“We wait for baseball all winter long,” Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, “or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”
Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.
The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the readerlike the true baseball fanmust be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds familiesand indeed the nationtogether, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game’s long season and to the lives of those the game engages.
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Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems
“We wait for baseball all winter long,” Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, “or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”
Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.
The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the readerlike the true baseball fanmust be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds familiesand indeed the nationtogether, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game’s long season and to the lives of those the game engages.
“We wait for baseball all winter long,” Bill Littlefield wrote in Boston Magazine a decade ago, “or rather, we remember it and anticipate it at the same time. We re-create what we have known and we imagine what we are going to do next. Maybe that’s what poets do, too.”
Poetry and baseball are occasions for well-put passion and expressive pondering, and just as passionate attention transforms the prose of everyday life into poetry, it also transforms this game we write about, play, or watch. Editors Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles unite their own passion for baseball and poetry in this collection, Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, providing a forum for ninety-two poets. Line after line, like baseball itself game after game and season after season, these poems manage to make the old and the familiar new and surprising.
The poems in these pages invite interrogation, and the readerlike the true baseball fanmust be willing to play the game, for these poems are fun, fresh, angry, nostalgic, meditative, and meant to be read aloud. They are keen on taking us deeply into baseball as sport and intent on offering countless metaphors for exploring history, religion, love, family, and self-identity. Each poem delivers images of pure beauty as the poets speak of murder and ghost runners and old ball gloves, of baseball as a tie that binds familiesand indeed the nationtogether, of the game as a stage upon which no-nonsense grit and skill are routinely displayed, and of the delight experienced in being one amid a mindlessly happy crowd. This book is true to the game’s long season and to the lives of those the game engages.
Brooke Horvath is a professor of English at Kent State University and the author of two collections of poetryIn a Neighborhood of Dying Light and Consolation at Ground Zero. He has served as a book review editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.
Tim Wiles is the director of research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. His baseball writings include a column, “Letters in the Dirt,” in the Cooperstown Freeman’s Journal and poems in Elysian Fields Quarterly and Fan.
Table of Contents
Foreword
xv
Editors' Acknowledgments
xix
Editors' Introduction
xxi
1
The Origin and Purpose of Baseball
3
Spring Fever
5
Stealing Home
6
Spring Training
7
Little League Tryouts
8
The Catch
9
Baseball
10
The Player
12
1947
13
The Retarded Children Play Baseball
15
Asked for a Happy Memory of Her Father, She Remembers Wrigley Field
17
Sweet Spot
18
Something I Could Tell You about Love
20
To Fungo the Torn Ones
21
The Baseball Boys of 1964
23
It Ain't Over ...
27
Instant Out
28
Baseball Fields Seen from the Air
29
Cardinals in Spring
30
Stop Action
34
2
How to Hit a Home Run
37
Blyleven's Fourth Shutout, June, 1985
39
Baseball
40
Black Ink
41
A Dream of Third Base
43
Glory
45
Aesthetics
47
Ode to Apple Pie
49
A Softball Game
51
Listening to a Baseball Game
53
Singles
54
Players
56
Crowd at the Stadium
58
In the Red Seats
59
Supernatural
61
Minor League Rainout, Iowa
63
Polish-American Night, Tiger Stadium
65
Biographical Note
67
Softball
68
Night Baseball, 1947
70
3
A Baseball Game
73
September Pears
74
The Gamer
75
Photo of a Minor League Baseball Team, ca. 1952
76
Where Baseball's the Only Game in Town
77
Baseball Cards
78
Geronimo at Short
80
Something about Certain Old Baseball Fields
82
Night Baseball in the American West
83
Is Reality One or Many?
85
Southpaw
87
Returning to the Field
88
The Big League
90
Visiting My Boyhood Friend after His Stroke
92
Hits
93
Isn't it pretty to think so?
95
Catch
96
Old Baseball Found under a Bush
98
Everything But Everything
99
Limited Power
101
4
True Story
105
Baseball Haiku
106
Dreams Should Not Dog Great Center Fielders
107
The Career of Lou Proctor
109
Question and Answer
111
World Series, 1968, Southeast Asia
113
Short History of a Baseball
116
Play by Play
119
My Father, on the Day He Died
121
Baseball in Ohio
123
Betting on the Muse
125
Telephone Call
128
Williams in Autumn
129
October Play
131
Night Baseball
132
My Last Hit
134
Dream of a Hanging Curve
135
America without Baseball
137
Tired of Loss and Sin
140
Winter at the Ball Field
144
5
World Series, Game 5
147
Softball Dreams
148
Voices of the Sea
150
Archives
152
Poem for My Father
154
If You Know Me at All
156
Final Play
157
Why I Love Baseball
158
Line Drive Caught by the Grace of God
160
Listening to the Ballgame
162
The Cure
164
A Dharma Talk by Johnny Roseboro, Boulder, Colorado, March 23, 1983
166
Carolina League Old Timers Game
168
Pearly Babe
170
Sweet
171
Question: If You Had Only 24 Hours to Live, What Would You Do?