By Mary Karr
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Hearing a ball game on the radio recently said spring to me, as does any trip to Yankee stadium (now in its last season before demolition). In New York, the chatter about team injuries can take on a tribal intensity -- which is why I cracked Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball. Editor and translator Cor van den Heuvel is a haiku aficionado whose single-image poems capture moments from my own baseball-centered childhood, like these two:
baseball cards
spread out on the bed
April rain
biking to the field
under a cloudless sky
my glove on the handlebars
In George Swede's work, as is evident in the two here, the natural world interrupts and supercedes play, lending totemic power to things like dandelion seeds and sunbeams:
empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone
village ball game
through knotholes in the old fence
evening sunbeams
Michael Fessler, who's published two books on the game along with five of haiku, best captures the game's players. His last line really drags me into the intimacy of those screaming matches:
August heat
umpire and manager
nose to nose
Despite the sometimes curious carnal power of these poems in English, the Japanese poets managed to make the haiku a spiritual instant -- delicate as tissue paper. Imai Sei even creates psychological complexity:
after the error
the player still faces the outfield
towering clouds
Such feeling in such a small space. These haiku prove that in a secular culture, the stadium -- from little league through the majors -- may be the closest many Americans get to a house of worship, which is why I end with Raffael de Gruttola's meditation on eternity:
lost in the lights
the high fly ball that
never comes down
(All of these poems appear in "Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball," edited with translations by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura. Norton. 2007. Copyright 2007 by Cor van den Heuvel and individual copyrights by the poets.)
Mary Karr's most recent book of poems is "Sinners Welcome."
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