[I'll be delivering this talk in Ottawa, Kansas on Friday. In the meantime, I highly recommend Kevin's book; I've read it a dozen times now, and it has rewarded every go around the bases.]
Kevin
Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography of Zeroes
On April 20, 2007,
the Cardinals played the San Diego Padres at Aloha Stadium in
Honolulu. They won the first game, 2-1, in front of a crowd of
37,382; the game lasted two hours and 34 minutes and was played in 80
degree weather, clear skies, with no wind. Mostly I remember the
strange shape of the field, modified from football; there were acres
of foul ground, lots of cheap outs. I remember that it was billed as
a home game for the Padres, but that at least a third of us wore red.
At least half of what I just remembered came from the box score,
which can be found on-line. The other half of my memories are mostly
emotional: I was excited to see Willie McGee, and I attended the game
with my future husband, a new baseball fan. Meanwhile, behind us a
long conversation transpired between two older colleagues. In slow
and looping fashion, and by way of baseball, they told each other the
story of their lives: games they’d watched, events that had
occurred during games, one father’s stroke. As my one now retired
colleague, Arnold Edelstein, had written in a review (Biography
14:3, 1991) of The Baseball Encyclopedia, edited by Rick
Wolff, and published in 1990: “Proust had his petite madeleine;
baseball fans have the Encyclopedia.”
The only World Series game
Arnie
attended occurred while his
father, an ardent baseball
fan, was dying at home; he
used a ticket proffered by a
relative to distract him.
At the game he attended,
played on October 3, 1953,
Mickey Mantle homered with
the bases loaded.
In his brief but profound
review, Edelstein argues for
the importance of the encyclopedia
not so much as
a repository of information
(Mantle’s heroic feat) but
as goad to intense emotions
(like
the association of that home
run with his father’s stroke and later death).
Arnie
and his friend were practicing the
oral form of story-telling,
but baseball’s stories are
also recorded in writing. The
box score is not narrative; it’s
short hand;
in fact, there are no sentences, only lists of line-ups, what each
player did in the game, and summaries of batting, fielding, and
pitching. A box score is fossil to the game’s living body. But like
a fossil, it’s a guide to memory. A game I remember better, albeit
very imperfectly, is the 6th
game of the 2011 World Series, the crazy game won by a David Freese
homer in the 11th
inning. I remember that Series, in part, because I have a line-up
card pencilled in by David Freese from the 7th
game on my wall; I bought it for the Pencils for Promise charity. The
line-up card reminds me of the drama’s characters; a box score
tells me the significant plays of the game; the full DVD set of that
World Series holds in its silence on the shelf underneath our
television the promise of total recall. Each
version of the game, the one dimly remembered, the one pencilled into
the box score, and the one watched again, liberates an emotional
field for me. I remember my
son slamming his door during Game Six when we’d all given up hope.
I remember screaming with joy at the end.
Kevin
Varrone’s Box Score: An Autobiography is
a book of prose poems about
becoming a Phillies fan. As
he wrote to me in a facebook message:
“The book was meant to end with the end of spring. Box
Score had a mind of its own.
Long story short: I clearly can’t write a short poem about
baseball. Also, 6/18=a fairly important date in Philly history (day
the Brits left the city during Revolusion; official day of ‘founding’
of Philly by William Penn, etc.), but I wanted the game itself to be
insignificant, historically. Just important in the ways all baseball
games are, for those of us who love the game. Anyhow, it was as close
to the end date of Spring that year that the Phils had a home game I
could attend.” The game he
chose was between the Phillies and the Twins, June 18, 2010, a game
won by the Phillies 9-5. In
the book, this game unfolds
in blurts between other observations about personal and political
history. It’s
fragments of a box score set against the ruins of every other
obsession in the book: his
father, his two
sons;
his poetic lineage by way of quotations
from the poets who helped form this book;
the eephus pitch; several cases of the yips, and floating quotations
from Goodnight
Moon,
by Margaret Wise Brown.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHI/PHI201006180.shtml
The
full-length book came out first as a free app. It
featured collages,
audio of friends reading the poems, and included
a shuffle function. The book itself, published
by Furniture Press in 2014,
has no page numbers,
a(nother)
fact that encourages the
reader to open the book at random, wander
around, find his or her own
route to the ball.
