Static static, Cubs lose
Robert Pinsky goes Keats on us this week:
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too�
While the former poet laureate didn't mention baseball in his comments, we know the playoffs had to be on his mind. Once a Brooklyn fan, now a Red Sox fan, Pinsky's a wait-'til-next-year kind of guy. You think he wasn't rooting for a Cubs-Red Sox series?
In the year the long ball finally quieted down, he had to be loving this postseason. He's a pitcher's poet. His Night Game has got to be one of the best pitching duel poems ever, if anyone else ever wrote one. If no ever did, then the poem still throws the lights out.
Pinsky doesn't write like a man who sits around reading Bill James. Across the waves of a radio Brooklynite's Dodger dial, he would probably agree with Vin Scully: "Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination."
Poets are all about illumination.
This postseason, when statistics are giving way to game sixes and sevens and goats and ghosts, Pinsky introduces Keats' work with nameless appropriation. "The fulfillment, the hovering, and the finality of autumn," writes the baseball fan, illuminated but long-suffering.
