Aisle 228
BooksMLBOriginalsBy Jessica Kleinschmidt on

Sandy Marchetti knows the poetry of baseball shows itself before the first pitch ever crosses the plate.

Aisle 228 combines the game and the relationship with her father. The book highlights milestones across 50 years in Major League Baseball and the iconic World Series title for the Chicago Cubs in 2016.

Listening to baseball on the radio turned Marchetti into observing the game and how it’s introduced with her written word. A combination of recreating the time we fell in love with the game and how the grew into respect as we aged.

Marchetti sat down with Awful Announcing to detail her new poetry book.

Awful Announcing: When, for you, did love and baseball become intertwined?

Sandy Marchetti: This isn’t a question I’ve been asked! I think it’s an interesting way to approach the project. I tend to think of my first book, Confluence, as a traditional love story that takes place in the Midwestern landscape, but Aisle 228 is that too. Being a Cub fan, you experience that “first love” flush when you walk into the ballpark. In the last poem of this book, I talk about how when we “ascend the stairs” to enter the Wrigley seating bowl, we “wear our [childhoods]” again.

But the heartbreak comes quickly, and melancholy was our natural state for many years. Even when the team is good, my father and I will keep complaining about them, maybe not to jinx anything?! When you experience the entire emotional cycle so quickly, you latch on. I’m a third-generation Cub fan, myself.

AA: I see your dad taught you a lot about the game. Tell me about your relationship with him.

My father is a quiet guy — perhaps more so when I was a child. I’m an only child and like most kids, I was curious and always looking for parental approval. It was a very relaxing scene sitting with him in the “toy room” (our den) watching the Cubs. We would play with Barbie dolls and watch the game, and we found a shared lexicon as he taught me about the players, the gameplay, and tried to explain to this five-year-old girl the strike zone. I couldn’t grasp that it existed even though I couldn’t see it. It’s one of the great baseball metaphors for life!

We still attend a lot of games together and spend the whole time talking about inside baseball stuff—which base should be thrown to on a certain play, who might be stealing, what the defensive positioning says about the scouting report on a hitter, etc. Men sometimes turn around and tell us that “we really know our stuff,” much to their surprise. Baseball is a love language.

AA: How did you develop a gift of observation? Or the sense of finding the details in little things?

SM: Being a baseball fan and a poet affords the opportunity to hone that skill, doesn’t it? I am fascinated by watching the little scenes of life play out. The biggest “rush” for me is feeling that sense of awe, one that we experience on a natural high from exercise, or from communing with nature, or watching our team win a big game.

I certainly don’t catch everything, but often something very small catches my attention and captivates me. Just recently I wrote a poem about how the call of a hot dog vendor sounds like that of a mourning dove if you close your eyes and forget where you are! Weird, but beautiful. And it often starts with sound for me, rather than visual images. I hear a rhythm, tick, or buzz, and start writing based on that.

AA: Was there one particular baseball game/moment that made you want to write this collection?

SM: I don’t think anyone could accuse me of being a bandwagon fan, considering my grandfather lived on the Northside of Chicago and had his TV permanently tuned to WGN, but many readers have asked if I wrote the book because the Cubs won the World Series. The short answer is no—I wrote the first poem, “Frame,” in 2013.

I knew I had this book in me after publishing my first collection, and wanted to get started on it as soon as possible; I felt it bubbling up. All this to say, I wrote my first baseball poem after a Cubs-Braves playoff game I attended in 1998. The story of that night is told in “First Poem” in the book. I lost the original poem but never forgot it. I thought that once I was a “published author” I’d re-write that piece. Eventually, I fulfilled that promise (and then some) to my 14-year-old self.

AA: Which poem is your favorite? Why? Favorite line?

SM: I have a few faves — many of them are not Cubs-centric. I love “Myth,” starring Ichiro as an eternal merman who rises from the sea to participate in one more spring training. My favorite line is probably from “Twilight”: “How can we know / where the strike zone is—imaginary / cube, filament I could not hold / in my hand?”

A close second for favorite poem/line is “Distortion,” which ends with: “Milwaukee was losing / and so was I, winking/slow across the shoreline, / my ears wrecked in the static / of a bobblehead giveaway.” I love the little bit of humor there.

AA: What’s your relationship with writing poetry?

SM: The conventional wisdom is that poets should avoid being sentimental. In creative writing courses, we are told it’s a wasted emotion and comes across as cliché. Writing about baseball totally upends this. Baseball fans lean into and fiercely defend the game’s history, its legends, and even its origin story!

Nostalgia is allowed in baseball fandom — in fact, it’s encouraged. We need it to understand the game and our connection to it. So this was an objectively interesting project. How much I could lean into these “sappy” emotions and still write poems of quality, that would touch both baseball fans and poetry readers? The number one thing I had to do was allow myself the freedom to try it. And based on audience feedback, I’m glad to say I think I’ve reached a wide array of folks. I’ve been writing for a long time, and poetry became attractive to me due to the economy of words. What is the most complex idea I can get across in 75 words? 50 words? It’s like a puzzle to me, a sense of deep play.

AA: Is there a particular piece of content/media — perhaps a favorite broadcaster that helped enhance your love of the game?

SM: I listened to a lot of Harry Caray growing up, as well as Pat Hughes and Ron Santo. Pat’s cadence was certainly influential in how the book came out, as well as Len Kasper, Vin Scully, and others. I’m often asked what kind of baseball literature I read. I love Andrew Forbes, Krystal Languell, and Terry Kirts’ work. But, the sounds of the radio broadcast were more powerful and influential when I was writing these poems and when I was growing up. In that sense, I’d ask you to read my poems aloud in order to do them justice. Read one out in a normal voice, and don’t pause at the end of each line. I bet you’ll hear what I mean.

 

She’s not entirely dedicated to the Cubs, however. Upon closing the interview with Marchetti, she mentioned the Oakland A’s have the best uniforms in the game, especially the Kelly green.

I would have to agree.

Aisle 228 can be purchased wherever books are sold. You can follow Sandra on Facebook and Twitter at @sandrapoetry.

About Jessica Kleinschmidt

Jess is a baseball fan with Reno, Nev. roots residing in the Bay Area. She is the host of "Short and to the Point" and is also a broadcaster with the Oakland A's Radio Network. She previously worked for MLB.com and NBC Sports Bay Area.

View all posts by Jessica Kleinschmidt