Insistence on keeping poetics apart from [hockey] is warranted only when the field of [hockey] appears to be illicitly restricted, for example, when the [play-by-play] is viewed by some [commentators] as the highest analyzable construction, or when the scope of [hockey] is confined to [statistics] alone or uniquely the nonsemantic questions of external form or to the inventory of denotative [plays] with no reference to free variations.
- "Closing Statement: [Hockey] and Poetics" (1960)
Textbook categories are comfortingly simple: [hockey] is one thing, poetry another. Nevertheless, the difference between a poet's [hockey] and that of a [normal hockey player], or between the poems of a [normal hockey player] and those of a poet, is very striking.
- "Marginal Notes on the [Hockey] of the Poet [Pastrňák]" (1935)
