October 30th forum announcement

Dear Poetry Aficionados,

Poetry & Poets in Rags

It's Halloween tomorrow, and for the occasion we headline with a link to a book about bat poetry--as in the flying creature. But also occasional is our Back Page link, brought to us by Major League Baseball, about Jack Kerouac and his love of the game.

Could this be a coincidence? Could it be that on the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road, Kerouac's Red Sox played Neal Cassady's Colorado Rockies in the World Series at the baseball diamond in Denver? If you think not, then is it a coincidence that a batsman named Mike Lowell, whose last name happens to be the name of Kerouac's hometown, was named the MVP? Or that the Red Sox won on the road? Or that this was the 103rd World Series, and on page 103 of my copy of On the Road, Kerouac writes, "I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October"--what Lowell did in Denver. Coincidence? Further on that same page:

"The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated the ghostly gathered husks; it was almost Halloween. . . . I cut right along. I wanted to get home.

"It was the night of the Ghost of the Susquehanna."

Is it a coincidence, then, that the Susquehanna rises as the outlet of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, the home of Baseball's Hall of Fame, where Lowell, now, will become immortalize?

Or a coincidence that Boston Red Sox fans sing Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" as a victory song, diamond as in baseball diamond, Caroline being a variance of Carolyn, as in Carolyn Cassady, Neal's wife with whom Kerouac had an affair, and Neil being a variance of Neal Cassady? Is Kerouac saying that the "I" of Sal Paradise was at those games?



Yours,
Rus

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