Happy Spring, everybody!
♦ Kevin Baker‘s latest book, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, was recently reviewed in The New York Times. Baker — who will be a guest on the “Bookshelf Conversation” in the near future — has written several novels about New York in the 19th century as well as a baseball novel, Sometimes You See It Coming.
♦ John Leahy, a professional sportscaster who has done play-by-play since 1995, has completed his new book, Living a King’s Life: The Story of the 2009 Kalamazoo Kings from the Radio Broadcast Booth. Read more here.
♦ Author Eric Vickrey marks the launch of Runnin’ Redbirds and Season of Shattered Dreams: Postwar Baseball, the Spokane Indians, and a Tragic Bus Crash That Changed Everything on April 27 at the Jacoby Arts Center in Alton, IL. The former, published last November by McFarland, chronicles the Cardinals 1982 World Championship season while Season of Shattered Dreams, which comes out next month from Rowman and Littlefield, tells the true story of a minor league baseball team and its tragic bus accident, which to this day is the deadliest incident in the history of American professional sports.
♦ 
2B or Not 2B? Yes, the general topic has been done before, but I’m still interested in reading Shakespeare and Baseball: Reflections of a Shakespeare Professor and Detroit Tigers Fan, by Samuel Crowl, trustee professor of English emeritus at Ohio University. Crowl’s book actually releases today. Happy coincidence.
♦ Speaking of Shakespeare, this about a new SABR project:
SABR is seeking contributing authors for an upcoming book project on found poetry of historic baseball announcers. The project is inspired by Tom Peyer and Hart Seely’s O Holy Cow: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto. The hope is to include representation of all teams, with the final product consisting of about 200 poems.
The task of contributors, in many ways, is simple: take a portion of a play-by-play broadcast and refashion the words — using line breaks, punctuation, capitalization, etc. — into a poem. There are few hard and fast rules to found poetry; please feel free to bring your individual creativity to the table.
If you are interested in helping out, please contact book editor Eric Poulin.
The Village Voice, a New York City alternative weekly, would publish verses by Peyer and Seely from time to time. I had to ask about the term “found poetry” and Poulin was kind enough to supply this explanation:
According to The Poetry Society of America
Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.
A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
Have at it.
is available on Amazon.com,
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