gan to celebrate, the ball flew out of the pile back to
Rodgers, who raced across the field with a pack of
teammates close behind. On the Stanford forty-five-
yard line, he confronted a defender and pitched the
ball to Mariet Ford. Ford took the ball another
twenty yards where, as he was being wrapped up by a
trio of tacklers, he blindly threw it over his shoulder
to Moen. Moen had only one Cardinal between him
and the goal with a teammate already blocking the
defender, but surprisingly, the Stanford band had
wandered onto the field, assuming the game to be
over, so Moen had to run the final twenty yards
through a sea of red-coated students racing wildly to
get out of his way. As he crossed the goal line, he
leaped into the air to celebrate and fell directly onto
trombone player Gary Tyrrell, who was oblivious to
the chaos occurring behind him.
Though penalty flags had been thrown all across
the field and with Stanford insisting that Garner had
been tackled before lateraling the ball, officials de-
cided that the play was legal and that California had
won the game, with a final score of 25 to 20.
Impact The incident—which became known as the
Play—quickly became legendary.Sports Illustrated
published an extensive analysis of the play in a fea-
ture article less than a year later, and the play regu-
larly appeared in polls and retrospectives highlight-
ing the most memorable moments in sports history.
Further Reading
Bradley, Michael.Big Games: College Football’s Greatest
Rivalries. Dulles, Va.: Potomac, 2006.
Mandell, Ted.Heart Stoppers and Hail Mar ys: The
Greatest College Football Finishes, Since 1970. South
Bend, Ind.: Hardwood, 2006.
Devon Boan
See also Elway, John; Football; Sports.
Poetry
Definition A form of concentrated expression
through meaning, sound, and rhythm
Several factors combined to create a break with the tradi-
tional place of poetr y in American life, causing the form to
undergo many changes in the 1980’s
After World War II, traditional forms and concepts
began to break down among American poets. The
social protests of the 1960’s, the growing popularity
of consumer electronics, and especially the rise of
mass media transformed the United States from a
private, literate, book-based culture into a media
culture. American poetry was directly influenced by
these changes. Films, videos, tapes of poetry read-
ings, and interviews with poets became widely avail-
able, while new, cheap methods of printing encour-
aged young editors to start literary magazines, which
by the end of the 1980’s numbered over two thou-
sand. In the 1980’s, there was a great proliferation of
poetic styles and poems, which were presented in
new ways by new media.Ethnic and Women’s Poetry Following the estab-
lishment of university ethnic studies programs in the
1970’s, by the 1980’s many academic journals, pro-
fessional groups, and magazines intended for spe-
cific ethnic groups were founded. The work of mi-
nority poets became widely published, heard, and
read. There was a great flowering of such poets as
Gary Soto, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich,
Rita Dove, Maya Angelou, Cathy Song, and Simon
Ortiz. Chicano, or Mexican American, poetry
achieved a new prominence in the 1980’s, and the
works of Soto and Ortiz were often anthologized.
Erdrich, a Native American poet, wrote of families
coping with poverty, unemployment, and a dimin-
ishing of their culture on the Chippewa reserva-
tion. Her long poem “Family Reunion” (1984) high-
lighted some of these problems.
African American poetry was influenced by such
phenomena as jazz, history, popular culture, and
Afrocentrism. Dove, an African American poet, won
the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 forThomas and Beulah:
Poems(1986), which celebrated her grandparents
and illustrated the rich inner lives of the poor and
uneducated. She was appointed poet laureate of
the United States in 1993. Asian American poets, a
group consisting of descendants of Japanese, Chi-
nese, Filipino, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese peo-
ple, among others, also grew in prominence during
the 1980’s. Among the notable Asian American po-
ets were the Chinese American Song, whose 1983
collection,Picture Bride, dramatized the life of her
family and won a Yale Younger Poet Award. Li-Young
Lee, a first-generation native-born Chinese Ameri-
can, won New York University’s Delmore Schwartz
Memorial Poetry Award in 1986 for his first collec-
tion,Rose. Japanese American David Mura saw his764 Poetry The Eighties in America