The Best American Poetry

A Bleacher of One's Own [by Catharine Stimpson]

My neighbor in the elevator was giddy with excitement on Monday, November 2. He was on his way to Philadelphia. His family had tickets for the 5th game of the World Series between the Phillies and the Yankees. He was going to join a crowd enthralled with the fact of being at the game. The Phillie supporters would wave their white towels to create an energy flow for their champions. He, though normally an ironic man, would cheer and cheer for his Yankees.

Lucky him? Most fans would say yes.

I love sports and take sides, often rabidly. Watching Roger Federer get beaten in the 2009 US Open made me feel sick. So did the Yankee loss on Monday night.

However, give me a bleacher of my own far away from the huge modern sports dome.  The first time I saw such a swollen structure I thought, in disgust, “This is a shopping mall.” My bleacher of choice can be in a small, old arena. The toilets may stink. The hotdogs may be lukewarm. But the fans will sit together in egalitarian simplicity.

Or, my bleacher of choice can be a chair or a bed in front of the TV.

Of course the cameras control what I can see. They decide how often I will watch Chase Utley, the current Philadelphia Home Run King, lean back in his dugout, hair slicked back, face thickly handsome, as happy as a lion who has just made a kill. Better to submit to a camera’s gaze than to a huge scoreboard pounding at me and exhorting me to scream and cheer when my team does well, and to follow the bouncing ads.

Whatever the exact site of a bleacher of my own, let me shout at my own pace, despair at my own pace, pound the glove of my soul at my own pace, pray at my own pace.

The real test of the fan is not how we behave in the crowd but how we behave when we have no witnesses to our fierce loyalties.

Go, Yankees.  And Roger Federer, return in all your glory.

Watching the Dodgers with Vin Scully, Second Inning

Every now and then life intrudes into the toy department.

-- Sportscaster Vin Scully [left, in his Fordham days, before he began calling the BrooKlyn Dodgers' games on the radio in the 1950s] on why LA shortstop Rafael Furcal was absent from tonight's game. Furcal and his wife were forced to evacuate their home in an area of La Canada Flintridge threatened by the massive fires.

-- sdh

"Happy Belmont Day!" from Laura Orem

Okay, okay, I'm know I'm being a total blog hog this week, but this was too perfect for today - the Belmont runs this afternoon. Will it be the filly, Rachel Alexandra? Or the come-from-behind-kid, Mine That Bird? Or someone else entirely?

Have fun - and I promise that now I'm absolutely back on my once-a-week Tuesday schedule.

The Bubble in Baseball Cards, the Foil Ball, and the Hair Test [by Matthew Yeager]

II. (This is a continuation of the topic in a previous post.)

The bubble in the world of baseball card collecting grew steadily throughout the 1980s; the air came  out in the early 1990s.  It grew as a result of the overvaluation of the cards of contemporary players.   The fact that these stars were new, hot, present, and capable of raising or dropping their stock with every at bat inflated their values; they got traded up.  At core, the general sense was that these cards would eventually be the Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays rookie cards of a new generation.  That's what casual hobbyist's assumed.  I can recall being at a baseball card show in 1987, when a young Eric Davis had risen to the fore of the game, even inviting a Sports Illustrated cover story that wondered provocatively if he was the next Willie Mays.  That Saturday afternoon in 1987, in a day game, Eric Davis hit three home runs; it was all the chatter; and the value of every piece of Eric Davis merchandise in the hotel convention room went skyrocketing.  What people were unwilling to understand was that the value that these older cards had was due not to the deeds of the players, but do to their low numbers.  There were smaller printings to begin with (America was smaller), and the children of the 1950s and 1960s, save for those fastidious, can’t-have-the-shoes-in-the-closet-touching types, handled their cards destructively.  They stuck them in bike spokes, and punched holes in them with hole-punchers so they could string them up in decorative festoons in their bedrooms.  I would not be surprised if one or two wasn’t spread with peanut butter and fed, to an unsuspecting dog, who probably would have been game for as many as peanut-buttered slathered cards as the neighborhood kids were offering.  The cards that survived, that ended up in a shoebox, untouched, were generally thrown away by mothers. 

