Interview: E. Ethelbert Miller

Interview: E. Ethelbert Miller

By Scott Bolohan

When we started The Twin Bill, poetry was not originally going to be part of it for a number of reasons. Mostly because I didn’t think I would be able to handle editing them on top of everything else, but I also wasn’t sure about how much interest there would be in baseball poetry.

But a funny thing happened. Without even asking for poetry, we started getting submissions. And they never stopped coming. We get probably three times the amount of poetry submissions as any other genre.

It’s been championed perhaps by no one more than E. Ethelbert Miller, truly a giant in the world of baseball poetry. His second of three baseball poetry books, When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, was published in September. In it, Miller uses baseball as a metaphor for love and relationships, often with a sprinkling of humor while also weaving in art and music. But he also delves into the oft-repeated phrase of baseball being a reflection of America as he examines the pandemic and racial tensions through the lens of baseball.

We had a wide-ranging conversation over Zoom about baseball poetry in 2021, often punctuated by laughter.

What drew you to baseball poetry?

I’ve written two memoirs, so I’m not just writing poetry. When you start dealing with your memoir you are spending time looking back on your life. You also hear people saying write about what you know. I know baseball, especially of a particular era. I try to bring that forward in terms of using the game as a metaphor at this point in my life to examine issues of gender, issues of race. I think what I’ve done, at least in terms of American letters, is expand on it. People have written one or two poems about baseball, but I just completed a baseball trilogy. When I look at each one of these books, I think they break ground.

I’m blessed that I met Emily Rutter, who’s a baseball scholar. I met her by accident. I was at a conference in Boston, for a panel, and some of my friends and one of my former students, we were outside of our room. And this woman went by us looking for the restroom. She’s going to her panel and we’re talking, and she’s a baseball person! I think it changed my life. And then she wrote the introduction to When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery.

I think this gets back to baseball, as a team sport. I was always concerned in terms of African-American culture and history, I always felt that we needed to bring together teams of scholars to examine reconstruction, teams of scholars to examine slavery, teams of scholars to examine the New Deal, and have that sort of working relationship. When you move into the academy, many times it’s very competitive. You got a fellowship, I didn’t get one. Many times it’s not about that it’s about what are we trying to examine, historically, that will help us in terms of our country, citizenship, things like that. That’s why we do the work. That’s why we play the game.

And there’s a whole literary tradition of baseball poetry, whether or not people are aware of it.

When you talk about baseball poets, I think of Donald Hall or Phillip Levine, these guys who love the game and write about the game. And now just being a member of this Pandemic Baseball Book Club is like—what’s the secret society to George Bush was a part of?

Skull and Bones.

Yeah, exactly. [Laughs] I say that in terms of like, I got a new tribe.

I have to say this, one person, a guy named Sam, who wrote me an email when my book came out. He said he was a big fan and he had given the book away. And Sam, at that time, was the Assistant General Manager of the Nationals. For him to say how much he enjoyed the work, he was giving the book to some of the players. A very nice moment for me in terms of motivating me to write more baseball poems. I was doing a recording of my TV show, and when I came out of the studio, I turn my phone on, and there was a recording from Dusty Baker calling from California. He called and said he liked my book, and he reminded me that he played with Satchel Paige. It said a lot for him to call and then I felt that I was blessed by having people at least take the time to enjoy these poems.

It never would have happened if it hadn’t been for David Wilk, the person who published my work. And this ties into social media, because I hadn’t seen Dave Wilk in many, many, many years. I knew who he was, but we never corresponded. I was always putting my poems on Facebook and he contacted me and he says, I’d like to publish your poems, do you have a book? And I said, ‘I do now.’ [Laughs] He wanted to do the next one too. It’s been really nice to have that relationship. He’s a Minnesota Twins fan, and I forgive him every now and then. [Laughs] I’ve been very happy in terms of what these poems have done for me.

I was talking to someone who said the language of baseball is like the language of America. I think your poems speak to that. I want to talk about your approach to writing a baseball poem. What goes into a baseball poem versus any other poem? Do you worry about your audience when you write them?

