The inspiration came to Stephen Biondolillo when he read about a fisherman’s poetry festival. This is not a story about that event, but it could be. Now a quarter of a century old and still flourishing, the FisherPoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, is not a celebration of literary anglers in the tradition of Isaac Walton or Norman MacLean or Richard Brautigan, but of the poetry of commercial fishery, and hundreds of fisherpoetry fans come each year to hear “the authentic, creative voices of deckhands and skippers, cannery workers and shipwrights, young greenhorns and old timers, strong women and good-looking men.”
The world of literary poetry, criticized (often unfairly) for having become increasingly tied to the insular world of colleges and universities, and the even more insular world of MFA programs, has an uneasy awareness of the world of populist poetry, from rappers to cowboy poets to, as it turns out, commercial fishermen. And did Bob Dylan really deserve the Nobel Prize?
Biondolillo, a student of Helen Vendler, a lover of Yeats and Auden but equally a populist, and a successful entrepreneur with particular expertise in the field of special event fund raising, read about the fisherpoets, and was intrigued. If fishing could inspire such poets, and draw such audiences, why not his favorite sport – and a sport that has attracted more literary minds than any other? Why not a baseball poetry festival?
Baseball has attracted humorists like Ring Lardner and P. G. Wodehouse. It has pulled at the imagination of novelists Bernard Malamud (The Natural), Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly), and W. P. Kinsella (Shoeless Joe – in the movie Field of Dreams a fictional novelist played by James Earl Jones is kidnapped and drawn into the romance of baseball, but in the novel the baseball-loving hero kidnaps J. D. Salinger). Songwriters have found inspiration in baseball, from Paul Simon and Bob Dylan to John Fogerty and Warren Zevon, not to mention Dan Parker (“Leave Us Go Root for the Dodgers, Rodgers”) and the immortal Jack Norwood and Albert Von Tilzer (“Take Me Out to the Ballgame”).
And poets, too. Nancy Willard, one of my favorite poets, is also the author of one of my favorite novels, Things Invisible to See, about an epic game between team of former high school players and Death’s all stars.
Other poets have taken on baseball head-on, like the classic pitcher-batter confrontation. Brooklyn resident Marianne Moore was a Dodger fan who found poetry in the game (https://poets.org/poem/baseball-and-writing):
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?
Donald Hall wrote a nonfiction book, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, about the Pittsburgh Pirate hurler who once pitched a no-hitter under the influence of LSD. Baseball was a frequent subject of his poetry, including this one. Here’s the first stanza of ”The Baseball Players”:
Against the bright
grass the white-knickered
players, tense, seize,
and attend. A moment
ago, outfielders
and infielders adjusted
their clothing, glanced
at the sun and settled
forward, hands on knees;
the pitcher walked back
of the hill, established
his cap and returned;
the catcher twitched
a forefinger; the batter
rotated his bat
in a slow circle. But now
they pause: wary,
exact, suspended—
while
abiding moonrise
lightens the angel
of the overgrown
hardens, and Walter Blake
Adams, who died
at fourteen, waits
under the footbridge.
Mikhail Horowitz married baseball to poetry in his book for City Lights Press, Big League Poets:
Justin Hamm has his own approach to poet baseball cards:
The most famous – by far – of all American poems was written about baseball. “Casey at the Bat,” written by Ernest Thayer in 1888, as Mark Twain was finishing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Walt Whitman was making his final revisions to the last version of Leaves of Grass. Three enduring classics of American literature, and if Thayer’s name doesn’t quite ring the same bell as his illustrious contemporaries, his poem certainly does.
One place where Ernest Thayer’s name is remembered with pride – Worcester, Massachusetts, home of the AAA ball team the WooSox, and birthplace of the poet. And, as of 2023, the site chosen by Steven Biondolillo for the annual National Baseball Poetry Festival – an event welcomed by local arts and civic organizations, by a magazine, Baseball Bard, and by the WooSox, who are now hosting the event for its second year in their state of the art Polar Park.
