The Home Stretch

September 5, 2009

 

 

Well, what can I say? My teams are pretty well defined by now. The Cardinals have locked it up. The Devil Rays and White Sox have cashed in whatever chips they had left and made productive trades to jettison a bit of dead weight, overpaid salary (yes… Scott Kazmir is dead weight). The Red Sox look like they’ll contest Texas down to the wire for the Wild Card which at this point seems to be a toss up for me given the streaky inconsistencies of both of those clubs.

 

My Dodgers, however, continue to be consistently mediocre. I loved the John Garland trade although it may have been nice if they could’ve pulled it off a month ago. The reasoning behind that might have been Arizona holding the Dodgers hostage. Who knows? The Jim Thome trade remains a puzzler simply because I think Ronnie Belliard’s acquisition may actually have more of an impact instead of featuring a long time DH in a pinch hitting role. But at this point, the offense is so anemic that I suppose any bat will do. I hope the Dodgers hang on … it’s problematic at best.

 

Now, let’s talk a bit of poetry.

 

William Carlos Williams is not one of my favorite poets. He rose to prominence with his craft during the Modernist period of Literature in the 1930’s and at the time was dwarfed in the spotlight by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Sadly, it may have been the only period when the modern world gave a hoot about experimental poetry.

 

But Williams remained ardent in his desire to not only push the limits of poetic craft against the long reign of formalist poets, he also sought to make his poems more American in essence by focusing on American concerns and issues as well as typical everyday occurrences in life as his favored subject matter.

 

On reading the one included below, I’m not entirely convinced Williams was a baseball fan. I could be wrong about that since the sport is distinctly and American invention. But aside from the title, the setting seems to me it can be anywhere that has a crowd: a train station, shopping mall, or rock concert. But I felt given his heavyweight status as a sage of modern poetry, this poem deserved to be featured below. To learn more about William Carlos Williams, click this link: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/119

 

And now, the poem:

 

The Crowd at the Ballgame by William Carlos Williams

 

Published: The Dial (08-1923)

 

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

 

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them —

 

all the exciting detail

of the chase

 

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius —

 

all to no end save beauty

the eternal –

 

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

 

for this

to be warned against

 

saluted and defied —

It is alive, venomous

 

it smiles grimly

its words cut —

 

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it —

 

The Jew gets it straight – it

is deadly, terrifying —

 

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

 

It is beauty itself

that lives

 

day by day in them

idly —

 

This is

the power of their faces

 

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

 

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

 

permanently, seriously

without thought

Written by mlblogsbaseballpoetry Posted in Dailies