Peanuts and popcorn and crackerjack

Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About The Game
edited by Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura

Every American schoolboy and schoolgirl knows the mock epic, ‘Casey at the Bat’ (which William Schuman made into an opera), and Franklin Adams’s ‘saddest of possible words,/Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance’ (of the Chicago Cubs’ double-play past masters). The historian, J.H. Hexter, analysed a baseball game to help him fathom the depths of causation in history; Stephen Jay Gould made extensive use of batting statistics in support of a theory of evolution. Baseball reaches parts of Americans that other games still cannot reach. It continues to lie warm and deep in the national spirit, renewing it every spring and hibernating there when the snows close in. Thanks to baseball, April is the least cruel month in America, though it certainly mixes memory and desire. No other game has inspired so much fiction of such high quality. Not just the unforgettable stories of Lardner and Runyon, but novel after novel from writers of the first rank. There is no major cricket novel. Baseball has Coover, Kinsella, De Lillo, Irving, Roth, Malamud, Doctorow, Greenberg — and they are the tip of an iceberg.

Baseball, we learn from Cor van den Heuvel’s excellent introduction to this collection, was introduced to Japan in 1872 by an American teaching at what is now Tokyo University. The first Japanese baseball haiku was written in 1890. The first known American one was written in 1958. Fittingly, it was Jack Kerouac who wrote it, for he was an accomplished outfielder and the haiku has often been linked to Zen. (A year later Kerouac recorded his readings of 30 of his haikus in Blues and Haikus.) Since then many American poets have been drawn to the form.

This collection represents the work of 29 American poets, one Canadian and 15 Japanese (in translation).