I was able to attend the first day of the festival, May 3, held in the cafeteria overlooking Polar Park’s outfield. The room was full of baseball/poetry lovers, so two gentlemen asked if they could join Pat and me at our table, and I was surprised and pleased when one of them was called up to read his poem about robins taking over a baseball field in the early spring. His name was Tom Clark, but as a well-known poet has already usurped that name, he writes as Tommy Twilight (“my rock and roll name”) and he gave me a copy of his book of poems about birds, including the ballfield-haunting robins. Stephen Murray, a Worcester native and composer, presented the umpire’s aria from his opera about Casey at the Bat,, and the organizer of the festival, Steven Biondilillo, introduced some poetry celebrities in the audience (including me!) and read a moving poem about baseball as solace to the early loss of his father. The event concluded with a tour of the ballpark, and the regularly scheduled WooSox game.
I wasn’t able to stay for the heart of the festival’s lineup on Saturday, open mike readings of baseball poems, and readings by the winners of the two baseball poetry competitions, one for school age kids and the other adults. Biondilillo is not a believer in hierarchies of first, second and third place winners (although baseball is certainly a hierarchical game), so the twenty selectees in each group would all read on equal footing. And also on equal footing, the populist poets and the…literary poets? I don’t care much for that designation. The professional poets? No one else will care much for that, but I kinda like it. It bespeaks an honest attention to craft, a commitment to the idea that what we do is worth doing.
So as I was saying: also on equal footing, the populist poets and the professional poets, joined by a love of baseball and the desire to celebrate it. This is a wonderful event, poets linked by a sport that has inspired so many over the years, and next year I will organize my springtime to be able to attend the whole weekend.
Here's some baseball poetry. Excerpted from Steven Biondolillo’s “In Centerfield”:
I’d shagged fly balls in centerfield
At least a thousand times;
The label on my glove had peeled—
Like me, its age was nine.
My dad had given me the glove
The day that I was born;
The gift outlived his hopeful love,
By six, my dad was gone.
A boy without a father seeks
A glade where he can grow—
A place where nothing hurts or bleeds,
A place where he feels whole.
For me that place was open sky
On ground of black tar seal;
While others tried in left and right,
I thrived in centerfield.
And an excerpt from “The Dead,” by Tom Driscoll:
My father and I sit at that kitchen table,
tell the same stories
we always told, pretending them new each time.
Dad has that one about Carl Yastrzemski,
how after a bogus called third strike Yaz calmly bent down
and covered home plate with dirt and walked away,
never turning to acknowledge the enraged umpire
ejecting him from the game.
We laugh, smile sharing that one again.
And then I try to tell him about 2004,
how I’d thought it might be the sweet and solemn gesture
when I brought the sports pages and an old Sox cap
to the graveside the morning after they’d finally won it all.
You’d have loved to see it, Dad.
You can find the rest of the poem, and more of Driscoll’s work, here.
Here are some populist poets from other arenas. Baxter Black, large animal veterinarian and perhaps the most famous cowboy poet, wrote his own obituary not long before he died. Here’s an excerpt:
And heaven for a cowboy is just what you might expect,
It's horses that need tunin' up and heifers that need checked.
It's long rides with a purpose and a code that lights the way
And a satisfying reason to get up every day.
It's the ranch he's always dreamed of and never knew he'd find
And if you think about it, you can see it in your mind.
Him, leanin' in the saddle with his ol' hat on his head,
Contentment set upon his face like blankets on a bed.
The leather creaks a little as he shifts there in the seat.
The bit chains give a jingle when his pony switches feet.
And you somehow get the feelin' that he's sittin' on a throne
A'gazin' out on paradise just like it was his own.
FisherPoet Alana Kansaku-Sarmiento sometimes chooses the rhymed couplets often favored by populist poets, as in this tribute to Fish Naked Day:
The weather is chilly, the water is gray
A little too nippy for some on this day
But talk comes cheap, and we women are proud
After months of big talk, giving up’s not allowed!
