While I don’t have the cultural connection to Haiku that true connoisseurs of the 17-syllable poems might, I got chills as I listened to several read on a special Selected Shorts program devoted to baseball writing, as aired on Public Radio International.
The readings come from Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game, as read by the actor Alec Baldwin and Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer.
Haiku is merely the appetizer as there are some truly wonderful readings here, most notably personally, a poem “Polo Grounds,” by Rolfe Humphries as read by Fritz Weaver, and ”The Green Fields of the Mind,” an excerpt from A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti, read by the author himself.
You can find the two episodes of Selected Baseball Shorts on Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf, a nice looking blog chocked full of audio, visual and literary treats dedicated to baseball. Ron put each episode in its own post in part 1 and part 2. The Haiku is in the second part.
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