The Best American Poetry

Sandy Koufax's Scouting Report -- and Tom Seaver's

In 1965, the scout watched Seaver pitch for USC and wrote, "This boy showed a real good fast ball with good life … boy has plenty of desire to pitch and wants to beat you." The scout was Tom Lasorda, the future Hall of Fame manager who was, at the time, best known as a Dodger lifer, a southpaw pitcher who had come up with Koufax but failed to stick to the major league club.

Here is Bill Zinser's scouting report on Koufax from May 15, 1954. -- DL

Sandy Koufax back in Dodger Blue

At the Dodgers training camp this week in Glendale, Arizona, Mr. Koufax conferred with Dodger coaches and players, Now if the baseball Dodgers were the basketball Knicks (who are adding Kenyon Martin to an already impressive lineup of over-the-hill greats), they'd probably be offering a contract to the southpaw, 77, who, to help justify the analogy, played basketball in college. As a Dodger pitcher he won the Cy Young Award three times and was NL MVP in 1963. And he pitched the team to two world championships. And he refused to pitch game one of the 1965 World Series against the Twins because the date fell on Yom Kippur. Here he is, giving the fans something to smile about. -- DL

In Praise of the Index [by Heather Christle]

Today I finished updating jubilat.org with content from the new issue--our twenty-second. Much of the process is a little mundane, like figuring out (with my extremely limited html skills) how to best represent a poem's irregular form. It's a puzzle, but not an especially artistic one.

On the other hand, once all that formatting's complete, I get to move on to my favorite part of making a new issue: determining how to index the poems. We do have an index of contributors' names, but the "index of ideas" is where I get excited. Might I associate a poem with already-existing terms like meat or money? Or does the poem demand the addition of new terms to the index? While I was working today I realized that--to my great surprise--ghosts had not yet made it onto the list. It took this particular group of haunted poems to push the word forward in my consciousness.

It's a strange way to read, moving my eyes over the poems and back into my memory through some alternate dimension. If I typically read a poem with my eyes on the poem, reading to index lets me read through them. It's like discovering an elevator in the middle of an ice skating rink. And down I go.

I'm an irresponsible indexer. I don't pretend to be complete or consistent. Nor do the other index-makers I admire. The other day, reading the final chapter of Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, I ran into this passage, which describes the index of the book Manguel says he hasn't written, but would like to read--titled The History of Reading:

I know it possesses a copious and curious index which will give me intense delight, with headings such as (I fall by chance on the letter T) Tantalus for readers, Tarzan's library, Tearing pages, Toes (reading with), Tolstoy's canon, Tombstones, Torment by recitation, Tortoise (see Shells and animal skins), Touching books, Touchstone and censorship, Transmigration of readers' souls (see Lending books).

I rushed to the actual index of A History, and felt first disappointment, then a kind of thrill to see that no such terms were to be found. In their place? Very useful and proper headings: Torah, translation, troubadour. This straightforward collection meant that I could invent my own copious and curious index for the rest of the alphabet. It was not limited by actually existing; it was the largest index in the world.

At times, for fun and self-instruction, I've indexed my own poems, taking a cue from my friend Zachary Schomburg (hi Zach), who has included an index in all three of his books, helping readers notice the presence of Blood in the trees, Bravery, and Baseball (see also Sports). Baseball appears, by the way, in the jubilat index as well.

Not yet have I attempted the poem as index, but the late Paul Violi did. More than attempted! He recognized that an index is a tremendously revealing form: an imperfect x-ray of a book's soul. (Or sometimes an autobiographer's.)

Do you have a favorite index? Don't say Harper's! I really do want to know.

--Heather Christle

Sandy Koufax was born today!

after pitching the fourth of his four career no-hitters

cover of Life (August 2, 1963)     in action

Why the Dickens would they Ditch Dickey? [by DL]

