this ain't football

As the posts below suggest, seeing Poetry Magazine's except from Donald Hall’s new memoir of his life together with the late Jane Kenyon has sent me scurrying back into his poetry, especially his early 1990’s volume, The Museum of Clear Ideas.  The two poems I’ve posted come from the section of the book with the same title, which comprises contemporary twists on the odes of Horace.  The joke is a good one, on the whole, though some of the efforts inevitably come off better than others.  Hall certainly provides the proper Horatian tone.  I especially like the tender concluding lines of “Flaccus, drive up”, which I recall first reading when it and another poem appeared in the winter 1993 issue of Partisan Review.  Seeing those works in the magazine made me seek out the book – as eminent as Hall was and is, I was then only beginning to learn about contemporary poetry and hadn’t read him before.

I remember reading the book numerous times over the next few years, as well as his next, Without, published after Kenyon’s death.  This review from last year of his then-new volume, The Painted Bed, illustrates part of the reason why:

While I don't like every single line he's ever written, he is, as a writer, along the lines of Robert Duvall as an actor: clearly very good, and incapable of doing a piece badly. Michael Keaton once said that Robert Duvall is one of his most admired actors because (as I recall his words) "there's a level below which he does not go." Donald Hall may not be quite as good as Robert Duvall, but it's close.

I haven’t keep up with Hall’s work much since then, though I did read with pleasure Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, his remembrance of poets who he had known or been inspired by – Frost, Pound, Yvor Winters, Eliot and others.  Aside from the usual reasons – laziness, lack of focus – my neglect finds its roots in my reaction to the two sections of The Museum of Clear Ideas that bookend the Horatian poems, “Baseball” and “Extra Innings”.  Both contain so much that is good, and the latter displays such bravery in the face of his and Kenyon’s battles with cancer that it seems churlish to criticize them.  But I simply cannot stand the sort of baseball-as-metaphor-for-everything that the poems display.  Baseball is poetry, life, mortality, the experience of time, fathers and sons – oh, please do not let it be fathers and sons, please, I’ll do anything, just not that.  Hall is too canny to fall into outright bathos, but comes pretty close at times.  Reading the poems during the mid-1990’s, I couldn’t help but feel that the last thing baseball needed, aside from an endless Ken Burns documentary, was a poem cycle.  Baseball needed labor peace and Michael Jordan to have decent bat speed, not poets, would-be or real.  Max Beerbohm has a great line in one of his funniest essays, discussing the comically minor neoclassical painter Tischbein in Italy with Goethe:

I remember that some years ago an acquaintance of mine, a painter who was neither successful nor talented, but always buoyant, told me he was starting for Italy next day. `I am going,' he said, `to paint the Campagna. The Campagna WANTS painting.' Tischbein was evidently giving it a good dose of what it wanted.

Donald Hall is of course quite successful and talented, but in this book he was intent on giving baseball a good dose of what it wanted.

Still, I can’t help but admire so much in the poems.  There is indeed a level beneath which Hall does not go.  The inventiveness of the structure, for one: “Baseball” has nine poems, with nine stanzas each, all of which have nine lines with nine syllables per; the “Extra Innings” add one to each of these, until the final poem, “The Twelfth Inning”, begins to seem a baggy monster.  The internal transitions and juxstapositions of subjects as well: collage is the conceit, as the narrator explains baseball to Kurt Schwitters, drawing from Hall’s earlier work, personal reflections, baseball, philosophy, and the quotidian.  Deep in the examination of illness that throbs within “Extra Innings” come these lines:

7. The entire history of human thought,
Western and Eastern, remembers and codes
Our efforts to declare the real unreal.

Preserving normalcy in the face of encroaching death, feeling the solid here-and-now pulled away and replaced by the reality of cancer, asserting life over dread in response: these form the heart of “Extra Innings”, and override its flaws.  “We know what wins in the end,” Hall writes, but still concludes the book with these lines:

12. In September the Red Sox lose games in the ninth.
The season ends.  Even if you win the Series,
the season ends, O, and games dwindle to Florida’s
Instructional League where outfielders without wheels
learn to be catchers.  From Florida north will truck
oranges that Jennifer squeezes in the cold
light of a low sun.  I wear my yellow sweater;
we eat scrambled eggs from blue and white dishes, her
hair’s kerchief is yellow.  We gather yellow days
inning by inning with care to appear careless,
thinking again how Carlton Fisk ended Game Six
in the twelfth inning with a poke over the wall.

Hall's tending of the care to remain careless ultimately overcomes its strained extended metaphor.  But it’s a closer game than it needed to be.

(Extra links: read Hall's "The Ninth Inning" here, and listen to him read the ending of "The Twelfth Inning" quoted above here, as well as him talking about the Red Sox winning the World Series.)