That’s a good question, but if you just open the two books I have and read the title of the poems, you can see it’s very easy because all you have to do is give me a baseball term as a prompt. Now what I’m trying to do, and I have done because I finished the trilogy, I moved into other areas. I decided I needed to have more poems about baseball history and personalities. I have a poem about Jimmy Piersall in the next book, and one for Emmett Ashford, the African-American umpire who is just as important as Jackie Robinson, and one on the Black Sox scandal. I began to look at baseball history.

The challenge of writing baseball poems is that you have to be accurate. The same way you deal with baseball fans, somebody says ‘This didn’t happen, let me tell you what did.’ I was blessed that my literary assistant, Kristen Porter, her dad was a sportswriter and editor for U.S. News. After Kirsten and I go through everything, he looks at it. In this last book, he caught the spelling of two baseball players’ names I spelled incorrectly. You could spell Rickey Henderson’s name incorrectly. You have to be exact, and that was one of the things in this era where it was very hard to find copyeditors. Because I’m writing for baseball people, it’s made me a better writer. I go back and double-check something if I have a name, a date. That’s very important. But that’s my approach. What I’ve done with the last poems, I’ve moved more in terms of not necessarily dealing with African-American music, I’ve started moving more into the visual arts. So you’ll see a reference of painters.

I did want to bring that up. I edited a fine arts journal and I’ve always been sensitive about how people in the fine arts world almost looked down on sports. Then I can read your poems, and you write about Miles Davis, Ralph Ellison, Hopper, Picasso, all in the same breath as baseball players. I found it very reaffirming.

There was a cartoon in the New Yorker many years ago, two dogs at a high-class reception. They got their little drinks. The dog said, “Yes, and they were talking about Kierkegaard, and all I could say was ‘Bow Wow.'” [Laughs] I feel in terms of what has happened with American literature, I’m happy that I’m associated specifically with baseball and meeting people who maybe they’re not reading poetry, but they like this particular poem.

The nicest thing is I go into a senior citizen home, especially in DC, they’re all Dodgers fans. So they identify with Jackie Robinson, Dem Bums, and it was interesting. Baseball is what connects you. Or as you can see recently, this is Red Sox nation. We have a team, it wasn’t doing all that well. But what happened the last game of the season, it was packed, and it was Red Sox fans. That’s one of the things I find when I go into these places and you say the name of a player, you say Duke Snider, and all of a sudden the memories come back. If you can do that, as a writer, that sort of restoring memory to an individual or community of people, that’s why you’re here.

I want to talk about this book in particular. You wrote a lot of this during the pandemic, which is how we got started. I found myself trying to latch on to baseball somehow. The first thing I did when the pandemic hit was watch Ken Burns’ Baseball. Then I decided to create The Twin Bill. How did writing during the pandemic affect this book?

I was in a very reflective mood during the pandemic and before I connected to baseball, it took me back to my beginnings. And I said, ‘Okay, I’m here, I can’t go out.’ I started relating to my brother because in the early ’60s, he became a Trappist monk. And I said, ‘Well, if my brother, can I make that decision, I can tell make it a few days.’ [Laughs] My brother took a vow of silence. He went in and my mother pulled him out of there. She just couldn’t accept that all of a sudden he was going to be gone forever. But I got into it. I was very close to my brother. I started reading my Thomas Merton, then I got into nature. That’s why a few of the poems have this very strong spiritual sense. In fact, in the next book, I have a poem where every baseball players are Buddhist. I made sure that I was connecting to something spiritual, something that’s making you connect to who you are, and why you’re here. It might be baseball ties you to a place, or what happens is it slows you down. Ginsburg talks about this, that breath and how you take that in, and that’s where the language comes from. So you’re looking at your body as a temple, you’re looking at your body and say, ‘How can I preserve it? How can I not? How can I take care of it? How do I breathe?’ Those breaths are sometimes linked to good deeds. And once again, about baseball, understanding the teamwork, the other. And the importance of love, love for the game, love for individuals, love of country, all those things come together.

I want to talk about one poem, probably my favorite poem in the book, “The Cardboard Season of 2020.”