Why do sports pundits persist in recommending that rebuilding franchises trade their best players? Thus Brian Costa in "Why Dickey Should Be Traded" (Wall Street Journal, Nov 9, 2012, p. A21) ). The theory is that the aging star will bring in hot-shot prospects that will dramatically help the team's prospects in the long range. Unfortunately, it is logic of this sort that impelled the Mets to part with Tom Seaver, the best player in their history, back in 1977. In exchange for Seaver -- who had several great years left in him, and even a threw a no-hitter in a Cincinnati uniform -- the Mets got a mediocre pitcher, a good-field-no-hit second baseman, and two can't-miss outfielders. Steve Henderson, the more ballyhooed of the two, had what would charitably be called a disappointing career. The other outfielder is the answer to a trivia question. All right, don't scarch your head. Dan Norman.
The Mets should sign Dickey not only because he had a great season but because he is a reason that fans come to the park and buy tickets. He is a Met, a crucial part of the team's identity. It interests me that he is also notably intelligent, a published author, but the germane fact is that he may well continue to pitch at this year's sensational level. While it is true that he is 38, the knuckle-ball as he throws it causes less arm weariness, and is less likely to lead to a severe shoulder, elbow, or wrist injury, than the standard pitcher's repetoire.

On the week when the Mets parted ways with Jason Bay, undoubtedly the biggest bust in a history of bad free-agent signings, two things occur to me:

-- Will columnist Jason Gay either leave the Journal or change his name to, for example, David Bright?

-- If we made a team of over-the-hill players that donned Mets' uniforms and stopped performing (.e.g. Jason Bay, Mo Vaughan, Roberto Alomar), added players acquired in one-sided deals (Jim Fregosi, Juan Samuel) or other dumb moves (George Foster), how would it fare against a team made up of players the Mets dispensed with (Seaver, Nolan Ryan, Lenny Dysktra, Kevin Mitchell, David Cone)?

The long season's over, and then came the chill. They played the World Series and nobody noticed. -- DL

Sports Desk (Olympic Edition): On the Ghost Sports: Baseball. Ripatrazone and Campion.

Today Poetic/Olympic Coverage continues at The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Best American Poetry. We're starting a series within the series in which we consider sports that have been and no longer are a part of the Games. We're calling them Ghost Sports and today it's baseball. Here's a moving meditation by Nick Ripatrazone and some brilliant hilarity by Peter Campion.

Foul Ball: On Baseball and Poetry

By Nick Ripatrazone

The dugouts are empty and the bats are silent: there is no baseball in the London Olympics. There will be no baseball in the 2016 Berlin games. Baseball has merged its international governing body with another spurned sport, softball, for their 2020 bid. It pains me to hear Softball Federation President Don Porter’s admission that they will try to find ways to make both sports “more attractive and interesting.”

            Some major reasons for exclusion include the sport’s popularity in the Americas and Asia but more provincial following in Europe, concerns about drug testing, and the absence of Major League Baseball players. Yet a more implicit trait that appears to have doomed baseball’s chances as an Olympic sport--relatively slow, long games with moments of muted drama--is the same element that makes baseball so beautifully poetic.

            Baseball, even when played in the most urban of locations, is a reminder of the pastoral. The field is geometrically pleasing: batter and catcher boxes, on-deck circles, the manicured diamond centered with the pitcher’s mound, the dirt infield and the grassed outfield, stretching to the fences. That back border is hard, but other borders, like foul lines, can be straddled and crossed. Soft grass and rough dirt can both stain bodies. The bases, though fixed onto anchors, are sometimes upended. Home plate is often buried. It is a static field in almost constant flux.

            Fiction and film have romanticized the game, but poets have given the mythology further refinement and form. Marianne Moore, who threw out the first pitch of the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968, finds “excitement-- / a fever” in the unexpected nature of the game. Unlike basketball, with set hoops, and football, with end zones that must be reached like conquered land, baseball hinges on the relationship between pitcher and batter. If baseball hits bat, the ball springs, and the action follows that white blur. For a sport billed as slow and steady, the movement can be swift and erratic. In “Writing and Baseball,” Moore finds a connection between the unpredictability of both arts, and her uneven structure pushes forward the breakneck lines: a “leaping” player “snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest, / one-handing the souvenir-to-be / meant to be caught by you or me.” Moore’s witty poem is framed by her epigraph: “Suggested by post-game broadcasts.” Baseball is a game clothed in commentary from raised booths and rows of seats: a world covered in words.

            Fernando Perez, the first Major League Baseball player to be published in Poetry, writes that the world of baseball is infinitely splintered and complicated. Minor league players are like itinerant bards, “slouched on a bus, watching small towns roll by matter-of-factly like stock market tickers,” even, as he quotes Ginsberg, “‘shopping for images’ in a Wal-Mart.” Perez knows that “eventually my prime will end” and baseball will “slowly break my heart.” He turns to poetry “because it is less susceptible to circumstance,” and yet he is “not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other.” A baseball player, he wants the worlds of poetry and baseball “apart.”

