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Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 8 19, 9:03 pm
by sighyoung
For this poem it's best to go to the weblink, because the poem's visual layout is very important, and impossible to reproduce through cutting and pasting


7th Game : 1960 Series
By Paul Blackburn https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... 960-series

—for Joel—

Nice day,
sweet October afternoon
Men walk the sun-shot avenues,
Second, Third, eyes
intent elsewhere
ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets
Bars are full, quiet,
discussion during commercials
only
Pirates lead New York 4-1, top of the 6th, 2
Yankees on base, 1 man out

What a nice day for all this !
Handsome women, even
dreamy jailbait, walk
nearly neglected :
men’s eyes are blank
their thoughts are all in Pittsburgh

Last half of the 9th, the score tied 9-all,
Mazeroski leads off for the Pirates
The 2nd pitch he simply, sweetly
CRACK!
belts it clean over the left-field wall

Blocks of afternoon
acres of afternoon
Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon . One
diamond stretches out in the sun
the 3rd base line
and what men come down
it

The final score, 10-9

Yanquis, come home

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 8 19, 9:29 pm
by sighyoung
DON LARSEN'S PERFECT GAME

Paul Goodman

Everybody went to bat three times
except their pitcher (twice) and his pinch hitter,
but nobody got anything at all.
Don Larsen in the eighth and ninth looked pale
and afterwards he did not want to talk.
This is a fellow who will have bad dreams.
His catcher Berra jumped for joy and hugged him
like a bear, legs and arms, and all the Yankees
crowded around him thick to make him be
not lonely, and in fact in fact in fact
nothing went wrong. But that was yesterday.

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 8 19, 9:56 pm
by sighyoung
Here's a link to Gregory Djanikian's poem "How I Learned English." In the webpage, be sure to click on the right arrow to read the second page of the poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry ... =4&page=39

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 8 19, 9:59 pm
by sighyoung
MANTLE

William Heyen (once again, the visual layout of the poem isn't accurately reproduced on the page)


Mantle ran so hard, they said,
he tore his legs to pieces.
What is this but spirit?

52 homers in '56, the triple crown.
I was a high school junior, batting
fourth behind him in a dream.

I prayed for him to quit, before
his lifetime dropped below .300.
But he didn't, and it did.

He makes Brylcreem commercials now,
models with opened mouths draped around him
as they never were in Commerce, Oklahoma,

where the sandy-haired, wide-shouldered boy
stood up against his barn,
lefty for an hour (Ruth, Gehrig),

then righty (DiMaggio),
as his father winged them in,
and the future blew toward him,

now a fastball, now a slow
curve hanging
like a model's smile.

[You can get a sense of what the poem looks like within the spoiler.]
[SHOW]
Image

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 8 19, 11:08 pm
by CardsofSTL
sighyoung wrote:For this poem it's best to go to the weblink, because the poem's visual layout is very important, and impossible to reproduce through cutting and pasting


7th Game : 1960 Series
By Paul Blackburn https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... 960-series

—for Joel—

Nice day,
sweet October afternoon
Men walk the sun-shot avenues,
Second, Third, eyes
intent elsewhere
ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets
Bars are full, quiet,
discussion during commercials
only
Pirates lead New York 4-1, top of the 6th, 2
Yankees on base, 1 man out

What a nice day for all this !
Handsome women, even
dreamy jailbait, walk
nearly neglected :
men’s eyes are blank
their thoughts are all in Pittsburgh

Last half of the 9th, the score tied 9-all,
Mazeroski leads off for the Pirates
The 2nd pitch he simply, sweetly
CRACK!
belts it clean over the left-field wall

Blocks of afternoon
acres of afternoon
Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon . One
diamond stretches out in the sun
the 3rd base line
and what men come down
it

The final score, 10-9

Yanquis, come home
For the link impaired among us; the visual impact is quite nice as Sigh instructed.
[SHOW]
Image

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 9 19, 6:47 am
by sighyoung
The mid-century poet Rolfe Humphries wrote a couple of important poems about baseball. His most widely anthologized baseball poem is "Polo Grounds," which first appeared in The New Yorker in the early 1940's. I'll provide both a blurry image of it, but also a link to the New Yorker's website, in which people might be able to see the poem in its original context in the magazine, and even magnify the image. http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1942-08-22#folio=022

Image

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 9 19, 6:55 am
by sighyoung
Here's another Rolfe Humphries poem, "Night Game," first published in Poetry Magazine in the mid-1940's. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetry ... =1&page=31

It's best to view the two pages via the link (click on a right arrow to see the second page).
I've spoilered the two images, which are so large that they don't reproduce all the words.
[SHOW]
Image
[SHOW]
Image

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 9 19, 7:34 am
by sighyoung
Here's a link to a poem entitled "Poem for My Father" by Quincy Troupe about his father Quincy T. Trouppe, Sr. (yes, two p's in the father's name), who played in the Negro Leagues. Troupe is from St. Louis, and his cousin, Charles Quincy Troupe, was my longtime state representative. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... -my-father

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 9 19, 7:51 am
by sighyoung
And here's a link to a poem entitled "From Altitude, The Diamonds," by Richard Hugo, an important Western poet who wrote a handful of poems about baseball and softball:https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ ... 52F21.html

Re: Baseball Poetry

Posted: February 9 19, 7:31 pm
by CardsofSTL
The five people that voted WTF need an ass whupping