Baseball Poetry

August 1, 2004 10:24 PM

The Night Game, by Robert Pinsky; Baseball and Writing, by Marianne Moore; Baseball Canto, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and more baseball poetry than you can shake a stick at.
posted by .kobayashi. (4 comments total)

Inspired by this AskMe post by JanetLand, a request for a poem that I, too, really wanted to find, but never did.
posted by .kobayashi. at 10:25 PM on August 1, 2004

Canuck WP Kinsella deserves a mention here.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:37 AM on August 2, 2004

Dream of a Baseball Star



I dreamed Ted Williams

leaning at night

against the Eiffel Tower, weeping.



He was in uniform

and his bat lay at his feet

--knotted and twiggy.



‘Randall Jarrell says you’re a poet!” I cried.

‘So do I! I say you’re a poet!’



He picked up his bat with blown hands;

stood there astraddle as he would in the batter’s ox,

and laughed! flinging his schoolboy wrath



toward some invisible pitcher’s mound

--waiting the pitch all the way from heaven.



It came; hundreds came! all afire!

He swung and swung and swung and connected not one

sinker curve hook or right-down-the-middle.

A hundred strikes!

The umpire dressed in strange attire

thundered his judgment: YOU”RE OUT!

And the phantom crowd’s horrific boo

dispersed the gargoyles from Notre Dame.



And I screamed in my dream:

God! throw thy merciful pitch!

Herald the crack of bats!

Hooray the sharp liner to left!

Yea the double, the triple!

Hosanna the home run!



Gregory Corso
posted by clavdivs at 10:26 AM on August 2, 2004

Thanks, .kobayashi., this is a wonderful post. There's a lot of good baseball verse, but few "real" poems (even Marianne Moore descended to the silly much of the time when she wrote about the National Sport), but one unquestionably real (and scary) poem is WCW's "The Crowd at the Ball Game" -- the way it turns on a dime in the middle and steers straight at your face is breathtaking and terrifying.
posted by languagehat at 12:19 PM on August 2, 2004