Sports Saturday
We’ve long had an active poetry series at St. Mary’s, and periodically a wonderful new voice will swim into my consciousness. Bruce Cohen from the University of Connecticut is the latest. Cohen has a wonderfully wandering surrealistic style. Often, as in the poem below, he gives us a narrative that is easy to follow—but he then will explode it by veering in unpredictable directions or by inserting startling images.
In the following poem, one of his more straightforward ones, he starts with an account of a friendship between Robert Frost and a Boston Red Sox player and then moves into accounts of his father and him sitting in the bleachers at Fenway Park. The luxury mentioned in the title is a luxury box, in which he is seated but which his father never could have imagined. But real luxury, he says, is
a baseball game, the way you plan nothing after
cause there’s no telling how long it’ll last,
The play not restricted by time, but by the number
of failures, (outs), a sport that invades all four seasons.
At the end of this post I’ve appended the introduction that my colleague, poet Karen Andersen, gave for Cohen’s reading. Here’s the poem, which appears in Disloyal Yo-Yo (Dream Horse Press, 2009):
Ghosts of Luxury
Sometime in the 50’s, Robert Frost, a visiting
professor at Berkeley, desired, Frost desired
to meet baseball players & was introduced
to a curly haired cherubic blond who later
became Rookie of the Year for the Bosox:
Jackie Jensen. They talked into the espresso
evenings mostly baseball but a little poetry too,
& stayed periodic New England pals.
Jackie often left tickets for Mr. Frost.
I’m embarrassed by my love for this story,
void of drama, its only point, the oddness of friends.
July, 1993, my first Fenway visit. The Green Monster.
Steel girders obstruct some of the cheap seats.
A man’s value is measured by his seat at a baseball game.
I thought of my father, how he’d be a little proud–
me, in a sky box with free beer & unlimited franks.
The dead don’t need to know the why of anything.
He’d just brag to his scalper cronies in heaven.
No doubt he’d think I’ve become something,
but what would he ask besides the names of my sons?
If I’m happy? I once swore I’d never
Mention happiness in a poem, so I’d just nod.
I know loss & luxury began in 1961 because
the National League didn’t exist, did not exist in New York.
I know it was 1961 because the city was buzzing
Mantle & Maris & 61 Jacks, the city pregnant
with Mets. Upon their birth in ’62, my father
no longer needed to wake me at 4 a.m.
No, nothing was wrong. He simply needed to drive
to Philly to catch the Giants: the closest they’d get
to New York for a year. (Save the World Series).
In 1961, in the House That Ruth Built, my father
thought out loud. Look at those slobs in the bleachers.
If every one gave us a buck, no one would miss it,
or even think twice, & baby, we’d be fucking rich.
As time erodes, one’s definition of luxury changes.
Any moron can identify the wealthy. Seasons
are so casual, so insignificant, they treat them as verbs.
(We summered along the Seine). At Fenway, my buddies
& I waited till everyone but the sweepers left the stadium,
then snuck onto the darkened field. Bob pretended to bat.
I threw an imaginary curve from the pitcher’s rubber.
I believe I saw the ghost of Robert Frost in the bleachers–
Jackie Jensen in the dugout thumbing the complete
poems of the Queen of Amherst, & my old man,
wolving a hot dog in three bites, a cigarette glowing
in his other hand. My definition of luxury is constant,
a baseball game, the way you plan nothing after
cause there’s no telling how long it’ll last,
The play not restricted by time, but by the number
of failures, (outs), a sport that invades all four seasons.
Luxury has changed. When I have a late work
meeting & not enough time to go home & come back,
I hoard the hour at a Chinese restaurant,
not thinking about my wife, the boys,
the third kicking her belly. After the meal,
The waitress formally announces: my fortune cookie.
I crumble it & find a lucky mistake:
three fortunes. I forget the first two.
The last said, He who has imagination
without the darkening has wings but no feet.
But even that may not be exactly right…
If not for failures, nothing would ever end.
Here is Karen Anderson’s introduction to Bruce Cohen’s reading at St. Mary’s College of Maryland:
Thank you for joining us for our second to last reading of the semester, with which we bid farewell to classes and greet exams—and then into the great escape of summer. It’s great good luck of ours to be able to temper this transition with the deft maneuvering between tragedy and comedy that Bruce Cohen’s poems give us; a spiraling, surreal trip through the mundane tasks of life—stripping wallpaper, attending cocktail parties—to the places the mind allows us to arrive. Poetry is generally hard to write, funny poetry harder, or perhaps not hard to write but hard to feel like reading again, because hey, we got the joke the first time. But Bruce’s poetry writes in the best tradition of not what I’d call humorous but rather hilarious verse: Frank O’Hara, James Tate, Kenneth Koch—by scaring us a little, veering close to the edge of the void, even while he’s making us laugh. His favored tools—the strength of plain speech tempered with the quick cuts the consciousness makes—don’t just treat us to wit or irony as literary tools but invoke irony as a condition of living, a place we are doomed to and blessed by, a state of being that is both beautiful and terrifying. In it we are suddenly awake to way our minds spin the world into existence, how they mark us, how marked we are by them.