William Matthews, Baseball, Detroit, Cities, continued

It’s been awhile since I used visitor comments as the basis for a post, so here we go.
From my responses yesterday:

AH, great! I hadn't been back to [the Matthews poem] in years--maybe I have some memory and judgment left after all.

Barbaro, you're probably on thin ice AND out on a limb [favoring Detroit over some others], but you know cities much better than I do. I certainly agree that Detroit gets a bum rap, but it's the only major city I've ever lived in, unless you count Memphis. I'm snowed by the presence of four major sports teams, the symphony, which I'm told is world class (just got back from a daytime Schumann, Haydn, R. Strauss, and it was fantastic), a fine art museum, a dandy river front, the Eastern market, and on and on.

I suspect the problem is that what's bad is now very bad indeed, from schools to infrastructure (esp. roads) to vacated buildings to corrupt politicians to economic jeopardy. It's a damn shame because what's good is very good indeed.

I think Mayor Dave Bing has some good ideas with urban gardens and forestry, but where's the money for tearing down the old, much less putting up the new?





And here again is William Matthews on fans and audiences, onlookers, those not heroes:

Cheap Seats - 94.12

William Matthews, Baseball, Detroit, Cities: Some Notes

Here are some looks at Detroit's Comerica Park. I hate to admit it, but Comerica beats the hell out of the sentimental favorite, Tiger Stadium, which the team abandoned in 1999.

I've put the pics up small for fast, easy opening. Did it work? Remember, you can click on a photo to enlarge it. Maybe a few today and a few later?






In case you haven't been to a baseball game for a while, let me recommend it. No, it's not cost-effective, but neither is that watch you're wearing, or those shoes, which no one considers a great thing about America. Baseball is. Just ask Ken Burns, who gave us American History via the ball field a few years ago.

I only get to a couple of games a year, but each time I'm aware of the great American mix at the stadium, along with the vastness of the rustbelt city where I now live--suburbs to the north, west and south (which we call Downriver), and Canada just a healthy bird flight eastward across the Detroit river. From any point in Detroit, it is at least 30 miles to open country, farm country, rural America. A full house at the ball park is about 40,000; that's twenty of the town and four of the entire county where I grew up.

During my first 22 years in Opey-ville, I used to look around and realize there was not one spot in town where you could not see beyond the city limits into the hills and farms. The town was so small you could always see past it. Surely I would die of hickdom.

Now, after more than 30 years in Detroit's burbs, the vastness of the urban sprawl and the melting pot still create astonishment for me. At the stadium, the guy in front of me might work in the factories downriver while the lady to my left is a home maker from one of the Bloomfields or Grosse Pointes. I also see some folks from the little bergs north and west, in for the day from West Branch, Romeo, Fowlerville, and college kids from Ann Arbor, and maybe even some sensible folks from the former KKK haven of Howell, Michigan.

Last I heard, greater Detroit still had the world's largest Arabic population outside the Middle East. Detroit has a Mexican Town, a Greektown, Polish Hamtramck, Corktown and probably every other ethnicity in our nation. A sports stadium is a huge bowl of socioeconomic and ethnic snap, crackle, and pop. And except for an occasional drunken dumbass, everyone behaves; there's a genuine sense of community among strangers from very different walks of life.

But what about Detroiters themselves, people within the actual city that supports all that growth and sprawl, while shrinking from over two million in the 1950s to about 750,00 at present? Honest answer: I have no idea. Shall I assume that every African American fan at the stadium lives in the city proper, which is about three-quarters black? That would be quite an assumption, and, if true, it would still account for maybe 1% of the crowd on a typical day.

So whose Tigers are these? What exactly defines an American city in the year 2011, anyway? And what defines the decay or death of an American city in 2011? Where is the tipping point, and how do we prevent complete collapse? What would complete collapse even look like? The rest of the country jokes that it looks like today, outside the stadium . . . .

I get so distracted by all those questions that I retreat into innocence and feel I'm nine again. It's Little League Day in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium, where Ted Williams and some other Red Sox had come to visit my Indians, like Al Rosen, Luke Easter, Larry Doby, George Strickland, Early Wynn, Bob Feller, Bob Lemon, Ray Narleski. (I didn't have to look up any of those guys, yet I was not at all the most rabid fan among my buddies, my peeps).

I got lost looking for a hot dog in the dark caverns. Oh, there's my mom waving at me. Maybe I'm not lost anymore. (I have no idea how I found my way back to my team and mom; it was a miracle, more proof of a deity than I ever found in church).

But this is a poetry blog! Sort of. I looked for a poem about baseball, but could not be satisfied. Then I remembered the late William Matthews' impressive poem about hoops, "Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959." I offer it as one of the very finest sports poems:

Cheap Seats - 94.12

**


**

Writers Interviewed. The Tallahatchee Button Fetish.

Interviews with two writers, I’ve mentioned recently here – Dorianne Laux and Charles Baxter – are available at Eastern Washington’s literary mag, Willow Springs:

http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/interviews.php

Other Banjo-respected writers interviewed there are Rick Bass, Aimee Bender, Stuart Dybek, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Gerald Stern. Each of them has wowed me at least a couple of times, though for truth in advertising, I should mention that I haven’t yet read these interviews.

Speaking of celebrities (outside the poetry world, where appearance should be irrelevant), why have male celebs developed the custom of buttoning their jackets when they stand, unbuttoning when they sit?

I caught a moment of the nuclear arms summit on TV this morning, and as President Obama rose for a moment of silence honoring Poland’s tragedy, he buttoned his jacket. So did his female counterpart from Argentina.

How many times have I puzzled over this as I watched Letterman or Leno and their guests?

What is so outrageous about an unbuttoned jacket on a standing man or a buttoned jacket on a sitting man? (Well, the latter might be an issue of tightness and popped buttons, an epic embarrassment, to be sure). Aren’t there enough dumb behaviors out there without this button fetish?

I’ve lost plenty of sleep over this, and my patience is wearing thin. Everything has a reason. A universe without reasons is a piss-poor universe, and I want some answers. I don’t want obscene wealth, just some minor league info—nothing that would shock or depress me, please, just some crumbs on quirky subjects like this. If you have nothing to offer, why are you using my oxygen?

* *

Baseball and Diction: Tigers 4, Indians 2

Is it only a game?

Or a biting reminder


to watch your word choice,




even there at the park at a boisterous time,
the magical boys who can turn on a dime.







If you can't keep your mind
on the game or your diction,















enjoy a good corn dog, a greased benediction.