Where Memory Gathers

The newly named Poet Laureate of the United States, New Hampshire poet Donald Hall, is noted for his appreciation of the national game. "Baseball," he told Ken Burns, "because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers." At NPR you can hear Hall interviewed the day after the Red Sox won the World Series, and reading from his poem "The Twelfth Inning":

In September the Red Sox lose games in the ninth.
The season ends. Even if you win the Series,
the season ends, O, and games dwindle to Florida’s
Instructional League where outfielders without wheels
learn to be catchers. From Florida north will truck
oranges that Jennifer squeezes in the cold
light of a low sun. I wear my yellow sweater;
we eat scrambled eggs from blue and white dishes, her
hair’s kerchief is yellow. We gather yellow days
inning by inning with care to appear careless,
thinking again how Carlton Fisk ended Game Six
in the twelfth inning with a poke over the wall.

(Via Modern Kicks)

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Reviewed alongside Hall at the Society for American Baseball Research is another book of baseball poetry, O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, in which editors Tom Peyer & Hart Seely have set the Scooter's play-by-play to verse.

For Steve M's appreciation, here is a selection from the collection:

"Apodosis"

Fly ball right field
It's gonna drop in.
No it's not gonna drop in,
Happy 46th wedding anniversary
Thomas and Mary Anne Clearwater.
That's it.
The last three, six, nine, twelve Yankees
Went down in order.
So that's it.
The game is over.