Poetry & baseball
By Edmund Cardoni
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Drawing by John Dobbs, from
Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer. |
there’s one bar
where they want us
to come and sit
and talk all night
just a bar to talk
from “At Fifty: a Poem” (1982) by Joel Oppenheimer published in Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer. (The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, SUNY at Buffalo, 1997)
I had stopped following the Red Sox (and therefore baseball, and therefore professional sports of any kind) after the 1975 World Series, not because they lost, but because I got interested in other things, like older women and French cinema and backpacking across Europe.
The Poetry Room at the UB North Campus and the downtown ballpark are two Buffalo treasures that are either too little known or too seldom visited. Their official names are, respectively, The Poetry/Rare Books Collection and Dunn Tire Park. The ballpark’s current name is about naming rights, as are, come to think of it, university buildings like Lockwood and Capen Halls where the University Libraries are housed. Of course, those don’t change as often as the names of sporting facilities; witness Buffalo’s erstwhile Pilot Field, Rich Stadium, and Marine Midland Arena, not to mention, on the national scene, Houston’s Enron Field, recently redubbed Astros Field for reasons that are painfully obvious. So I’ll just call ours the downtown ballpark, two of my favorite compound words.
The Poetry Collection (as it calls itself for short), on the fourth floor of Capen Hall, is certainly more than just a “room”: it is a world-class literary archive with state-of-the-art storage and electronic cataloguing facilities, a major destination for international scholars and researchers, an exhibition space for rare books and manuscripts as well as related artworks and artifacts, a book publisher, a gathering place for readings and lectures, and a collaborative partner for many of Buffalo’s off-campus cultural institutions on matters literary and historical. Nevertheless, for purposes of this article I’ll exercise my poetic license and call it simply the Poetry Room, because that’s how I was introduced to it after moving to Buffalo as a graduate student in 1981, back when the downtown ballpark hadn’t been built yet—the Bisons still played at the Old Rock Pile then—and anyway I hadn’t yet rekindled my interest in the game, let alone the minor leagues.
I was a native Bostonian and lapsed Red Sox fan who had been studying creative writing in pre-Rockies Colorado (the baseball team, not the mountains). Literature was my sole obsession then, and Buffalo a major league poetry town. The Poetry Room quickly became one of my most treasured retreats, at that time and arguably still one of the few truly cozy and congenial spots on an otherwise cold and unwelcoming campus. And I still think of it that way, as a room where you can go to hear poets read or talk about poetry, surrounded by books and art and the ghosts of great writers, including—now twenty years on—dear departed friends like John Logan, Jack Clarke, and Ed Dorn. Even the campus didn’t look bad from the large westerly facing windows of the Poetry Room, often providing a dramatic backdrop for readings and lectures that in memory always seemed to take place at sunset.
The most memorable events to take place in the Poetry Room back then were the annual Charles Olson Lectures, inaugurated by Robert Creeley in 1979 to honor the spirit and intellectual legacy of Creeley’s 1950s Black Mountain College mentor and later UB faculty colleague, author of Call Me Ishmael and The Maximus Poems. Each year for slightly over a decade (1979-1989), a distinguished poet associated directly or indirectly with the so-called “Black Mountain School” of poets (including their Beat and downtown NYC cousins) would be invited to Buffalo for two weeks to deliver a series of lectures on aspects of Olson’s works, his theory of poetics, or the influence of Olson’s work on their own. Robert Duncan gave the first Olson Lectures in 1979, followed by Michael McClure in 1980 and Edward Dorn in 1981.
My first experience of the Olson Lectures—and maybe of the Poetry Room—was Joel Oppenheimer’s visit in the spring of 1982, exactly twenty years ago to the month as I write this. Oppenheimer, like Dorn, had been a student at Black Mountain College, where Olson had been rector (succeeding painter Josef Albers and novelist Edward Dahlberg), and Creeley a young teacher. I knew Oppenheimer’s prose from his column in the Village Voice. His poetry readings and lectures that first spring in Buffalo were just the first of many that would blow my mind in succeeding springs, by such visiting Olson Lecturers as Ed Sanders (1983), Diane DiPrima (1985), and Allen Ginsberg (1988).
What I wasn’t paying attention to in 1982 was Oppenheimer’s obsession with baseball, and in particular the New York Mets. I had stopped following the Red Sox (and therefore baseball, and therefore professional sports of any kind) after the 1975 World Series, not because they lost, but because I got interested in other things, like older women and French cinema and backpacking across Europe.