The point is that though Eric Davis might have been thought of as the next Willie Mays, (rather, even if he had BECOME the next Willie Mays), a 1985 Eric Davis card would never be a 1951 Willie Mays card.  Though I might have the same nostalgic response in the year 2064 (should I live that long) to a photo of Eric Davis as he was, the card would never trade that way.  The conditions could never be right.  There were millions of cards on the market in the late 80s.  Topps was joined by Fleer, Donruss, Score, and finally Upper Deck.  People were trading on these newer cards, Mark McQuire rookies and such, as if they had a scarcity that they’d never have.  $7 for a Mark McQuire rookie in 1987!   It was a great time to open wax-packs.  His first full year in the league, his cards were already being sealed up in plastic, and being kept away from the conditions that would have given them actual value.  Nobody was going to be putting these in spokes.  It was an obvious bubble, and like all bubbles, it popped.

You have a bubble any time people behave as if there is value when there isn’t value.  I suppose, in that light, that the foil ball could be perceived as a bubble – or if not a bubble, a relative species of a bubble.  In the case of the ball, you have a man out there in the world, filling his pockets with foil as he walks along, let us say, 125^th St.  On one level, it is a personal overvaluation of trash….)  Anyway, when this bubble popped in the early 1990s; all the inflated values of these newer cards plummeted.  Many of the older cards were knocked down a notch in the process.  There were some new strategies employed to get value into the new cards, and in many ways these were successful.  Personally I found them disturbing, as a pond stocked with fish is mildly disturbing.  (Man's conscious hand at the rudder in such matters causes you to feel not in reality, but in proxy, ersatz reality....)  For instance, there was implemented an extremely harsh grading system that would reward only the one card in ten thousand that was, in the lingo, “gem mint.”  This drew value from the many and imparted it onto the few in a relatively closed system.  There was also the attempt to use fancy materials, to stamp gold-foil onto the cards in various places.  In practice, this chintzy tattooing only highlighted the fact that it was preposterous that value would exist at all in a mass-produced piece of cardboard.  Manufacturers also did some low-volume printing of ‘limited edition’ sets.  Essentially they were trying to fabricate the conditions of scarcity.  That someone was trying to raise the level of value on cards by simply pushing the button fewer times (I mean, this is cardboard rectangles spitting out of a machine, not Faberge-egg painting), is innately unattractive to the soul.  There is something infinitely repugnant about artificial scarcity.  A final thing they’ve done is to include fibers of game-worn jerseys in the cards of the best players. Sealed into a plastic window in the card itself, you will see a few pieces of authenticated thread, a snippet of a game used jersey.  The collector gets to look at the jersey in the photograph on the card of, say, Derek Jeter, and know that he has a few threads of a jersey that might even be that jersey he’s looking at.                    

 It is this last practice that is fascinating to me, and it’s started me up thinking about baseball cards in a way that I never quite have.  Neil Postman used to maintain that a good question to ask when encountering a new technology is, “What is the problem for which this is a solution?”  The example he always gave was the cruise-control function on a car.  What problem does cruise control solve?  Assailed that way, you see it solves the problem of keeping the foot on the pedal, which isn’t a problem for hardly anyone.  Upon encountering a phenomenon such as this rending of jerseys, you want to ask yourself a different sort of question: “What is the religious phenomenon that this phenomenon is a secularization of?”  Is what we we’re doing essentially what we used to do, only in varied form?”  The idea that miraculous power inheres in the bones and teeth and garments of our greatest citizens, has deep roots in the psyche.  When I feel myself, say, dressed up in catering attire, in well-pressed white jacket, clean shaven, and bending into a table to gently ask a guest, “Coffee or tea?”, I feel nothing like the member of a species that would rip apart the garments and even the teeth and hair and bones of its most revered deceased members.  It is one of our most peculiar attributes.  Of course it’s aboriginal, pre-Christian, the sense of the magical body, though absorbed into Christianity; it demonstrates a belief that holiness inheres in the flesh (and by extension) in the things of this world.  A saint’s tooth, planted, might help create an area of holiness to protect a cathedral being built.  Gandhi’s shirt sleeve pressed to the forehead of a dying child certainly cannot hurt.  The belief is still in practice in Catholicism; still there are bones in altars, even in the newer churches, which retain a bit of the religion’s essential horror; i.e. What is best is torn apart (and must be torn apart) if its goodness is to be spread to all.  If you find that horrifying, ah, well, then that is because it is horrifying.  The world is horrifying, at least partially. As it’s a practical analogy, it’s worth pointing out that the jersey of Mario Mendoza, or any other weak player, isn’t being torn about into thousands of individual threads.  Ad men and marketing men, as we all know, are the deep-sea divers of the human psyche.  We learn as much about ourselves by studying the ways they attract us than by anything.  