Let
me have Kevin
to read the first two prose poems. I’ll then talk us through what
he’s doing.
This
opening poem
can be compared to the
abstract at the opening of
Williams’s Paterson; in
this short poem,
we find many of
the elements of the whole.
You
could read any section and have the same effect. Rather
than follow linear chronology, these poems trace the
circular history of our emotions; the circle that encloses the box
where we find the score, before
we realize that, “what happens between innings [hence not in the
box score] is pretty much what life is all about.”
What is a box inside a circle
but a stadium built around a baseball diamond? What
is history, but passed time or pastime:
“when I’m sure there is nothing going on I step inside: the way
you enter history a pastime”[.]
The
second prose poem contains the keyest
of the key words, spinning
like mantras, in this book:
“father.” Ray Kinsella plays
with his father’s ghost, a comic revision of Hamlet playing with
his. Varrone’s father, a NYC
policeman based
in Queens,
introduced him to baseball and coached him in
Little League. He’s quoted
throughout the book. The
phrase, “my dad used to
say,” occurs at
least 15 times in 82 pages. Varrone’s sons appear often, as well;
Asher has three appearances in the text, while the
older Emmett has twelve. If
you’re keeping score, that
makes for over 30
references to fatherhood in the book, one on more
than every third page. Here’s
a passing down, lineage of
stories and poetic puns
(“are we going home,” one son asks; the other says, “we’re
playing catch ball”). They
both hear their father (or mother) read Goodnight Moon to
them, as do we.
The poet’s dad tells
his son to play baseball “the
right way”; he’s also a compelling story teller, just
as his son is a brilliant
poet.
The form of the book suggests that lineages are not
fast balls but curves, or
even the
eephus, curving slowly up in the sky like a seagull and then coming
down toward the home plate. Both
baseball and its eephus “disrupt the flow of time & are tied to
it.” As such, their lineages
are also poetic.
I’ve
seen seagulls at ball games (dozens of them once in Detroit), but not
“a nightingale’s pastoral
evasions.” Unless
it was played outside John Keats’s cottage on Hampstead Heath, no
one’s seen or heard a
nightingale at a baseball game.
So whence the nightingale’s pastoral? Clearly this is a bird that
never wert (Shelley now!) at any MLB game, but lived in a poem, “Ode
to a Nightingale.” “Cold
pastoral” comes to us from Keats’s
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
and references eternity. Just
as players come to us in long lines of “begats,” so do poets.
Harold Bloom’s notion of
the younger poet mishearing the elder occurs
when, for example, “George
‘Will’ Oppen” is quoted as writing that baseball “does not
& never did have any motive but to achieve clarity.” Or when,
in a typical elision of baseball and word poet, when
Varrone writes of the “nothing
that is not there & the nothing that is is pretty much what
the eephus is all about sd mark fidrych or wallace stevens.”
Poets
and birds have often been equated, so here a pitcher (Fidrych's nickname was "Bird") might be a bird
and a poet’s lines might
fold into
baseball’s language.
More surprising perhaps is
the entrance of Emily Dickinson onto the field: “those evenings of the brain are pretty
much what night baseball is all about sd Emily Dickinson” who
then throws to the next poet, quoted as saying “or the apparition
of those faces in the stands at Shibe Field,” namely
Ezra Pound. There’s
an all-star team of poets playing on Varrone’s team, because
“language is pretty much what baseball is all about” [.] Among
these poets are Bill Lee and Fidrych, quoted as saying, “I’m a
little flakey . . . people say I should be a lefty” [.] (Varrone
and I both write right handed and throw left, a flakey combination.)
It’s all
one big game of catch ball
between poets and baseball players.
A
short list of all-star poets
includes Dickinson.