            That could be the ultimate draw of the sport to poets: it feels like a mythological other, a well-groomed natural world that resists the occasional simplification and nostalgia that poets wish to drape on it. Robert Creeley, Perez’s favorite poet, laments: “The one damn time (7^th inning) / standing up to get a hot dog someone spills / mustard all over me.” In a sport where Babe Ruth is king, where The Pride of the Yankees inspires those who can’t stand the Bronx Bombers, hyperbole and humor equal a second reality, a pastime more game than sport. It is a game where rules are bent, where decisions of safe versus out, ball versus strike are handed down by umpires who sometimes shout, nearly mouth-to-mouth, with frustrated coaches. A game where pitchers might bean batters, where a thief of the infield--a base stealer--is praised by Robert Francis: “How he teeters, skitters, tingles, teases, / Taunts them, hovers like an ecstatic bird, / He’s only flirting.” Only in baseball can the grand and legendary, the progressive and monumental reside next to, and perhaps thrive on, the loopy, the subversive, the angry. Such power and possibility in these names: Jackie Robinson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter, Joe DiMaggio, Cecil Fielder, Pearce “What’s the Use” Chiles, Ty Cobb.

            Is this not poetry? Another pursuit mistakenly thought as passive, where the careful accumulation of image can create the tender or forceful. Archibald MacLeish’s “The End of the World” is not about baseball, but in the pageantry of this particular circus, I find correlation. The best moments of baseball and poetry happen “quite unexpectedly.” The “top” blows off when, distracted by an overfilled cup of beer or a vendor screaming about peanuts, we hear the bat crack against ball, and watch it disappear into the blue. We know the ball will return, but for now it remains unseen, while it “hung over / those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes.” Even the most lackluster popup can drop, like a ton, on the grass, and what happens next is controlled chaos: coaches scream, the bench clears, the winning run on second sees the absurd possibility of home. This is the movement of poetry: like “a piece of ice on a hot stove.”

            But what is that ice doing on a stove? Only Robert Frost knows, and we know he certainly loved baseball. It might have been his poultry farming background, the marriage of the pastoral and patience. He said that “nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write -- unless it be to have assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.” Frost thought of baseball as a form of prowess, and saw that as its “common ground” with poetry: both had “something to achieve, something to win or lose.” In the same way we are startled by a late-inning rally, we are shaken by a poem that prodded along until a charged final couplet, and perhaps we feel guilty that we did not see the beauty all along.

            An exhibition and demonstration sport since the 1904 games, medals for baseball have only been awarded in 5 Olympiads. It is unfortunate that such a storied sport is absent on the world’s athletic stage. Imagine, as poets are inclined to, the dramatic perfection of a gold medal no-hitter. Yet there is sufficient drama in a batter’s repeated foul balls as he battles against a determined pitcher on a full count, or the long, slow walk of a relief pitcher from the bullpen. The length of this game is what I find most beautiful and complex. Despite innings and outs, there is always the possibility that a baseball game could go on forever. This glimpse of the eternal is contrasted with the fear and pressure of the final out of the ninth inning. Even in the World Series, we know that these teams will live to play another day, but there is so much grace and terror in that moment before we all go our separate ways, before we take off our team’s caps and celebrate or sulk. We know that tomorrow the groundskeeper will mow lines of light and dark into the desolate outfield while summer help pull rakes along the infield. But in those tense final moments, the possibility of an eternal game can be snapped with a third strike, a caught line drive, a lazy runner picked-off at second. Calm cloaking intense drama. What else could we hope for in the world of sport?

