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.