I wouldn’t expect that to be your favorite poem. I try to use humor. I want to tell people, poetry doesn’t have to be this serious thing or with rhymes. With that poem, I thought it was funny, because what happens is that somebody has to decide where to put the cardboard faces, right? You and I are in charge of putting some Black cardboard face in Fenway Park. Really? [Laughs] Have you ever seen a black person at Fenway Park? [Laughs]

You know what that poem felt like? It was like an observation that a stand-up comedian would make. It speaks to the truth of life in some way.

It’s funny but it’s also very political. Because what happens is no different, you and I are going to the park, who gets to sit in the suites? When I went to baseball games we were young, we sat in the bleachers for fifty cents or whatever it was at that time. But you know, the whole thing where you sit, has a lot to do with it. When we talk about the sad part about it, if you have family of four or five, can you really afford to go to a ballpark? You’re talking, whatever the distance is from the ballpark. And let’s say you’re outside New York, so we’re not taking the subway. So you’re down in Miami, you’re driving, that gas that you’re using for work that now you’re going to take your family out. There’s parking. There’s a meal for a family of four. And then you want to maybe buy something extra. You can easily spend $250.

If you want to go to Fenway, it’s $100 tickets. I think this is part of the larger conversation about baseball, the inaccessibility of it. I see my high school players going to tournaments in Florida, in Alabama. What differentiates the players is if they can pay for it.

And it’s not just paying for it, it’s the fact that the structures are set up. At the same time, you see more players gaining control over their workplace. We hear about there’s not a lot of Black baseball players. I say, ‘Well, I don’t know what you are talking about.’ They mean English speakers. It forces us to redefine your own Blackness, in terms of how when we say Black the same way you say Black in England, you could be talking about somebody from Pakistan. Then you see Jeter and the Miami Marlins and insisting that the organization will be bilingual, that’s going to carry over into many of these players. I think the strength will probably come from the Latino players. You look at the bat flips and Fernando Tatis, it is such an art form. If you try to control that, you might as well say you’re going to control the drum in Congo Square for the Black Africans. It ain’t going to happen. You know, telling Charlie Parker you should only play with strings. When you talk about the future, and this is a challenge for me as a writer, we want to have long memories. And I think baseball is stronger than memory. But we don’t want to be stuck in the past. That’s why the whole thing of ‘let them play’ is very important, because that’s an advocacy for democracy and diversity.

I feel like the narrative in my life has always been baseball is a dying sport.

Go back to January 6th, and just forget about baseball for a minute. Look at when baseball began. Baseball begins around the Civil War. Baseball began when this country was divided, baseball began when soldiers and free Blacks were playing it. If that game was bringing people together, back then during the Civil War. That’s what we have to do now. You cannot be cheering somebody in the Home Run Derby and leave the stadium and Asians are afraid to walk down the street to get the groceries. You can’t have that. Something has to extend from the field to society. Today’s athlete is not going to accept that. The bat flip is an act of defiance. Look at all the things that are taking place in the dugout after a home run. That’s what’s happening in baseball because the influences are coming from so many places,

I have to ask you about the two Tommy John poems, one of which is the titular poem of your book.

I deal more with love poems and relationships. So basically what you get is a metaphor of a relationship that’s not working. At the end, she’s leaving. She found out that I got a new arm, I got a new man. The second one, I wanted to have to make sure I have a poem that is somewhat factual. So you see that poem is in sections and the last part was a list of players who had Tommy John surgery.

You said you finished your third baseball book. Is this the end of your baseball poetry?

No. I’m still writing poems. I keep writing. There’s a lot of baseball poetry that won’t be in the trilogy, which will probably be my contribution to American letters. And because it’s getting so much attention within the baseball community, and then especially with Emily Rutter, bless her heart, she’s really analyzing the work. I don’t mind being redefined. There’s a lot of writers out there. I feel the work I have presented is a way of looking at the game. I always will return to the game. There is always going to be something that I see that I would like to interpret. It may begin with something that’s happening in our society, and then I get pulled back and use baseball.

E. Ethelbert Miller’s latest book of poetry, When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, is out now.

Scott Bolohan is the founder of The Twin Bill. He has had Tommy John surgery.

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