BASEBALL CARDS, WALTER BENJAMIN, FOIL BALL [by Matthew Yeager]

PART ONE: 

In his time, my dad did a lot of wheeling and dealing.  He wheeled and dealt all sorts of things; baseball cards and baseball memorabilia, art prints in the Audubon tradition of nature art, birds or raccoons against white backdrops, often with an authenticating pencil scribbling in the corner by the artists; antiques of various sorts were also things he liked picking up and swapping; he liked old fountain pens, which he especially liked making gifts of.  He was relatively good at all his wheeling and dealing, at these motions that stir up value, and as a kid, I did a lot of accompanying.  To have grown up with a father who embraced baseball cards was absolutely as wonderful as it sounds.  I won't lie to you.  The child of the candy store owner will typically tell you first off about the bugs and the mice and the steep basement steps to make the point it wasn’t all candy.  I will tell you the opposite; traveling to sports memorabilia shows on Saturday or Sunday afternoons with my old man was easily the most magical experience of my early years.  It was Araby for me.          

In my version of the events, at about 7 or 8, I was partnered up with him, and my role was as a kind of external hard-drive, an R2-D2 like companion.  There is no more ravenous sponge than a small child’s brain.  It’s unpolluted, fresh off the line, and it will absorb any pile of information it gets interested in.  Like a paper towel in a TV commercial for that brand of paper towel, something capable of swallowing into itself a puddle many times its size, the child brain will take in the names of hundreds of dinosaurs, an entire history of a tribe of Native Americans, or in my case the prices of thousands of baseball cards every month in  big floppy newsprint compendium.  And when you have your head so full of something like that, naturally you want to talk about it.    

The 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle is the great card of the second wave of American baseball cards, and truthfully, as stable an investment as NYC real estate, because by now those that exist – even those with soft edges, creases, bad-centering, etc. -  are firmly under glass, counted, and unchanging.   Traditionally it is a player’s rookie card that has the highest monetary value, but in the Mick’s case, it’s actually this 1952 Topps card.  As a child, I figured that the reason must be was that this was his first Topps card.  Topps was the main brand of baseball cards from the early 50s through the mid-80s, so I naturally assumed that his first Topps Card must have been, in itself, a big deal.    

There are two primary reasons for its value; the first has to do with the way that cards were printed..  If you turn over the back of any baseball card, you’ll find a number in the usually the top right or top left.  This number, anywhere from 1 to 700 in a modern set, designates where the card falls in the ordering.  If one is attempting to collate a complete set by hand, it is obviously much simpler to get all the numbers than get all the players. 

Customarily, the stars in a set, the Dimaggios and Ted Williamses, were given the lower numbers; these cards were the first to be printed, and they were printed at much higher volumes.  Going into 1952, Mickey Mantle, despite his prodigious gifts, was still a pup, and rookies and lesser players (“commons” in the lingo) were relegated to the back of the line.  As that Mantle card was printed in the high numbers,  automatically there was scarcity, and thus the seeds for value.

