Baseball & Beyond, September 17

As the notice said, “… poems about deep space, the exit velocity of home runs leaving the stratosphere, neutron all-stars, and who knows what else,” a poetry reading at the Guilderland Public Library by Louise Grieco, Mikhail Horowitz & Tim Wiles on a Sunday afternoon. 

Tim Wiles is the Director of the Guilderland Public Library, once worked at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, & has been known to don an old-time baseball uniform to recite “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer. Mikhail Horowitz has a long history of mixing baseball with poetry & humor from his 1978 City Lights Books Big League Poets, up thru the 2019 Ancient Baseball (Alte Books), art-history & baseball humor. Louise Grieco had poems included in Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems (SIU Press, 2002) edited by Tim Wiles, & High Fives: 50 Cinquains (Alte Books, 2022) in collaboration with Mikhail Horowitz.

For this day’s reading, each of the poets alternated poems thru baseball poems, then on to poems about the cosmos. Leading off was Louise Grieco with “It Ain’t Over,” then a planetary take on the old baseball refrain “Tinker to Evers to Chance” (from a 1910 poem by Franklin Pierce Adams, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon”), Louise’s poem titled, “Saturn to Venus to Mars” (after all, there are 9 planets!). Other poems that she read were “Jeter in the Air,” “A Baseball Elegy,” “Lines to [or too?] Short” (about the diminutive short-stop Phil Rizzuto), “Ash” (baseball bats & their future), & a pair of poems exploring exploding stars & the formation of gold. 

I had first met Mikhail Horowitz at a Readings Against the End of the World in the late 1980s, then would often cross paths with him at readings in Woodstock & elsewhere in the mid-Hudson. His work is infused with a mix of humor, eruption & whimsy. He began with a prose poem “Pearly Babe” imagining Babe Ruth in Heaven — & Outer Space; then on to thoughts about “Baseball in the 22nd Century,” & he, too, with a reference “Tinker to Evers to Chance” somehow working in Seinfeld, & a piece titled “All that Remains of Josh Gibson” (a star of baseball’s Negro League). A poem titled “Summer Sonnet” was followed a “spell acrostic" on the name "Ty Cobb." Then into deep Space to the constellations “Winter Night,” & poems on black holes. Later he teamed up with Louise for a duo of poems on the creation of the Universe, her poem was titled “Divine Comedy,” his the diagrammatic “The Rube Goldberg Theory of the Creation of the Universe.”

Tim Wiles began with a poem he had just written this morning, “After St. Edna” (i.e., Edna St. Vincent Millay), a baseball poem of remembrance, then a sprightly word play “12 Ways of Looking at Baseball, then “Overheard at Doubleday Field,” on to a baseball Haiku about pitcher Don Sutton. His poem “Why Baseball is Like Your Father” is one of those poems you want to hear again, then another poem set in Cooperstown, “Early Evening in Doubleday Field."

For those of you interested in baseball poems, I suggest that you visit the Blog Baseball Bard maybe even send them one of your own baseball poems.

To cap off the afternoon, Louise Grieco & Mikhail Horowitz read from their collaborative chapbook High Fives: 50 Cinquains (Alte Books, 2022). The cinquain had its origins in Medieval French poetry, but in the early 20th Century the poet Adelaide Crapsey created an American cinquain of 5 lines, 22 syllables. Both poets read 3 cinquains each, Louise’s had titles, “Past Time” (on baseball), “Star Exchange,” & “December 31, 2020.” Mikhail’s were untitled, one on black holes, another references the famous Basho Haiku (frog jumping into a pond), & deer run over by a Rabbit. All great fun & profundity.

For this interested in the conjunction of baseball & poetry, see my previous Blog on this year's National Baseball Poetry Festival that was held in Wooster, MA.