Oppen, Moore, Stevens, Olson,
O’Hara (if only by allusion), Hopkins, Walcott
and others. What these
players throw around are words, and words blur together. Take the
name, Williams. There was William Carlos and there was Ted:
“marianne moore called william carlos williams the splendid pencil
:ted williams sd to rip sewell (whose real name was truett banks
sewell) throw that blooper sewell
bill dickey told williams to kind of run at it williams sd &
he did & hit a dinger (no ideas but in eephus) it was all stars
1946 & williams was between stint as a marine corps
aviator” [.] Between
stints, between names. The
word “eephus,” which comes up obsessively in the book, becomes
the “thing” of William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in
things.” Ted Williams
should have been out for running toward
the super slow pitch that he
hit out in an All Star Game.
That fact is,
of course, lost in the box score to the game. There’s grainy video
to think on, but it doesn’t count.
Video
hasn’t counted for much except
bad feeling until the recent
replay rule was instituted in most rudimentary form in 2008 (only by
umpires for disputed home runs) and later in 2014, when the call for
replays by managers was
instituted. That accounts for one of the many
moments of failure that haunt
the poet. He’s concerned mostly
with the yips, but he writes
often about the game pitched
by the Tigers’ Armando Galarraga in
2010 that would have been
perfect had the umpire, Jim
Joyce (who wept in public the
day after), not mistakenly
called a
runner safe with two outs in the ninth. To
Varrone, obsessed as he is with memory (either private
or set on the page as a box score), failure is important because it’s
so memorable. It’s also one of the great tropes of American
literature. Late in the book he writes, “would anyone remember jim
joyce if he’d gotten the call right & armando galarraga
hadn’t made that smile break into blossom across his face”[?]
That memory is a bit
different from the one that follows in this poem, namely the one that
fixes Rick
Ankiel in our memory because only he and Babe Ruth had 10 wins and 50
home runs in the majors. The latter is a box score memory. But my
memory of Rick Ankiel is all emotion. His five wild pitches for
the St. Louis Cardinals in
the 2000 playoffs, when he was tasked with pitching the first game
because he’d been so phenomenal during the year, are five pitches I
watched then, but cannot watch now without a visceral response. I
flinch in horror, more horror than any
game merits. There
is redemption in the Ankiel story, because he came back as an
outfielder, making some world-historical throws to third and
home from center field.
That, too, is compelling, more than his 11-7 record in the 2000
regular season, or his lifetime .240 batting average. It’s
compelling because it’s a
biblical story of failure and
redemption, not because you can find
it in the box score, except perhaps as WP (wild
pitch) followed by HR.
In
the book review of The Baseball Encyclopedia
that I talked about earlier, Arnold Edelstein mentions Moonlight
Graham, a real player whose story became the
subject of W.J. Kinsella’s
famous novel, Shoeless Joe. Graham’s
first appearance in the majors was on June 29, 1905; his last
appearance was that same day. Though he played right field in that
game, his line score is
empty. Kevin Varrone finds
another such player, another such box score, in Harry O’Neill who,
in 1939, caught in one game for the Philadelphia Athletics. He had no
plate appearance. His line is
all zeroes. In Varrone’s book, the box score appears under the
first line: “the box score an autobiography”[.] That is the
title of the book, and the poem he told one of my students once over
skype was his favorite poem in the book. If
this is autobiography, what does it say, especially considering that
Harry O’Neill died in 1945 at Iwo Jima? He
was in a major league game once, but
he had no effect on the game
(except to make
the throw from the catcher to the pitcher, without which there would
be no game, as Marianne Moore
has pointed out). It
says that the box score fails.
On
the one hand, the box score, like poetry, "makes nothing happen." On the other hand, the
box score opens up to autobiography as pure emotional
possibility. Zero is to the
box score what white
is to all colors. Anything or
nothing could have happened.
A box score can indicate a
perfect game, or it can tell us that someone with a name played and otherwise left no trace of himself. Varrone’s notion that a baseball stadium is a church moves us past
the pastime of baseball and into eternal time. He
is running the bases, yes, but he is also saying goodnight to the
moon and sounding out a hush to
his sons. The lights have
come on; they are electric lights, but they also belong to that
larger light that unites us to history and to something beyond it.
The imperfect, as Wallace
Stevens once wrote about baseball, is our paradise.