INTRODUCTION, CHAD JOHNSON, McLUHAN, SPORTS, TECHNOLOGY [by Matthew Yeager]

First of all, a big hello to everyone reading, to those that I know personally and to those that I don’t know personally, to those that have been frustrated by my tendency to go off the map periodically but have been good enough to forgive me,.  I hope that you’re having a fine Sunday, or rather that you had a good Sunday.  I have been rattling along as if strings with soup-cans were all hooked up to me, but that is only for the last few days. As mentioned above my name is Matthew Yeager, and I will be blogging all this week for Best American Poetry.  I’m simply going to go; I have zero blogging experience, and I can’t pretend to have a feel for how talky or how “essayistic” I should be.   I suppose the phrase “essayistic” is itself, by nature, what you’d call “talky;” one doesn’t want to be wearing a tie when others are wearing swimsuits.  One doesn't want the opposite either.  Basically one simply doesn't want to be ridiculed. About four years ago, an email I sent to a friend regarding Chad Johnson, the flamboyant Bengals wide-receiver, was posted on his own blog.  He's a comedian.  This was then linked to from a sports blog called Deadspin, which to the sports world as Gawker is to those who follow celebrities for amusement.  Sports constitute huge amounts of internet traffic, and my friend’s blog page began to suffered almost humanly, turning green.  Realistically, it was as if 300 people barged into a 40 seat bar and bowled the doorman sideways, then began tearing off the wallpaper and ripping out the sconces.  We were both mildly terrified by it.  If I am honest with myself, that little blog post has undoubtedly been read by more people than have ever read any single thing I’ve written.  inclined to at least try to find some significance in this, as I’ve been scratching away as a poet for a minute here.  As a diehard devotee for 20 years of one of the three worst franchises in sports,* the Cincinnati Bengals, I embraced their brief turnaround in 2004 and 2005 with the lunacy of one who has never been there before.  Symbolic of this lunacy of hope were the touchdown celebrations of Chad Johnson.  As gestures, they were ecstatic embodiments of having never been before.  They were the opposite of, as coaches drum into your head from a young age, “acting like you’ve been there before.”  They seemed to take into consideration that he might never get back into the end zone again.  CJ, now Ochocinco, proposed to a cheerleader; he put on a Santa hat and tossed out presents to a crowd from an enormous stocking; he danced the Meringue and the Irish jig with, as was noted, the beautiful fluid hips of a pro; he putted a football like it was a golfball, with a pylon.  In 04-05, I would drink coffee all through the Sunday afternoon at one of several bars which aired all the games.  The Bengals would still be relegated to one of the smallest, least visible television sets, but I’d situate myself directly under it and periodically scream and yell in a way that a person needs to every now and again. 

Anyhow, one of my imaginative activities as that time was more or less playing with the idea of a celebrating Chad Johnson, just toying him around in my head, as a boy would with an action figure.  Is that odd?  Personally I wouldn’t screw in the Freudian monocle, at least not yet; all who write are invariably communing, in some degree, with the fantastical imagination of childhood….Over a few months that fall, mostly at work, I dreamt up a long list of potential touchdown celebrations, all for the ostensible purpose of the minute-to-minute happiness of saying something that my friend, whom I’ll call here Zest One, might find funny.   Me being myself, I kept these touchdown celebrations close enough to the real world that were Chad Johnson, for instance, to be mailed a list of them, he might conceivably be able to execute one of them.  What would the equivalent of this be for me?   Like writing a cello piece in your studio apartment and having it be played by Yo-Yo Ma.  I can’t know.   At catering events during that 2004-2005 season, during prolonged periods of bussing glasses, which is a good activity in which to let your mind wander (ala the job of sitting at the top of the mast of a Mellvillian whaling ship, overcome with a wind and vision), I would occasionally giggle and whisper to myself at the prospect of Chad Johnson celebrating a touchdown with one of my ideas.  It was that thrilling to me.  I was even once lightly reprimanded for it, which was a peculiar thing to be reprimanded for – whispering and giggling to yourself.  “Hey you, stop giggling to yourself.”           

Anyhow, these were the best ones, which I cut-and-paste for you now.  That they are all possible is their strength.  They will of course be of no interest to you if you’re not a sports fan; the second one was the one that was explicated in detail in the email.     

1. JAMES BROWN: Ala James Brown, a sequined cape would be thrown over a kneeling Chad Johnson’s shoulders by a teammate.  Chad would then be led out of the end zone, only to run back in, kneel back down, have the cape reapplied to his quivering shoulders.      

