This past Sunday, Mike Pelfrey, a starting pitcher for the New York Mets, balked at the mound three times in a game against the San Francisco Giants. Baseball rules spell out clearly what constitutes a balk. It's not uncommon but it is costly, as runners on base instantly advance to the next base. Three times in one game is, unfortunately, uncommon. Pelfrey blamed it on a temporary case of the yips, a sudden and inexplicable loss of ability.
First baseman Jeremy Reed later told reporters that he tried to say something to Pelfrey to get his mind back in the game but had little experience in that role. Sometime jams in baseball can be resolved by one perfect pitch, but what if the pitch is lodged somewhere, out of reach. What line can you cast to get it out?
In fall 1995, I attended a Galway Kinnell-Gary Snyder reading at the University of Richmond. I was with a friend who was an avid Kinnell fan, and on the drive to the campus, she tried to describe the experience of hearing him read his poetry live. "You'll have to hear it for yourself," she told me, giving up. The theme of the reading was the environment. Snyder read new poems and a few from Turtle Island, which won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Then he turned the podium to Kinnell. My friend was right. Kinnell had a wonderful, deep voice and read his poems in measured and steady cadences. It was an example for me of how to be a good reader of poetry without engaging in theatrics. After reading some of his poems, he shared "One Ordinary Evening" by Virginia Hamilton Adair, who published her first collection at the age of 83. (Ants on the Melon was published the following year.) As far as poetry readings go, this was excellent.
Then Kinnell announced that the last poem he would read would be "The Bear," his signature poem. It's a long poem, and what made Kinnell's readings of The Bear so famous is that he could do it entirely from memory. So he began--
In late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
A few stanzas into the poem, Kinnell stopped. He started from the beginning and, again, stopped in the same place. He paused and said that something was breaking his concentration. Like others, I looked around trying to find anything out of place, out of the ordinary. But the door was closed, no one was going in and out, and we were quiet. Did he see something we couldn't see? It quickly became clear that Kinnell would not get out of that jam and, then, from one of the front rows, a man whispered the line that had been misplaced in Kinnell's memory. Without glancing up Kinnell repeated the line and kept going. He read this entire, brutal and gorgeous poem out loud. When he finished, he reached into the cheering audience and grabbed the man by the hand, grateful that he had got him through the inning.
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