Baseball being what it is, his pretty great essay in the September Poetry Magazine is going to raise eyebrows in the locker room--what will Pat Burrell think of such rampant intellectualism? Regardless, Perez really knows his stuff, and is capable of delivering a few evocative phrases of his own. Here's a snip:
Like poetry, baseball is a kind of counter culture. The (optional) isolation from the outside world (which I often opt for); the idleness about which—and out of which—so many poems are written or sung: I see this state of mind as a blessing. Sometimes, in fact, when I haven’t turned on a television or touched a newspaper for months, freed from the corporate bombast, poetry is the only dialect I recognize.
Reading this essay makes we want to explore his minor league diaries from 2007--getting a chance to get a real writer who happens to be a real ballplayer is pretty damn rare. But if you have few minutes go read his essay--it is short, and a fine read. And yes, I've left it unsaid until now, but calling up a player who enjoys reading contemporary poetry is just more proof that Joe Maddon is really the older, time-traveling alias of NPR Host Ira Glass.
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