A
REVIEW: KNUCKLERS, HUMMERS, & SLOW
CURVES: Contemporary Baseball Poems. Edited by Don Johnson. With a foreword
by W.P. Kinsella.
It’s
not that long ‘til spring training, and when you live where anything above zero
is considered warm, it can’t come fast enough. In the meantime, you just have
to read baseball poems, which I have been doing with this book edited by Don
Johnson.
How
can you review a book of over 100 poems? Aren’t some better than others? Well,
yes. Some of these are better than others. After all, if you include Robert
Penn Warren and Donald Hall and John Updike…
As
I read, though, each poem gave me a faint, uneasy feeling, as when you are
feeling nauseated but aren’t sure yet if you’ll throw up.
In
the first place, they are too long. That, however, is minor. Many people like
long poems. I like poems, though, that are short enough to memorize, so I can
listen to them whenever I wish, like Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”
I
finally figured out what it is that these poems share, and why I don’t really
like this book: these poems are not really about baseball.
Uniformly,
they use baseball as a front to talk about something else.
Well,
isn’t that true about all poetry? Yes, but good poetry makes you think it is
about only one thing while letting you experience two or more other layers at
the same time.
“Casey
at the Bat” is about more than a single at-bat by a famous player, and “Frosty
and the Babe” obviously is, but neither Ernest Thayer nor I seemed to notice
that as we wrote those poems. [1]
In
a baseball poem, you need to smell the grass, taste the popcorn, hear the crowd
and the crack of the bat before you move on to the relationship between
a man and his son, or a girl trying to make a boys’ team, or what happens in a
prison when the sun goes down.
Also
there are too many poems about the Yankees!
John Robert McFarland
1]
The very nice “Baseball Attic” web site recently reprinted my “Frosty & the
Babe” from the Baseball Almanac site, without my preface explaining that I
wrote the poem for Robert Frost, since he had promised one to his friend,
Albert Krymborg, but never got around to it. Baseball Attic readers speculated
that the “Frosty” in the poem must have been Frosty the Snowman, despite all
the references in the poem to “verse,” and “pen,” etc. So much for cultural
literacy. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poetry/frosty_and_the_babe.shtml
Daughter Katie Kennedy’s Learning to Swear in America will be
published by J. K. Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury Press, in 2015.
My novel, VETS, about four handicapped and homeless Iraqistan veterans who
are accused of murdering a VA doctor, will be published by Black Opal Books in
early 2015.
I
tweet as yooper1721.
SOME
OF MY OTHER BOOKS:
NOW THAT I HAVE
CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and
Those Who Love Them
[AndrewsMcMeel & HarperAudio, with Czech and Japanese translations] Paul K.
Hamilton, MD, the co-founder of CanSurmount, called it “The best book for
cancer patients, by a cancer patient, ever.”
AN ORDINARY MAN
[HarperPaperbacks] Randall MacLane just wanted to be an ordinary man. But sent
with a message for Custer, he became a drifting lawman with a knack for
killing, and a deep well of loneliness. Then a twist of fate brought him full
circle…
THE STRANGE CALLING:
Stories of Ministry
[Smyth&Helwys] I didn’t want to be a preacher, but I made a deal with God
to save my sister’s life. Was that really a “call,” though? I said, “I’ll try t
for 50 years, and if I still don’t know, I’ll do something else.” These are stories
of what happened in those years of questioning the call.
WHEN FATHER RODE
THE MAIL and Other Stories of Christmas [lulu.com] ISBN 978-1-300-38566-0
