While I am not a big fan of baseball or formal verse, I am finding something charming about the formal poems Greg Perry has been writing about the playoffs. Maybe it is the occasional aspect of the subject as I have always thought occasional poems to be particularly suited to verse forms for some reason (perhaps the ritual quality to it), or the fact that baseball itself to me feels a highly formalized and nuanced spectacle, despite its everyman sort of exterior. Any game is a repetition of familiar signs, symbols and events, even though each game is different; in this way formal verse is similar insofar as it repeats oft-handled structures and tropes. The juxtaposition of the slightly rareified context of formal verse and the more or less non-rareified context of baseball is sort of compelling as well.

Let it not be said that I'm not capable of thinking outside my own box. I consider formal verse to be a pretty limited endeavor, but improvisation within limitations is really what art is all about. I think it's infrequent for folks to happen upon truly successful formal verse, but these baseball poems seem like a likely candidate.