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A Poet On Baseball

From an Atlantic review of a poem in Gail Mazur's book, Zeppo's First Wife:

...the concluding poem, "Baseball," is a three-page ode to the game's

"firm structure with the mystery / of accidents always contained."

And from an interview with the poet:

You write, in the final poem in the collection, "The game of baseball is not a metaphor." Why do you go to such lengths to insist that you're not using baseball as a symbol for something else?

Saying that baseball "is not a metaphor" was actually a strategy to get around the fact that baseball in fact is such a perfect metaphor for life, or for creative work. To have said it is a metaphor would have left me embarrassed by the cliché. The strategy, I'm sure, came out of my feeling of being stuck with the truism. When I uncovered the missing "not" in the declaration, I could go on to deny everything in the poem, an ironic denial, a trick to say what I wholeheartedly felt in the writing—that the world of baseball, the players, the park, the fans, is a world and a microcosm of the greater world. Sometimes I think that the longer a thing that is "not a metaphor" lives in a poem, the more of a metaphor it becomes.