Oppenheimer had been a huge Mets fan from the time that team was established in 1962, having been a Dodgers fan all his young life until they left Brooklyn after the 1957 season when Oppenheimer was twenty-seven. Around the same time former Yankee pitcher turned National League knuckleballer Jim Bouton came out with his classic Ball Four (1970), Oppenheimer conceived the idea of writing a baseball book of his own, the definitive book on the Mets (it also touched on a lot of other things that were happening culturally and politically during the summer of 1972, including presidential nominating conventions and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics), The Wrong Season, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1973.
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© Dr. V. R. Lalli 1991. Used with the permission
of Boncraft/Holling Printing Group. |
When Oppenheimer died in 1988, The Wrong Season went out of print, was remaindered by its publisher and slated to be shredded and pulped. So Bob Bertholf, Director and chief Curator of the Poetry Collection, bought all the copies that were left, along with other out-of-print titles by the poet, and stores them and sells them out of the Poetry Room. In 1997, Bertholf edited and published Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer, illustrated with drawings by John Dobbs, an artist friend of Oppenheimer who supplied the sketch of the author on the back of the dustjacket of The Wrong Season, and who used to accompany the poet to Mets games, sketchpad in hand. There are a couple of wonderful baseball poems in this book of over 500 pages, but mostly they’re about other things—you know, the whole rest of human life.
And the works of Joel Oppenheimer are the least of the treasures to be found in the Poetry Room. It also happens to house the world’s main archive of the manuscripts of James Joyce, as well as the author’s personal library as he packed it for storage when he fled the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940, his correspondence with bookseller Sylvia Beach, his family art collection (including a full-length portrait of Joyce himself), and personal possessions such as his spectacles and walking-stick. The Collection also has major holdings of manuscripts, notes, letters, and first editions of such poets and writers as William Carlos Williams, Robert Graves (I Claudius), and Wyndham Lewis. These are just some of the other highlights of this truly major league literary collection.
Our downtown ballpark is my refuge of choice these days, home to the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons. (AAA or Triple-A is the highest level of minor league baseball, the level just below the majors.) Built in the early 1990s, when Buffalo still thought it had a shot at a major league expansion team (Denver and Florida got them instead), it is regarded as one of the finest minor league ballparks in the country. And even though the Bisons regularly lead not only their league but all the minor leagues (not to mention some major league teams, like the Expos) in annual attendance and ticket revenue, because there are so many seats to begin with, there are still too many empty ones for my taste, and I wonder why more people don’t go to games. It’s a beautiful place to be on a sunny Sunday afternoon or warm summer night. Friday nights, win or lose, there are fireworks. The tickets range from a low of $4 (for a child’s bleacher seat) to a high of just $9.50 for the best seat in the house.
The Bisons won their division (International League North) the last two years, including ninety-one wins and only fifty-one losses in 2001, a winning percentage of .641. Only the major league Mariners had better.
The current manager, Eric Wedge, was last season’s Triple-A manager of the year, and for the Bisons’ sake I hope he isn’t sent up to Cleveland to replace Grady Little as bench coach (the manager’s right-hand man), now that Little has been hired as the new manager of the Red Sox. If he is, though, he’ll be joining several recent Bisons regulars on the major league club. If you’d been attending regularly as I have been, you’d have seen a slew of Cleveland Indians honing their skills here in Buffalo, as well as superstars, including players like Jim Thome and Manny Ramirez down temporarily for rehab.
Joel Oppenheimer, like all poets, knew Buffalo had long been a big league town when it comes to poetry, right up there with New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. But I doubt he knew that Buffalo’s professional baseball team was in the National League (briefly) a hundred years and more before the Mets beat the Red Sox in the World Series (1879, 1886), or that baseball mania in Buffalo went back even farther than that, almost to the beginnings of the game itself, to 1857, when the most successful of its early teams, the Niagaras, was formed.
For most Buffalo sports fans, baseball has been eclipsed here by football and hockey, with the exception of maybe the year they shot The Natural, right around the same time he did the Olson Lectures. But I’d like to think that if he was still around today, Joel wouldn’ t mind taking in a game at our downtown ballpark, a cozier, more baseball-friendly place than his beloved Shea Stadium—even if it was just the Bisons and the Tides.
Edmund Cardoni has published fiction, book reviews, and essays on contemporary art and art-world- politics.
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