Baseball and Writing Marianne Moore

Fanaticism?No.Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement--
a fever in the victim--
pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.
Victim in what category?
Owlman watching from the press box?
To whom does it apply?
Who is excited?Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--
a catcher's, as, with cruel
puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
back to plate.(His spring
de-winged a bat swing.)
They have that killer instinct;
yet Elston--whose catching
arm has hurt them all with the bat--
when questioned, says, unenviously,
"I'm very satisfied.We won."
Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";
robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
the massive run need not be everything.
"Going, going . . . "Is
it?Roger Maris
has it, running fast.You will
never see a finer catch.Well . . .
"Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why
gild it, although deer sounds better--
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
one-handing the souvenir-to-be
meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
He is no feather."Strike! . . . Strike two!"
Fouled back.A blur.
It's gone.You would infer
that the bat had eyes.
He put the wood to that one.
Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.
I think I helped a little bit."
All business, each, and modesty.
Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
In that galaxy of nine, say which
won the pennant?Each.It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
by Boyer, finesses in twos--
like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-
diagnosis
with pick-off psychosis.
Pitching is a large subject.
Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
catch your corners--even trouble
Mickey Mantle.("Grazed a Yankee!
My baby pitcher, Montejo!"
With some pedagogy,
you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.Trying
indeed!The secret implying:
"I can stand here, bat held steady."
One may suit him;
none has hit him.
Imponderables smite him.
Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
require food, rest, respite from ruffians.(Drat it!
Celebrity costs privacy!)
Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,
brewer's yeast (high-potency--
concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--
deadly in a pinch.And "Yes,
it's work; I want you to bear down,
but enjoy it
while you're doing it."
Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
if you have a rummage sale,
don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion.

Hi Bill,

Whew, this is a long and difficult poem. But I appreciate its timliness, considering that the World Series is being played now,

Seems to me Moore spends a lot more time talking about baseball and her favorite players than she does poetry. I was interested to learn that the parts in quotation marks are probably real quotes from the people mentioned.

I liked the beginning and end, but not much more.

Here's a baseball poem by a Baltimore poet who was the US poet laureate at one time --

BASEBALL AS ETIQUETTE by Josephine Jacobsen

Baseball is etiquette made beautiful.
A quality pitch is fact, not rumor;
style is high. Do they say to the dangerous batter
who has walked, "Joe, take first?" Never, never.
The catcher, tall as fate, looms over,
his mammoth hand held high,
and the ball thunks his glove in perfect logic,
before the batter tosses his bat.
And when a batter trots back to triumphant home,
does he get his high-fives only from those
with whom he has a beer?
His worst enemy, if he has one,
is perfect in ritual; even in home glory
the pattern holds until the park
is emptied of the ball.
The famous three -- movement, velocity, location --
are sacred and do not bow.
When the dark takes the diamond
and the unforgiving brown circle of loneliness,
a covenant has been confirmed.

I thank you both for the well-intended offerings, timely as they are, but I submit that George Wills' prose about the game is better poetry about the game than these offerings.

The writers, I think, are captivated by the obvious and by the dramatic, the sorts of things one might gather by attending a game or two, by catching the play-by-play on the radio in the days of the legendary announcers most of whom have now gone on to that great dugout in the sky.

It has been said that baseball is boring. It has been said that baseball is about numbers. And both of these statements are true, in part. Much of any baseball game, to the casual observer, is boring, indeed, and to the fervent fan, numbers are everything, even if they seem insignificant to that same casual observer.

Having played the game for a number of years, having loved it for even longer, I know that there are any number of seemingly marginal activities that occur in the course of any single pitch. A coach rubs his stomach and removes his hat and pulls on his ear lobe: the hit and run is on! The manager shouts something seemingly innocuous out to his catcher: the hitter is about to hear one fly by his ear. The shortstop nods to the second baseman: that's all it takes to know who will be covering if the guy on first takes off for second. On an and on and on. And none of it conveyed in these poems.

For these reasons, Casey at the Bat, or whatever it is called, remains the best of the baseball poems that I am aware of. It captures a dramatic moment, to be sure, but we are given a pitch by pitch account and, in the end, the drama resides within the hometown hero's failure, built to that crescendo of emotion by every single act leading to it.

And Wills, even if I am not an admirer of his politics, can sit with me in the stands any time.

Take care,

Joe

I have to go with Roger Angell. For me the season doesn't end until I've read Angell's summation in the New Yorker. Here is some virtuoso rhyming from Sylvia Fine. <link> That's her husband singing. This record was reputed to bring the Dread Doggers bad luck so I played it a lot as a kid. As far as boredom goes, the grand thing about the game is that watching it gives back in proportion to what you put into it, I think more than any other game, except maybe chess or be-bop. The more you know, about the rules, the players, the more you feel like you're about to have a heart attack over some guys mainly just standing around.

This poem is about baseball. The word fanaticism gives that away. This poem captures a moment, and at that moment not just one but two of the greatest teams of all time were playing in New York. Some, by which I do not mean me (but I'd understand either way), might say she's rooting for the wrong team but she has no control over that: she is a fan. I wonder what it would be like to read this in the far future or now you weren't familiar with the players. So this poem is totally about baseball, which is only fair: she did write that other one about poetry.

OneArt..
Thank you for this very refreshing 'baseball/writing poem' by the incomparable Marianne. The baseball play by play and word play..and Marianne was very playful..along with her real familiarity of the game and players..is quite alive. She was an avid baseball fan and acquainted with every detail of the players' pitches, runs, words ..wins and losses. If you can find a book of George Plimpton's Collected pieces that he wrote for Esquire and other magazines..You will find a great piece on his day out with Marianne Moore when they went to a baseball game together. It is priceless.

Thank you for this delight..a nice Thursday surprise. And yes..for those of us who write poetry and appreciate the creation and craft of it..Marianne tells us..and those who love to read and appreciate poetry:

"And "Yes,
it's work; I want you to bear down,
but enjoy it
while you're doing it."
Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
if you have a rummage sale,
don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion. "

Thanks for finding this one.
A

An unexpected choice and a good one as well; Marianne Moore had the skill to find similarities between such an introspective sedantary activity as writing and a team sport as public and extroverted as baseball. Her unusual line lengths and quirky rhyme schemes give you the sense that anything might happen at any moment, and she does rather well keeping the dimensions of her comparisons within reach of the reader's imagination; nothing here is epic or epoch shaking, but there is passion, drama, duels, conflicts, things to be attained, virtues to be lived up to, all in the sense that it is the game that matters because the rules of the game are what unites us in spirit and keeps us going. Moore, perhaps, wanted to extend the egalitarian nature of b-ball to the communities where we live; there would certainly nothing more American than that.

I like this poem by poet Tom Clark, a tribute"

The Great One
Tom Clark

So long Roberto Clemente

you have joined the immortals

who've been bodysnatched

by the Bermuda Triangle

When your plane went down

it forced tears out of grown men

all over the hemisphere

Al Oliver and

even Willie Stargell cried

You had a quiet

pissed-off pride

that made your countrymen

look up to you

even if you weren't

taller than they are

No matter how many times

Manny Sanguillen

dove for your body

the sun kept going down

on his inability to find it

I just hope those Martians realize

they are claiming the rights to

far and away the greatest rightfielder

of all time

Why did you have to post this? I'm having a tough enough day as it is. It's wonderful. Thanks. A moment of silence.