Henry Schipper, a Venice based TV documentary producer and former journalist for the Hollywood trades–both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, decided at age 72 to do something he had ever considered before. Write a bunch of poems about his beloved sport of baseball, and how the sport is a metaphor for both our lives, and his life.
The book, “The Ball Dreams of the Sky,” was recently released, and to Schipper’s pleasant surprise, it ended up in the Amazon Top 20–that is, in Amazon’s category ranking of both baseball books and poetry. Many top baseball writers have praised the book. Tim Kurkjian of ESPN called it “A walk-off hit for all fans,” and Ira Berkow, the former New York Times sports columnist, says the great poet Robert Frost “would have delighted, as did I, in Henry Schipper’s distinguished collection of baseball poems.”
Schipper, who has produced documentaries on everything from Marilyn Monroe, the Golden Gate Bridge and 9/11, as well as countless one-hour documentaries on great black figures like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dick Gregory for the TV One network, sat down with the Easy Reader to talk about this unlikely foray into poetry.
ER: What inspired you to combine baseball and poetry?
HS: It happened naturally. I play outfield in the Culver City Senior Softball league, and
there’s lots of time out there to absorb and appreciate what’s happening in and
around the game, including green grass, blue sky, soft breeze, and buzzing/
humming of the field. First lines of poems came to me naturally as I widened the
game to include the world.
ER: The title The Ball Dreams of the Sky is beautifully metaphorical — what
does it mean to you?
HS: It’s the aspirational part in all of us that wants to go high. You could call it the
soul. But the image and projected longing of a baseball to soar—not just for a
home run, but beyond– really captures that for me.
ER: Were these poems written over many seasons, or did they come in a
creative burst?
HS: Many seasons, but as any fan knows, some are more productive than others. My
best year came after I had emergency heart surgery and realized how much I
wanted to finish the book. That was my Mike Trout year; I wrote most of the
poems then. It was a labor of love, and my heart weighed in with a sense of
urgency and joy.
ER: Do you write from the perspective of the fan, the player — or the ball itself?
HS: All three, but mainly the player/person who is playing the game of life, which I
translate into the language and metaphor of playing ball.
That said, a turning point in the book came when I wrote a poem from the POV of
The Ball. I imagined it was talking to The Pitcher. Then, in another poem, to The
Bat. Later I wrote a poem called “Bat and Glove Talking About a Ball.” It was
surprisingly easy and amazingly rich to get into the mindset and language of the
game through the three tools that every player knows so well.
ER: Baseball has a rich tradition in American literature. Were there any writers
or poets you looked to for inspiration?
HS: You are right, baseball has inspired the best writing of any sport by far. Its pace
is leisurely, but loaded with quiet drama that lends itself to a writerly frame of
mind. In fact, a few of the poems in the book are about the experience of writing,
cast in baseball terms. For example:
“His spikes dug into syllables
of dirt, spewing letters, dollar signs,
quotation marks and exclamation points
as he rounded the bag.”
My favorite baseball novels are Bang the Drums Slowly by Mark Harris, and The
Celebrant by Eric Rolfe Greenberg.
And my favorite baseball poets are Robert Pinsky, Gail Mazur and Donald Hall.
And of course, Yogi Berra, who mastered the art in spoken word.
That said, I didn’t have a model for these poems. I trusted the voice and form of
each as it came up through memory and feeling.
ER: How do you explore memory, nostalgia, or loss through the lens of the
game?
HS: Well, loss is easy, isn’t it? Baseball has plenty of that—games, seasons, skill,
entire careers– so there’s a lot of metaphor that people can relate to and share.
As for memory and nostalgia, baseball is saturated with both and would be
lessened by half without the companion game and measuring stick of the past,
the record books– who did what, when, how well, and compared to now. The
game’s sense of history is unique in sports, “its need,” as I say in one of the
poems, “to keep records and box scores and stats.” So it really lends itself to
poetic recollection of experience, recent or old.
ER: Are there specific historical games or players that show up in the poems?
HS: The Detroit Tigers of my youth hover over the entire book. How utterly captivated
I was by Al Kaline, Rocky Colavito, Norm Cash and the rest of the team, which I
can still name, position by position. That said, it’s not a book about glorious
moments from games gone by, but about the game we all play every day— the
game of love, creativity, aging, faith and beyond, described in baseball terms. Of
course, for me, all that is steeped in the glamour, awe and gratitude I carry for
the players who dazzled me at the start with their skill and style and passion to
play.
ER: What’s one line or poem from the book that you feel captures the essence
of your love for baseball?
HS: Probably the opening poem, called I Believe. When I was a kid, my dad taught
me a Jewish prayer of faith set to music that goes back all the way to
Maimonides. It’s called Ani Maamin, or I Believe. My little testament nestles
lovingly in that, but it’s obviously much simpler, rooted in the truth of childhood
faith and love. It begins: “Better worlds exist among us/every baseball field is
one.”
ER: What do you hope baseball lovers — and even non-fans — take away from
this book?
HS: A sense of relaxing into game of life, with all the highs and lows, and the intrinsic
perspective that baseball, because of its pace, brings. “Wait til next year” is the
way every season ends for most fans. That’s not the natural mantra of any other
sport.
ER: If you could read one of these poems aloud at a ballpark, which would it be,
and where would you want to be standing?
HS: It would be 7th Inning, about the 7 th inning stretch, of course, in the game, and in
life. The 7 th inning stretch is one of the quiet civilities of the game, a pause, a
truce, that lets us all be one for a few minutes, despite rivalries and opposing
teams. I make the most of that in the poem, and would love to read it to a packed
house in a tumultuous game while standing on the mound.
