Over at the New York Times tennis blog, Thomas Lin (no relation to me) posted this afternoon on Poetry in Motion. He quotes Robert Pinsky at length, embeds a YouTube video of Federer and Nadal reciting Kipling’s “If” (apparently arranged by the BBC circa during last year’s Wimbledon), and invites readers to post their own lyric commentary if so moved: “Got a French Open storyline you’re itching to put to verse? Send us your tennis poetry in the comment form below, be it a sonnet in iambic pentameter, haiku, free verse or a simple couplet. One request: keep it short and sweet.”

(As I note at my fandom journal, I actually do have some tennis poems starting to make a racket in my head, but they are unlikely to be either short or sweet by the time I get around to serving them up — which won’t be tonight in any case. It also just now occurred to me that once I upload my snapshots from a Paris “poetry garden” to their online album, I should tell all y’all more about it — it certainly helped rescue a somewhat-futile afternoon (short version: rode Metro across Paris (three transfers!) and waited in queue for Roland Garros evening pass; didn’t get it; consoled self with roses and people-watching).