Week 9: Baseball Poetry

Poet Marianne Moore throws out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, Opening Day 1968.

We've just finished one lengthy baseball novel (Roth's The Great American Novel) and we've got another one ahead of us (Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding), so I thought it would be the perfect time for a seventh-inning stretch of sorts, shifting scale from the very large to the very small with a week spent on poems about baseball.

We'll be using a PDF anthology that I've put together specially for this class (available here) and don't forget about the guide to analyzing poetry, found in this blog's righthand sidebar, which should be a useful resource as you make your way through the readings.

Here's how we'll split the readings for next week's classes:

• Tues. March 5:  Franklin Pierce Adams to Ron Loewinsohn
• Fri. March 8: Bernadette Mayer to Baron Wormser

We'll return to poetry at the very end of the semester when we look at some more experimental writing on baseball by Ted Berrigan & Harris Schiff, Kenneth Goldsmith, Richard Brautigan and Charles North.

Weeks 6-8: Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel"

As we shift gears into our third novel of the semester, we find ourselves with, in essence, a synthesis of the diverse styles found in Malamud and Coover.  Philip Roth's The Great American Novel doesn't exactly live up to its lofty title, though for the writer — coming after several scattered attempts to follow up his wildly successful Portnoy's Complaint (the novella The Breast, the political satire Our Gang) — it might be more representative of his overall goal, rather than where he ended up.  Or rather, there's reason to believe that, particularly when handled as lovingly as Roth does here, baseball itself might be the great American novel of his (and our) lifetime.

Again, we're dealing with alternate history — here's it's the WWII-era Patriot League — and an author who revels in the more absurd details the game has to offer.  Specifically, it's the wartime replacement players of Roth's youth, along with the sport's growing ethnic diversity that inspires him to create perhaps the most lovable losers imaginable on the diamond.  Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s also factor into the narrative, which, like Malamud and Coover before him, takes great pleasure in baseball's most intimate details, its culture and mythology.

Because the "great" in The Great American Novel is not just an appraisal of its quality, but also its size, we're going to spread it out over a few more classes than usual (the same will be true of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding).  Here's the schedule:

• Fri. February 15: pgs 1-82 (break at bottom of pg)
• Tues. February 19: pgs 82-165 (break at bottom of pg)
• Fri. February 22: pgs 165-246 (break at top of pg)
• Tues. February 26: pgs 246-322 (break in middle of pg)
• Fri. March 1: pgs 322-400

And here are a few supplemental resources:

• the New York Times' 1973 review of the book
• a story from last spring about Roth's unsuccessful lawsuit against a performance artist using The Great American Novel (specifically, reading it) as part of an installation