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JOSEPH STANTON - OCTOBER 2000 FEATURE  

The Cortland Review

FEATURE

Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival
An abundance of riches in the hinterlands of New Jersey.  TCR's own Ginger Murchison and Julie Larios report.

David Lehman and Maria Claire Leng
Companion Poems: Odes that Rhyme from A - Z.

Joseph Stanton
The Space-Time Continuum and The Slow Eye of Stan The Man: Baseball, apple pie, and Stan "The Man" Musial.

John Kinsella
The Globe Hotel: The next chapter in his exclusive autobiographical series.

Jonathan Kessler
Book Review: Michael Rothenberg's "Punk Rockwell," a book that transgresses boundaries.

Joseph Stanton

Joseph Stanton is widely published as a poet and scholar. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry East, Harvard Review, New York Quarterly, and many other journals. His latest collection of poems is Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. His next book of poems will be a sequence of baseball pieces.
Joseph Stanton - Poetry

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The Space-Time Continuum and 
The Slow Eye of Stan The Man
    Click to hear in real audio

   Well, you wait for a strike. Then you knock the shit out of it.
   —
Stan Musial's advice to Curt Flood on hitting


The greatest of hitters, legend has it,
have learned the trick of the slow eye:
a magic that contrives to see in slowed

emotion every turn and twist of hurled
white sphere that rotates its seams
in heightened view for those who've found the way

to note the ball's in-flight curve or swerve
or straight and narrowed path, heart to heart,
so that the bat can be administered

precisely dead-on through the line of fire,
for the sake of the sweetest intersection
that sends the pill back the other way,

remaking its career, and the pitcher's, too.
It's as if history were rewriting itself
on the way to the plate; as if the ball,

destined for a soft home, a shelter,
a tender pocket of comfort and desire,
were snatched of a sudden by death's

harvesting swing, which must be seen though,
in this case at least, as just another life,
arising in what some eyes have come to know.

 

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