Baseball and Writing

by Marianne Moore

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

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?
Owlman watching from the press box?
 To whom does it apply?
 Who is excited?  Might it be I?

It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel--
a catcher's, as, with cruel
   puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly
      back to plate.  (His spring 
      de-winged a bat swing.)
   They have that killer instinct;
   yet Elston--whose catching
   arm has hurt them all with the bat--
 when questioned, says, unenviously,
   "I'm very satisfied.  We won."
 Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";
 robbed by a technicality.

When three players on a side play three positions
and modify conditions,
   the massive run need not be everything.
      "Going, going . . . "  Is
      it?  Roger Maris
   has it, running fast.  You will
   never see a finer catch.  Well . . .
   "Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why
 gild it, although deer sounds better--
snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,
 one-handing the souvenir-to-be
 meant to be caught by you or me.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral;
he could handle any missile.
   He is no feather.  "Strike! . . . Strike two!"
      Fouled back.  A blur.
      It's gone.  You would infer
   that the bat had eyes.
   He put the wood to that one.
Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.
   I think I helped a little bit."
 All business, each, and modesty.
        Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.
 In that galaxy of nine, say which
 won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.

Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws
by Boyer, finesses in twos--
   like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-
      diagnosis
      with pick-off psychosis.
   Pitching is a large subject.
   Your arm, too true at first, can learn to
   catch your corners--even trouble
 Mickey Mantle.  ("Grazed a Yankee!
My baby pitcher, Montejo!"
 With some pedagogy,
 you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)

They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying
indeed!  The secret implying:
   "I can stand here, bat held steady."
      One may suit him;
       none has hit him.
   Imponderables smite him.
   Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds
   require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!
 Celebrity costs privacy!)
Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,
 brewer's yeast (high-potency--
 concentrates presage victory

sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez--
deadly in a pinch.  And "Yes,
   it's work; I want you to bear down,
      but enjoy it
      while you're doing it."
   Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,
   if you have a rummage sale,
   don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.
 Studded with stars in belt and crown,
the Stadium is an adastrium.
 O flashing Orion,
 your stars are muscled like the lion. 

Poetry by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

       all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

       discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

       Hands that can grasp, eyes

       that can dilate, hair that can rise

          if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

       they are

   useful.  When they become so derivative as to become

       unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

       do not admire what

       we cannot understand: the bat

          holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

       wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

       that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

       nor is it valid

          to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important.  One must make

       a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

       result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

       "literalists of

       the imagination"--above

          insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

       shall we have

   it.  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

       all its rawness and

       that which is on the other hand

          genuine, you are interested in poetry.

--

About the author:

Born near St. Louis, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore was raised in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. After her grandfather's death, in 1894, Moore and her family stayed with other relatives, and in 1896 they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909. Following graduation, Moore studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College, and from 1911 to 1915 she was employed as a school teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. In 1918, Moore and her mother moved to New York City, and in 1921, she became an assistant at the New York Public Library. She began to meet other poets, such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and to contribute to the Dial, a prestigious literary magazine. She served as acting editor of the Dial from 1925 to 1929. Along with the work of such other members of the Imagist movement asEzra Pound, Williams, and H. D., Moore's poems were published in the Egoist, an English magazine, beginning in 1915. In 1921, H.D. published Moore's first book, Poems, without her knowledge.

Moore was widely recognized for her work; among her many honors were the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise, capable of suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single, compact image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos Williams wrote about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular: "So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events." She was particularly fond of animals, and much of her imagery is drawn from the natural world. She was also a great fan of professional baseball and an admirer of Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the liner notes to his record, I Am the Greatest! Deeply attached to her mother, she lived with her until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. Marianne Moore died in New York City in 1972.