We grab ice from our tender, all clothing in place
Then pull up to our nets, stony brows set in place
“It is time!” I declare
Taylor groans but commits
As I begin to uncover my pale, frigid tits
Bare feet are set on the aluminum floor
Asses are bared to the Nushagak shore
A cold pile of gear, laying lonely and stiff
With the salt of our work in the bow of our skiff
We heave and we ho as we pull up our nets
And others trade money from won or lost bets
Some drive extra far today as they pass us
Some drive extra close and put on their glasses
Wind and salt touch exposed shoulders and toes
Nothing but air covers us, floor to nose
Our catch comes aboard as we haul up the mesh
Slimy fish bits cover our flesh...
But she can also express herself in free verse, as in this excerpt from “The Body Remembers”:
My muscles remember
As do my fingertips – oh! my fingertips, and oh! my palms
The feel of the flesh of the fish
My skin, my muscles, the bones of my fingers - all 28 of them - remember picking
And picking
And picking the fish
Out of their trap
And throwing, tossing, flipping them
Into the brailer
Beautiful arcs that the salmon used to make on their own
As they broke the surface of the water and felt the rush of air on their scales
Now, those glorious arcs are made cutting through the space between the sky and our aluminum skiff
An arc tracing the space between my hand and the brailer
An invisible dotted line leading from the ocean to the ice
Sometimes
Thousands of miles away by land
I am transported in a moment as my muscles recall and ache for that tedious motion
I can feel – I swear to God I can feel the fish on my fingers
Their fleshy fish bellies on the flesh of my fingers
I can feel it
I feel my index slipping under a gill plate
I feel another index sliding through a piece of mesh
I feel my bicep flexing as it throws the catch onto the pile
I can feel it
Both of these and more here.
And had I been able to stay to read on Saturday at the National Baseball Poetry Festival, this is what I would have read:
BRING THE DODGERS BACK TO BROOKLYN
I was courting a woman just about my age,
Fact is, she was a divorcee.
After just one date I knew we shared the same level
Of cultural literacy.
She liked long walks and art films and Mozart for breakfast,
And she knew what keeping fit meant,
There was just one trouble with this West Side angel©©
A deep-seated fear of commitment.
So one night after a Castelli opening
I asked her if she'd be my bride;
I said, What would it take to win your hand?
And this is what she replied:
Bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn,
If you want me to be your wife,
I want Erskine pitching and Campy catching
And Carl Furillo in right.
I want to see Duke Snider hit one more
Into Bedford Avenue,
When they yell, Play Ball! at Ebbets Field
That's the day I'll marry you.
Well, we saw eye to eye on almost everything,
Me and that divorcee;
We liked Walt Kelly and Kurosawa
And Billie Holiday.
We agreed if they'd have listened to Oppenheimer
Things wouldn't have turned so badly.
They should have pardoned the Rosenbergs!
They should have elected Adlai!
But whenever I steered the conversation
To questions of the heart,
She was all hooked into this baseball dream
And it was tearing us apart.
Bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn,
And never more I'll stray.
I wanna see to Reese to Robinson
To Hodges double play.
I wanna see Jackie stealin' home,
And Preacher Roe juicin' that ball;
Bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn
Or I won't marry you at all.
They baseball's the greatest obsession of all,
And it sure seems that way.
I told her I'd buy her a box at the Met,
She said, "I hate it out at Shea."
I told her I'd sign a pre-nuptial contract
But she didn't want to merge;
I tried again at the Harmonic Convergence
But she didn't want to converge.
I swore I'd never give up the chase,
But I knew the time had come
When they were playing Philip Glass at the Symphony Space
And I heard her start to hum:
Bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn!
I wanna see Cal Abrams run.
Just one more time to see Billy Loes
Lose a ground ball in the sun.
Now you may think I'm just another crazy
Brooklyn Dodger fan,
But I'll see the Dodgers back in Brooklyn
Before I'll trust another man.