Baseball Poetry

Discuss all things Cardinals Baseball
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Pick your Poem

Casey at the Bat
4
27%
Line-Up for Yesterday
0
No votes
Baseball's Sad Lexicon
1
7%
365
5
33%
WTF?
5
33%
 
Total votes: 15

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sighyoung
Mayor of GRB
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Location: Louisville

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

Here's a link to an article on the late Dan Quisenberry that also includes several of his poems about baseball: http://www.scc.net/~heather/quiz.html

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sighyoung
Mayor of GRB
Posts: 37618
Joined: April 17 06, 7:42 pm
Location: Louisville

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

Hopefully this link will work: it's a link to a poem by Michael S. Harper entitled "Archives." Harper often writes about absent or erased black history, and this one concerns all the missing or non-existent archival material on the Negro Leagues or black athletes early in their careers: https://books.google.com/books?id=gUTKD ... wn&f=false

EDIT: Alas, the link doesn't always show the full poem (which extends to a second page).

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MrCrowesGarden
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by MrCrowesGarden »

Roses are red
The thorns are sharper
Come on Cardinals
Sign Bryce Harper

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sighyoung
Mayor of GRB
Posts: 37618
Joined: April 17 06, 7:42 pm
Location: Louisville

Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by sighyoung »

Here are the first three sections of a poem by David Baker, published in The Kenyon Review in 1989, linking the start of each Cardinals season to the rhythms of spring. The allusions to Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass are pretty evident.

David Baker
"Cardinals in Spring" (After Whitman)

I
Tens of thousands on the wing, perennial in April
--think how pure we are, in retrospect--
tens of thousands in our red caps wheeling down
from Davenport, Saint Charles, from Boonville by the river,
from our populous sadnesses driven,
from our seedy backyards driven,
from the bullies and yahoos and doddering folk
of our neighborhoods driven to reclaim
our rightful seats, Saint Louis, Busch Stadium, 1968, the same
as '67, as '66, and the season's first pitch.

II
I don't deny this whole thing
is designed to celebrate our most common desires:
it's spring, we want to win, things grow, we feel
inside ourselves the power of something so immense and primitive
it spreads out unchecked, ritual. Redbirds! we sing
as they take the field, uniforms like shiny hieroglyphs,
and scatter across the Astroturf, a sun-lit plain of green stuff
hopefully forever so green, our latest synthesis
of industry, imagination, and the persistent pastoral archetype.
We're all here, never more perfect than now . . .

III
Brock of the basepath, never more perfect than now,
Javier of the hopping grounder, never quicker,
Flood in his field, and Shannon, and Maxvill at short,
McCarver-in-a-crouch, and suddenly Gibby
whipping his warm-ups in from the natural dirt of the mound ...
Mom with her bag of fried chicken, Dad with his cooler,
Dad with his scorecard and program, my brother next to him,
Uncle Buster crowding down who yesterday flipped
a knuckler behind his back so powerfully
it arched through an upstairs window ... never more perfect than now.

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MrCrowesGarden
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Re: Baseball Poetry

Post by MrCrowesGarden »


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