2.  ENDZONE GRAFFITTI: Chad Johnson stashes cans of spray paint in the vicinity of both an opponent’s end zones.  Upon scoring a touchdown, he retrieves a can of spray paint, and sprays an orange CJ on an opponent’s end zone, as a barrage of car batteries are hurled at him by the fans of Cleveland.     

Craig Arnold (+KBC, Etc.) {Loren Goodman}

I spent most of the morning reading, thinking and communicating about the disappearance of and ongoing search for the poet Craig Arnold. Craig and I had an energizing long chat a couple weeks ago about poetry, research volcanic and otherwise, and his travels in Japan. He was in Fukuoka that day, getting over what sounded like food poisoning. We made plans to meet in Kobe in June. As Craig had kindly given me plenty of detailed, helpful advice, and I was looking forward to chatting with him again soon, I kept his window open. At 10:18 am (before I'd read the announcement that he had gone missing) Craig's chat lamp came on green ("Craig is online."). At 10:19 am, the lamp went red again ("Craig is offline."). I called a few people in Japan and the US to let them know about this and see if I could help in any way. When I explained what happened with the green light, Mr. Kawahigashi (the local town officer) perked up. He suggested that even though reception on the island is bad, one could pick up an intermittent signal higher up on the volcano.

I'm glad to see they have extended the search and hope they find Craig soon and safe.

The Fastest Swimmer in the Republic of Cervixstan [by Rachel Shukert]

I came across this on the internets today, and on account of what I've been feeling (in my pants) whilst watching the Olympics lately, it seemed appropriate to share it with all of you. 

Olympics - Shenyang Report [by Joe Kruzich]

As I noted last night, there are two sports that the Chinese care most passionately about, and those are soccer and basketball. Tonight, I will give you an update on those two important sports at the Olympics.

First, yesterday China played Spain in a very close basketball game. Remember, just a few days ago the U.S. "Dream Team" knocked off the China team by 31 points, 101-70, deflating Chinese hopes that there team might make it to the upper echelon of the basketball world in these Olympics. Well, the top teams by my estimate and those of the taxi drivers in Shenyang, is that there are 3-4 teams to watch in this year's Olympics, and those are the U.S., Spain, Greece and Lithuania. But yesterday, the Chinese basketball team almost pulled off a major upset, sending their game with Spain into overtime, though finally losing to the Spaniards. I remember yesterday as I was rushing home in a taxi to get ready for going out to the soccer matches in Shenyang, my taxi driver and I pulled off to the side of the road to listen to the final minutes of the China-Spain game on the radio, as China had an opportunity to win the game in the last few seconds of regulation play. Of course, when Yao Ming, the great Chinese center and Houston Rocket, fouled out early in the overtime, everyone knew the game was over for the Chinese. Nevertheless, the Chinese performance showed they are still a rising basketball power to be reckoned with and probably only one or two Olympics away from being a serious contender for the gold.

Tonight, I headed off to the soccer matches again in Shenyang and this time it was The Netherlands vs. Japan. Now, I am sure many of you are familiar with the national and historical enmity between China and Japan, much of it emanating from Japan's treatment of China during the second world war. Well, when I arrived tonight for the game, I had never known about this secret alliance in soccer between the Chinese and the Dutch. It seemed liked every fan, and there were many tonight, was supporting the Dutch in their battle with the Japanese team. While both teams played well, though the Japanese team seemed to move the ball a bit better during most of the game, the Netherlands squeeked out a narrow 1-0 win, with the winning goal on a penalty kick in the second half. As the Dutch scored the go-ahead goal, the stadium erupted in applause and Dutch-Chinese relations never seemed better. Of course, I think the Chinese support for the Dutch had more to do with the other team. For the Chinese, especially in the Northeast, the next best thing to a Chinese victory is a Japanese loss. And that was the take away from tonight's game; old enmities, even in sports die hard.

