Baseball In Poetry

9 Innings.  3 Outs.  Pitch counts of around 100, a small white ball, 8 other men behind you, supporting your every move.  These are the things a major league pitcher are given to craft their art. Paper, pen, computer, language, their thoughts, these are a poet's supplies.   In their elements both strive to perfect the art of fooling their opponents: the reader and the batter.  Weather crafting an unhitable pitch or tongue-twisting sentence both as the poet Robert Francis states is trying to be "a moment misunderstood" in their art. Robert Francis uses a pitchers battle to fool a hitter as a metaphor to illustrate the battle a poet goes through to mislead their reader all in an effort to be "a moment misunderstood", while seeming eccentric, errant, arrant, and wild but being in control of their craft the entire time.  The poem The Pitcher line by line is the back and forth of an exciting match up between hitter, pitcher, reader and writer.   It is this exciting match up between poetry and baseball that I will be looking at in my new weekly Baseball in Poetry blog.  Here is this weeks poem The Pitcher by Robert Francis 

His art is eccentricity, his aim

How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,

His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He

Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,

But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate

Making the batter understand too late.