Baseball and Poetry

I've never been much of a sports fan, especially baseball. Even though baseball is said to be "cerebral" and therefore a game that should attract a poet like me, I find it slow and tedious. Good poetry, on the other hand, I find action packed like great soccer or basketball. A good poem is filled with internal rhyme, metaphor, simile, enjambment, and fast moving imagery.

Maybe that is why I got a puzzled look at the end of a line several years ago. Seamus Heaney, the Nobel prize winning Irish poet was reading in Seattle and I was looking for the line for the tickets. I found a long line and got in it. I inquired, is this the line for Seamus Heaney tickets. Who? This is for the Mariners. Perhaps if she had been a soccer or basketball fan, she would have know the great poets.

Poet in Residence.

Good News. Yesterday I was talking to Sebastian Smitch of Seattle Coffee Works and said I live as an urban monk, but sometimes my mind goes elsewhere. Urban Monk or nun he asked. Urban monk I hastily and emphatically restated. Though an urban monk, I have one unfulfilled wish, to be Poet in Residence at Seattle Coffee Works. You've got it Sebastian said. You are Poet in Residence at Seattle Coffee Works. Advice to young aspiring poets. Find a good coffee shop to sit and write in. If you fail to write any great poems at least you will have coffee to drink.