On a more positive side tonight, the Chinese men's soccer team played the Brazilians to a close 3-0 match. Well into the second half, the Chinese team was only down 1-0 to a much more talented Brazilian team. Again, it has to be said, besides the fantastic performances of Phelps in swimming and the U.S. basketball team, the Brazilian men's soccer team is a sight to behold; they are simply amazing in how they move the ball, attack the goal, and play with such skill and style. That the Chinese soccer team could stay in the game with them, was quite an accomplishment, and most of my Chinese friends went away proud that their team was able to make it an interesting game. Like I said before, China really wants to develop a great soccer and basketball team, and their performances in basketball against Spain and in soccer against Brazil, show they certainly have the potential in the future to realize this goal.

That's it for tonight. It has to be said that so far these Olympics are coming off very well and the athletic performances are absolutely stunning, especially Phelps. In fact, judging by the Shenyang taxi drivers, the real hero of this Olympic is Phelps, or, as the Chinese say Fee-er-pu-se. Talk to you tomorrow. Zai Jian.

Report from the Olympics - Shenyang [by Joe Kruzich]

This week we're pleased to welcome back Joseph Kruzich, Public Affairs Officer, US Consulate Shenyang Province, China.  Joe previously entertaned us with blog posts about Chinese food and drink.  He has agreed to take time out from his busy schedule to write about the goings on in China during the Olympics.    Thanks Joe! --sdh

Well, the Olympics are now well on their way in China and I thought I would provide some color to what all of you are watching on television and reading about in the papers back home. My observations are mainly from a satellite city, Shenyang, which is hosting many of the soccer games for the Olympics, at least the quarter and semi-finals. The finals will be in Beijing. Shenyang is an old, industrial city in China's Northeast, commonly referred to as China's Rustbelt. I often describe it to friends as a combination of Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo in the early 1980's, but when some American friends recently came up this way they thought that analogy was off the mark, and they thought Shenyang, with all its neon signs, was "Splashy". Anyway, Shenyang was given the privilege of hosting some of the Olympic soccer games and they have taken their responsibilities seriously, building a brand new athletic stadium that is probably one of the nicest soccer stadiums in China now, touching up the city and sending thousands of volunteers throughout the city to make sure foreign visitors are given a warm welcome.

But before I delve into the soccer games, let me just say a few words about the opening ceremony in Beijing last Friday, which was probably witnessed by most of China. I watched it with a group of Chinese friends and though they cracked jokes about their leaders and their expressions and all of the countries, one could tell they were deeply proud of the grand choreography of Zhang Yimou and the "chinese history and culture in one hour" theme. To watch it on TV in China and with Chinese was quite special. I also have to add, there are a lot of dumb and stupid things said in the American media about China, but today's column in the Washington Post by George Will raises willful ignorance to a new art form with his comparison of the opening ceremony to some Leni Riefenstahl propaganda documentary. What an insult to the memory of the Holocaust.

If there are two sports that the Chinese care passionately about, it is soccer and basketball, and both sports have attracted the nation's attention these past couple of days. I mentioned earlier Shenyang is the host to many of the Olympic soccer quarter and semi-final matches, and the Chinese men's team opened up their Olympic appearance in Shenyang last Sunday. Now it is, of course, true that soccer is a Chinese national sport, much like the NFL is in the U.S., but the Northeast is the real soccer loving region of the country and the region with the undisputed best team - that beautiful coastal city of Dalian. Northeasterners love their soccer teams, much like Pittsburgh fans love their Steelers or Green Bay fans love the Packers. So, when the Chinese national team came to Shenyang last Sunday, it was quite a spectacle to watch; the enthusiasm was high and the expectations higher. Now, before I get to the China vs. Belgium game, let me take a little historical detour on China and soccer. The Chinese men's team has been disappointing their fans for most of the last 100 years, and certainly of late; its the same sort of love-hate relationship Chicago has with its beloved Cubs. In fact, the frustration is so palpable a newspaper in Changchun (the Detroit of China), a couple of months ago carried a headline on the front page: "China men's team loses again; We have nothing more to say". There was no story that followed.

And, alas, the 45,000 enthusiastic Shenyang soccer fans who came out to cheer their team on were again disappointed as China dropped the match to the better Belgium team 2-0. But, this time they could blame the refs.