you hadn't seen it? it's a classic! Here's the final poem in book:
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.
Here's a fun review:
sfbg.com
If Allen Ginsberg contributed anything to the world it was the idea that anyone could write poetry. The Beats broke from the previous notion that poetry was either aristocratic or academic. Ginsberg shed his container, perhaps to be the secret featured reader for the Hale-Bopp after-party, and his death occured during the first week of National Poetry Month, the apex of poetry's notoriety for the year. His passing also coincided with the opening of a new baseball season. So, in honor of Ginsberg and the spring's first cry of "play ball!", what better tribute than a book of poetry by a former Yankee player -- and current Yankee play-by-play announcer -- Phil Rizzuto.
Tom Peyer and Hart Seely have distilled the on-air free verse of the one they call Scooter into a chapbook of cantos. Rizzuto, though he may not know it, is in fact a modern day poet. Unfettered and raw, he was influenced by the Beats more than he knows. "The Man in the Moon," dated "August 6, 1979, Baltimore at New York, Fifth inning, bases empty, no outs, Orioles lead 1-0," becomes an elegy to the late Yankee's catcher Thurman Munson, killed in a plane crash in the middle of his career.
Both the moon and Thurman Munson
Both ascending up into heaven.
I just can't get it out of my mind.
I just saw that full moon,
And it just reminded me of Thurman.
And that's it.
Rizzuto's day job is bucolic, pastoral, mixed with the simplicity of sport. His inadvertent genius is reminiscent of Basho's, the great Japanese Haiku poet, mingled with Bob Costas' penchant for truism. In the Rizzuto cannon significance of the moment is paramount. Images are tied directly to particular places and events. Rizzuto speaks verse at every moment. He IS stream of consciousness. The moon, a universal symbol of dreams, is the vessel. Rizzuto draws upon its image like a master. The sadness is obvious here. The invocation of night, the cyclical nature of life and death, and the allusion to the realm of ideals is implicit. We look into the machinations of Rizzuto's muse and see the finality of his work. "And that's it,": a coda for all metaphor, all symbolism. He's not afraid to be declarative. He's a Yankee, dammit. No fear.
The stanza is an anaphora, repeating expressions at the beginning of successive phrases. The rhetorical effect here is so natural as to seem, well, inadvertent. This is perhaps Rizzuto's genius. It's what distances him from the stale chatter of Williams, Shappho, or Shelley, none of whom could really get to the heart of a jock strap, or the squeeze bunt, things Rizzuto could, and probably does, muse upon in his sleep.
It was George Bernard Shaw who said: "Heaven is so boring and inane a place no one has ever described a full day there, while plenty have described a day at the beach." Rizzuto's heaven, though allusive, at least includes both the lunar satellite and a tobacco chewing, spit-flinging, scrappy catcher in pinstripes. Scooter, in one fell swoop, has surpassed other baseball word smiths, like Sparky and Yogi, and slid into the literary canon on the strength of a single chapbook. He is the Bard of Hardball.
From "Poem No. 61":
Here comes
Roger Maris
They're standing up
Waiting to see if Roger
Is going to hit Number sixty-one
Hit deep to right--
This could be it
Way back there
Holy Cow
He did it
Sixty-one home runs
They're fighting for the ball out there.
At times the epic force of Rizzuto's subject reminds us of Homer (no pun intended). His Ballads are equally epic. Roger Maris is no less than Aeneas. The violence is glorious, heroic; the epic crowd engaged in battle seeths in the stands; home runs become a symbol of conquest, power, strength.
In "Poem No. 61." we encounter the single most important element in Rizzutoian poetics, the image of the Holy Cow. Its presence is omnipotent, like some Hindu God, watching over the on-field battles like Zeus over the mortal coil. The Cow appears during moments of epiphany, triumph. Rizzuto's allusions here cause the reader to shudder in awe. The divine does touch the mundane, the realm of poetics returns to the soil, and we are enriched.
What is problematic for National Poetry Month is the presence of a new spin on the medium without new poetry. "O Holy Cow" has arrived at the perfect moment. In Rizzuto, the Everyman Boy of Summer meets the Poet from the Ivory Tower. He gives rise to a new epoch, an age of Joe Poetry. The work begun by Ginsberg et al, continues. Perhaps, there is hope for poetry yet.
ctb/A |
