Kevin Varrone, Box Score : An Autobiography

errors are part of the game       my dad used to say      to remain sub-

stance in the face of transubstantiality            is pretty much what hitting

the eephusis all about  :   some things cannot be explained by time

or continuance or        we select our documents to tell our stories     I

mean the city   the gulls           the green & way people           quiero & mill

between innings           mr sutcliffe      the stairway from bluff to

hollow remains                        one of the most fascinating dreams one could

have is of all this broad fenland as a great city playground      wrote a

visitor to the neck in the late 1800’s   :  light  a derivative miracle

comes on         howard got the bat head out & hit that one a country mile

there there now           hush hush swing low   there’s nothing but give &

damn & bring me home & carry me home

Philadelphia poet Kevin Varrone’s Box Score : An Autobiography (Furniture Books, 2014) is an extended exploration into the game of baseball, from its history to folk tales to its overall structure, held together through the author’s long-standing relationship to the game. Through telling the tales of America’s Greatest Sport, it allows Varrone to delve into elements of storytelling from his own past merged with long-forgotten elements of baseball trivia, mixed and re-mixed, interspersed amid prose-poems constructed with a series of pauses held together with staccato precision. At the same time, Varrone is utilizing the information of baseball to create an extended sequence of stand-alone episodes of text, being both his own autobiography and a biography of the sport. Through the stand-alone sections, lines and sentences repeat, recur and are re-ordered for the sake of repurposing meaning, connecting fragments and even confounding any suggestion of narrative.

As well, this text exists as almost a transcription of how the book was originally purposed: as an interactive app, allowing for visuals as well as audio from a number of poets across North America, each reading a poem from Varrone’s manuscript. The poems in Box Score : An Autobiography condense and erase time; each section occurs simultaneously, with a review of the app version suggesting that the order in which we read these sections should be seen as fluid, something the nature of literary print publishing tends to reduce down to the suggestion of a single option. What does the lack of interactivity lose us, and what might we, also, gain?

henry chadwick’s headstone     in brooklyn’s green-wood cemetery

reads     father of baseball    before the   ’46 all star game   ted williams

asked rip sewall if he would throw tht blooper   nl manager charlie

grimm put sewall in     & sd throw that blooper pitch & see if you

can wake up this crowd    sewell    who’d been injured in a hunting

accident the day japanese bombed pearl harbor    faced williams

for a three-run homer   (a deluxe version of the pitch sewell called

a sunday super dooper blooper)     it was the only home run sewell

ever gave up on an eephus in 300-plus big league appearances     &

he’d told williams it was coming again    & images showed williams

had run up out of the batter’s box & was therefore an enjamb-

ment     in violation of   6.03  of the official rules of   baseball

which states     :     a batter’s legal position shall be with both feet

inside the batter’s box