look back gingerly at the strongest
Blocks we have ever observed, whose secrets demand
Our promise to return through this perhaps
Half-empty arena, whose glittering posts support
Itself in majestic frustrations: so far, so high.

"Hey! Foul! Peewee is throwing elbows in people's ribs!" Burt interrupts a conversation to shout at the refs. Then he looks around. "I try not to yell too much when there are kids around."