21 Apr 2009, by Eric
Donald Hall was inevitable for this blog; he's the most famous living baseball poet. Maggie suggested a poem called Baseball, but I couldn't find it online for semi-legal reproduction on my blog. So here's one called Ninth Inning that I really like. It's long and literary on the dense side, but finish it. The oofh factor is high. and it prominently features a dog. If you doubt his baseball cred, Hall also wrote a biography called Dock Ellis In The Country Of Baseball that I'd really like to read some day.
1. My dog and I drive five miles every
morning to get the newspaper. How
else do I find out, when the Sox trade
Smoky Joe Wood for Elizabeth Bishop?
He needs persistent demonstration
of love and approval. He cocks his
head making earnest pathetic sounds.
Although I praise his nobility
of soul, he is inconsolable
2. when I lift my hand from his ear to
shift: Even so, after the reading,
the stranger nods, simpers, and offers
to share his poems with me. Dean Gratt
confided, at the annual Death
and Retirement Gala: “Professor
McCormick has not changed: A Volvo
is just a Subaru with tenure.”
Catchers grow old catching, which is strange
3. because they squat so much. “The barn is
burning, O, the barn is burning on
the hill; the cattle low and blunder
in their stalls; the horses scream and hurl
their burning manes.” Jennifer remains
melancholic. Do you start to feel,
Kurt, as if you’re getting it? I mean
baseball, as in the generations
of old players hanging on, the young
4. coming up from Triple A the first
of September, sitting on the bench
or pinch-running, ready for winter’s
snow-plowing and cement-mixing, while
older fellows work out in their gyms
or cellars, like George “Shotgun’’ Shuba
who swung a bat against a tethered
ball one thousand times a day, line-drives
underneath his suburban ranchhouse.
5. By 2028, when K. C.
turned one-hundred, eighty-three percent
of American undergraduates
majored in creative writing, more
folks had MFA’s than VCR’s,
and poetry had passed acrylic
in the GNP. The NEA
offered fellowships for destroying
manuscripts and agreeing: “Never
6. to publish anything jagged on
the right side of the page, or ever
described as ‘prose poems.’” Guerillas
armed with Word Perfect holed in abstract
redoubts. Chief-of-Staff Vendler mustered
security forces (say: Death Squads)
while she issued comforting reports
nightly on lyric television.
Hideous shepherds sing to their flocks
7. under howling houses of the dog.
At the Temple Medical Center
in New Haven I wait. My mother
at eighty-six goes through the Upper
and Lower GI again. My mind
jangles, thinking of my sick son in
New York and his sick one-year-old girl.
This afternoon, if the X-rays go
all right, I drive back to New Hampshire.
8. In New Hampshire, late August, the leaves
turn slowly, like someone working to
order—protesting, outraged—and fall
as they must do. The pond water stays
warm but the campers have departed.
By the railroad goldenrod stiffens;
asters begin a late pennant drive
in front of the barn; pink hollyhocks
wilt and sag like teams out of the race.
9. No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday
a double-header with the Detroit
Tigers, my terrible old team, worse
than the Red Sox who beat the Yankees
last night while my mother and I watched
—the way we listened, fifty years back—
sprightly ghosts playing in heavy snow
on VHS 30 from Hartford,
and the pitcher stared at the batter.
20 Apr 2009, by Eric
Fact: The no. 30 Smooth Jazz album on amazon.com is 'The Journey Within' by Bernie Williams. (Released in 2003)
Question: Is this because A.) Bernie Williams is famous, B.) Bernie Williams is actually a much better musician than you ever noticed, or C.) The only other artist in America willing to self-identify as a Smooth Jazz perform is Kenny G and he has only put out 29 albums?
Much more startling fact: Bernie's new collection, 'Moving Forward,' dropped April 14. It features (no shit) a duet with Bruce Springsteen. As I type this, it's the no. 99 album on all of Amazon, and no. 1 in Latin Jazz. I wonder what, artistically, prompted Bernie to shift from smooth to Latin jazz. But I guess we can't really try and categorize or quantify artistic growth.
All 3 (completely non-partisan and in no way Yankee fan) reviewers on Amazon have given 'Moving Forward' 5 stars. Dig the praise from user Brooklyn's Air Force:
If you like guitar music, it's a base hit. It you like latin music, it's a double. If you like jazz, it's a triple. If you like listening to music that let's you sit back and relax or move your neck and feet it is an inside the park homerun. I purchased this one then went back and brought his first album. Springsteen was hard on my ears, but he is the boss. Williams is a very talented musician!
Gee, I hope to hell he's overstating it! If we are really living in a world where The Boss is 'hard on the ears' compared to Bernie Williams, I have a great deal of painful soul-searching to do.
17 Apr 2009, by Eric
When this blog was first conceived in my imagination, it was as a sort of resource for baseball/literary info. I was thinking I'd review all the current baseball books and movies and so on and so forth. I thought it'd be part library, part commentary. Turns out, other than the greatly ignored Mixtape and Poems of the Week, P&P is all commentary. And thanks to Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf, that's fine.
It's fine, because the Bookshelf is really everything this blog wants to be but can't. Ron Kaplan -- according to his bio a NJ based writer and editor -- covers baseball journalism, literature, film, and even videogames so extensively that my doing it would be futile anyway. So go check out his blog, it's a veritable baseball cornucopia.
(Make sure you come back though.)
16 Apr 2009, by Eric
The way Vin Scully talks makes me wonder why I bother to write. Here he is on how Bruce Bochy must have felt watching his Giants get pounded in Monday's Dodger home opener:
I was thinking about Bruce Bochy on Monday, Opening Day, and I was thinking of a line that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: 'In the real dark night of the soul it’s always 3 o’clock in the morning.' And I was thinking about Bochy in the sunshine on Monday. It was sunshine and daytime to everybody here, but not to the Giants’ skipper. It was 3 o’clock in the morning.
What will this world be without baseball broadcasters who quote F. Scott Fitzgerald?
15 Apr 2009, by Eric
This has nothing to do with baseball, but a short story I wrote called Moroccan Passageways was published today (well internet published) in a literary journal (well internet literary journal) called elimae.
Check it out here.
And make sure you read some of the other stuff in elimae. It's actually a pretty cool lit journal -- it's been online since 1996, which in my culture makes it a man.
(Congratulatory cases of scotch, beer, and champagne can be sent to my home address. Please contact for details.)
PS: If you have 17 hours to spare, it's never too late to read my contribution to The Baseball Chronicle, which may or may not be longer than Leviticus.