I told Ron Silliman yesterday that I’d be writing a piece about the 2004 World Series, so I guess I should start one. Mirabelli just doubled off the Green Wall. Ron and I have been talking about the efficacy of using names in poetry, as I frequently do in my own; he warned me that such historical referents as I’ve used (for example, Pedro Martinez) have the risk of getting “stale” some years later; he cited as an example Kato Kaelin, with which of course it was hard to disagree. I countered, however, with Charles Olson’s interesting poem “Place; and Names,” his transcribed reading of which in Muthologos, Volume One (at a panel discussion in Vancouver in 1963 with Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Philip Whalen) I find persuasive. Ron then allowed as how he, too, had used, in his long poem The Alphabet, not only actual names, but the names of obscure baseball players like John Montefusco and Will Clark. (Readers who, at this point in the narrative, experience an obscure allusion to “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges can’t be faulted). After giving up three runs in the bottom of the third, making the score 7-2 Red Sox, the Cardinals have loaded the bases with nobody out and the count is three and two to Mike Metheney . . . wait, wait, Tim Wakefield “lost it in a hurry” and the score is now 7-5. This might be the time to bring up the question of what, exactly, “Who’s Your Daddy?” means; I have yet to understand its peculiar efficacy. When Pedro Martinez said, the other day, “Just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy,” it seemed clear he was issuing a criticism of his own masculinity. But when men – who might be making love to women at the time – ask this question, do they really mean to suggest that they want to be these women’s daddies? Probably they just want to be thought of as having power, so long associated with patriarchy. CBS News, meanwhile, has been running a horrific story about the electoral possibility of California overturning its medieval “three strikes” law by showing tearful videotape of the victims of eleven-year-old crimes that led to it; their governor, too, seems to be in favor of retaining this law. CBS follows this with another horrific story about Margaret Hassan, the valiant Irish-Iraqi woman who was recently kidnapped in Iraq and who, like several other formerly human beings, has been threatened with having her head cut off. “Remember that guy . . . the guy they used to call ‘Wild Thing’?” “Yeah, Mitch Williams.” Actually, the most encouraging piece of official video I’ve witnessed lately was a recent interview of Fran Lebowitzby Chris Matthews on Hardball; Ms. Lebowitz asserted that the world has been going backwards, and that the existence of such words as “beheadings” on the Evening News and the blurring of the boundaries between church and state were its symptoms. “Who’s Your Pápi?” Edgar . . . Renteria! (He didn’t do anything journalistic yet, I just needed to fill that line). “He . . . went; it’s a two-two count.” And then he DOUBLES! MAJESTICALLY! (Sticklers for historical accuracy can repeat that line in the eighth inning). I’ve discovered my allegiance in this Series is to the St. Louis Cardinals, led by animal-rights manager Tony LaRussa, whom Ron and I first got to know about when we were both living in Northern California. “That’s a fair ball; that’s going to tie the ball game!”(until the Bosox get two off Tavarez, and win Game 1).
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Joseph Safdie was a San Francisco poet back when I was a San Francisco poet. Now he’s a Seattle poet. I’m printing this partly as a result of our conversation, and partly out of a desire to be “fair & balanced” to the misbegotten redbird fans of the Midwest. I should note that my own choices – pro-Sox – are determined more by baseball history (which would include the Cards’ come-from-behind LCS victory over the SF Giants in 1987 as well as the Sox 86-year World Championship drought – it would even include the Cards’ theft of Orlando Cepeda from the Giants back in the 1960s) and by what I would call the ex-Phillie Phactor. Both teams have two key figures who were important members of the Phils in recent years – the Cards’ third baseman Scott Rolen & backup second baseman Marlon Anderson, the Sox pitching ace Curt Schilling & manager Terry Francona – but the Sox are more clearly dependent on their Phormer Phils than are the Birds.
