Baseball Poems — Often Populist Summer Perennials

Most Americans have heard the classic baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat” — and I know a performance poet who did a hilarious cutup combining that poem with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” The great American game has inspired many poems, serious and funny, classic and new. Now, nearing the end of the 2008 season, I’ve come across a couple of collections of baseball poems worth a look:

• The Baseball Almanac has amassed an anthology of baseball poems and songs that includes “Casey at the Bat” with a gathering of tribute and response poems, other classic baseball pieces (some of them anonymous), several poems by the famous sportswriter Grantland Rice, as well as William Carlos Williams’ “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” Marianne Moore’s “Baseball and Writing,” May Swenson’s “Analysis of Baseball” and other contemporary contributions.
• Bardball, whose subtitle is “Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel,” is a new populist baseball anthology from Chicago writers James Finn Garner and Stuart Shea. It’s been on the Internet since last year, working “to resurrect the connection between baseball and poetry, between the love of the game and love of language” by collecting poems from fans all over the country.