Sunday, September 13, 2009

"The Complete Poems of Chili Davis" and Other Books We Dreamed Were Real

My buddy Brian Gunn once joked that he'd been reading "The Complete Poems of Chili Davis," the brawny, taciturn outfielder for the Giants, right around the time we learned that Dan Quisenberry, the submariner-reliever for the Royals, began to pen his own poetry. I found this little piece online:

From "How I know the world as we know it is almost over":

in the newspaper I read
they have a new vacuum
so strong it can suck
a baby's head off before it can breathe
and some people are so mad
they shoot the doctors who
do that, in the name of god
saying "thou shalt not kill"
I wonder who will sorrow
when other babies reach eighteen
twenty-one or thirty-something
and get sniped in bosnia
somalia, iraq, okinawa, korea

The Quiz must have been quite the anomaly in the bullpen. Baseball culture tends to be macho, but Dan was always a little different.

Still, when I heard about Fernando Perez's love of poetry--and his reading of Lyn Hejinian and John Ashbery--I just about choked on my sunflower seeds. It sounds like an farce, a po-biz wet dream, but just listen to this guy.

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