"I Have Been Given a Baseball ... "

Remarks from the Fray:

Alan Michael Parker's "I Have Been Given a Baseball…" catches the nostalgia, the good time feelings of an old baseball park that has seen a lot of games, both good ones and bad ones. But the poem's techniques are too much on display to make this a successful poem.

Like so many other poems, this one begins with an object, one that conjures up memories and musings. The speaker just happens to have been given a novelty baseball, and it just happens to be "complete with the violet / No. 7 line… out to Shea."

Ah yes, the Mets… "Lovable losers" in their first decade; Miracle Mets in '69 when they beat MY Baltimore Orioles in the World Series; and then in the 1970s, again foundering as deaths and mismanagement brought the team down again. It's kind of hard to discover in this poem what the speaker found so endearing about "too often" watching the Mets lose – in the rain. I guess the speaker was a fan, but the poem doesn't really convey his own joy.

Parker's obvious technique is on display again in the fourth stanza, where the baseball given the speaker now reminds him of a woman he knows now "whose son has died." But instead of focusing on the woman who "should have the ball," Parker digresses to talk about the son. What an awkward way to get from the speaker's own memories to a comment about the stadium making the son "happy there, at last." I do like the outrageous suggestion that her son would be happy "in the buggy, humid night" – fans are nutty that way – but the next line leaves me cold. It's one thing to use a specific metaphor to concretize an abstraction (Happiness is a warm puppy), but here Parker uses an abstraction as a simile for another abstraction – Sitting in Shea Stadium on a buggy, humid night is "like being inside a pretty thought." Yeah, right.

It's all downhill from there on, as Parker races to cram in all his ideas before the poem ends. The small, sodden crowd that chants Let's Go Mets -- is that the crowd with the dead son or the 1970s crowd the speaker remembers? Are they angels because the son is in heaven—I don't think so, but then I don't know why or how Parker wants us to consider that. And now we know why Parker didn't mention the mother in the 6th and 7th stanzas – he was saving her for his final pitch in the last stanza. But the last line – "whatever we do with anything" – is just as maddeningly abstract as "like being inside a pretty thought." What are we to do with this poem? –

Whatever [we] want,
whatever we do with anything.

And what I want is a poem with less technique on display and more effective imagery to convey Parker's ideas.

--MaryAnn

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I ought to like Alan Michael Parker's poem "I Have Been Given a Baseball..." more than I do because it exhibits traits I find appealing and find not often enough; straight, unpretentious language, knowing details about a world we might recognize from our own experience, and a deft hand of knowing when to give the details and when to hold back, to let mood and substance fill in those details that plain narrative facts cannot express. Still, Parker's poem leaves me with that after taste one might associate with some fake beer. You can taste the resemblance to actual lager, but what you take away is how the simulation jumped the rails and gave you a cotton tongue and a mouth that felt like it had a long drink of your mom's shampoo. Similarly, Parker's piece reads like a poem and does it's paces very well--pause, sit, speak, roll over, go abstract, give a glimpse of something comprehensible, now conclude, wistfully, whispering--but I can't get over the gutlessness of the enterprise.

The problem might be with the subject itself, baseball and it's relation to the collective consciousness of how we'd like to regard ourselves; so much has been made of this over the century, supported, amended, expanded, contracted, with limitless layers of irony and outrage that one is hard pressed to name a particular emotion or dramatic trope that hasn't been through baseball's diamond-formed symbolism. The sheer attraction of the game, how it appeals to the perceived American virtues of openness and fair play and playing by the rules, that agenda after agenda, attitude after attitude have been pushed through it's fabled fields in the order of making a point, of laying out how great we are or how debased we have become. There's not much chance of using baseball again as a means to underscore points of pain of injustice or unspoken joy without having one's poetic feet snap the worm-eaten structure on which this mythology lies. Parker, though, is game and gives it a try, lowering his sights smartly enough, to a set of hieroglyphs mysteriously set in front of him, the base ball of the title. […]

[The poem's conclusion has] the effect of the poet sneezing at a crucial moment, turning his head to think of something else, mentally balancing his checkbook in the middle of delivering a simile. Parker wants us to use our own powers of streaming, steaming metaphor to read in all sorts of implications, invisible and unverifiable, that this cheat of an ending might signify, but what this evokes for me is a sight of a man walking away from an accident he caused. There is no meaning here beyond the disorderly exit of the last verses other than Parker hit the exits before this ball game was over.

--Ted_Burke

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(7/5)