 ***

The Dodgers' Secret Weapon

The Los Angeles Dodgers have defied the experts thus far this season. Despite crippling injuries, most notably to last year's MVP should-have-been Matt Kemp, they remain in first place. They are not a strong hitting club; their front line pitching is too dependent on aged arms; the debacle of their former owner's nasty divorce still offends the nostrils. Yet they win their share of one-run games and come-from-behind victories so crucial to a team's morale. Some of the credit has to go to manager Don Mattingly. (Yankee fans may never get used to the sight of their great first-baseman in Dodger blue.) But I think a second secret of their success can be summed up in one word: genes. Look at the Dodgers roster and you see six sons of former players. There are the juniors: Tony Gwynn, Ivan de Jesus, Jerry Hairston. Then there is Dee Gordon, flashy shortstop swift as Hermes, the son of reliever Tom Gordon, who lined a ball between outfielders tonight and glided into third base with a triple. Andy Van Slyke's son Scott won a game for the Dodgers with a home run, Justin Sellers, son of Jeff (I think), is the sixth baeball brat on the team. The Dodgers' theory. as I infer it, is that the sons of capable major leaguers are likelier to have mastered the intangibles of the game and to perform well under pressure. It's nice to have Tony Gwynn bat for you when there are two men on base with two outs in the ninth inning -- in theory and, so far in 2012, when the game is on the line.  -- DL

Stephen Crane: American Poet (by Jenny Factor)

Today is the opening day for millions of baseball fans--including me. (This poet cheers for the Dodgers.)

Another fan of baseball, Stephen Crane (b. 1891 in New York, and shown above as a Syracuse University undergraduate), made a name as a journalist, and wrote novels, short-stories, and poetry at the turn of a prior century. Here is a brief biography of the artist--and his influential friends--thinkers such as H.G. Wells and Henry James. And here is some information on his baseball-loving Syracuse days. And here is a wonderful Best American blog post on his birthday in November. 

A highschool sophomore I know sent me the following poem; in fact, it is his favorite early American poem. Stephen Crane’s “’Truth,’ Said a Traveller” he wrote, "presents two conflicting themes, first that truth is an achievable phenomenon, and second that it is mysterious and unreachable, a shifting, relative, and utterly mysterious entity." 

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.

In his fascinating 1975 essay, "The Hole in the Bucket", (Coming into the Country, University of Michigan Press) John Haines claims that  "American poetry lacks ideas." He continues, "Like all large statements, this one covers a lot of ground and leaves plenty of room for error". Was Haines responding to a lack he felt in 1975 that previous generations of American poetry had not shared? Yes, he seems to be!

However, it is precisely a poetry of ideas that I think we are beginning to see, more and more, in some of recent contemporary poetry...sinuous, philosophical long poems. Quirky philosophical sonnets. Experimental leaps and fancies that hold ideas central and foremost. Ben Lerner. Fanny Howe. Olena Kalytiak Davis. Claudia Rankine. Dan Beachy-Quick. Ben Doller. Douglas Kearney. Paisley Rekdal. And on and on.

Thanks, Stephen Crane. Thanks, John Haines. 

Are you ready for opening day?

 

"Our Love Affair": Which one?

Unsung heroes Arthur Freed (who produced "The Wizard of Oz" and rescued "Over the Rainbow" from extinction) and Roger Edens (who composed the "Dear Mr Gable" intro to "You Made Me Love You" for Judy Garland) wrote the "Love Affair" that I prefer of the two great contenders in movie history. The rival, composed by Harry Warren, orchestrates the 1957 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr tear-jeker, "An Affair to Remember." That one has its appeal, god knows; I believe Nore Ephron regards the film and everything about it as the epitome of romance, and it's great for the string section. But the one I vote for is the musical emblem of "Strike Up the Band" (1940) -- a movie directed by Busby Berkeley, in which, in one show-within-a-show scene, "demi-tasse" is the unlikely euphemism for hanky-panky. "Our Love Affair" carries the overture beyond the Gershwin title track, is sung thirteen minutes into the movie by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and recurs throughout as background music for the young romantics. I love Freed's lyrics in general -- he also wrote the songs in "Singin' in the Rain." I will write more about him some other time -- about Roger Edens, too, who, according to reliable sources, shared a birthday (November 9) with Kay Thompson. (From 1942 through 1957 they gave joint birthday parties during which each presented a surprise production number using special material featuring their friends— Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Dorothy Dandridge, Maureen O'Hara, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern, Danny Kaye, Charles Walters, Cole Porter, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane — with secret rehearsals, and neither telling the other what to expect.)  Anyway -- See "Strike Up the Band" once and you'll know "Our Love Affair" forever. The tenderness here coexists with brass. It can be done in swing time or full of the most wistful longing. If you click below you will hear it ably performed by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with the Sentimental Gentleman himself on the 'bone and boy singer Sinatra (24 or 25) crooning the words..  -- DL