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The Poet Goes to Fenway

Ourworld
Beacon’s own beloved Mary Oliver has a poem in the Boston Globe about  baseball, more specifically about our own, beloved Red Sox. It seemed appropriate to send you all to read it today, as the office buzzes with anticipation/dread (in typical Sox fan fashion) over tonight’s do-or-die game.

We are also buzzing about tomorrow’s blog post, by Mary Oliver about Edna St. Vincent Millay, who died fifty-seven years ago tomorrow. Millay’s house is one of many locales featured in the beautiful Our World, a collection of photos taken by the late Molly Malone Cook and accompanied with journal entries and essays by Oliver.

Use the comments field to share your own favorite sports poems, or just to say, "Go Sox!"

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7 responses to “The Poet Goes to Fenway”

  1. Mark Hyman Avatar
    Mark Hyman

    Published: The Home Team (1953)
    Wee Willie Keeler
    Runs through the town,
    All along Charles Street,
    In his nightgown.
    Belling like a hound dog,
    Gathering the pack:
    Hey, Wilbert Robinson,
    The Orioles are back!
    Hey, Hughie Jennings!
    Hey, John McGraw!
    I got fire in my eye
    And tobacco in my jaw!
    Hughie, hold my halo.
    I’m sick of being a saint:
    Got to teach youngsters
    To hit ’em where they ain’t.
    You Can’t Kill an Oriole by Ogden Nash

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  2. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    If you can’t get enough baseball writing each month, you should probably subscribe to this periodical, now in its twenty-sixth year.
    There are perhaps a surprising number of anthologies gathering poems about sports, but so far as I know only one good book about such poems, by (no relation to the actor) Don Johnson.

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  3. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    I almost forgot to post a sports poem! Here’s part (only part) of Judith Wright’s “The Sports Field,” about a school (not a professional) place for outdoor sport:
    What’s real here is the field,
    the starter’s gun, the lane,
    the ball dropped or held;
    and set towards the future,
    they run like running water,
    for only the pride of winning,
    the pain the losers suffer,
    till the day’s great golden ball
    that no one ever catches,
    drops; and at its fall
    runners and watchers
    pick up their pride and pain
    won out of the measured field
    and turn away again
    while the star-dewed night comes cold.

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  4. Helene Avatar
    Helene

    Not since Marianne Moore, I believe, has a female American poet written about baseball–but maybe I’ve missed some??

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  5. Steve Avatar
    Steve

    Yep,you’ve missed some: start here, perhaps with Linda Gregerson’s “Line Drive Caught by the Grace of God.”

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  6. Beth Kephart Avatar
    Beth Kephart

    I had the great pleasure of discovering Mary Oliver’s newest book (OUR WORLD) during a book fair in Oakland, CA. I came home, ignored my work, read it. I have blogged a bit about the best of it. I’m urging it toward all my friends.

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  7. Tim Botta Avatar
    Tim Botta

    I like Gregory Corso’s “Dream of a Baseball Star.”

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