Press for “Los Angeles Bards - Live In Pasadena” (CD/Mp3)


Los Angeles Times Sports Section - 12/20/2002

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What: “The Los Angeles Bards – Live in Pasadena” CD

Producers:Harlan Steinberger, Michael C Ford, Terry Cannon

Distributor: Hen House Studios, Venice

Kirk Gibson’s dramatic home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series has been described in many ways. But never quite the way it is in this collection of baseball poetry, believed to be the first of its kind.

Philomene Long, who once titled a collection of her poems “Memoirs of a Beatnik Nun,” offers the longest (9 minutes 13 seconds) and most intriguing poem of the 12 on this CD, which gives new meaning to “poetry in motion.”

Long, in her poem titled “Marcus Aurelius at a Dodger Game: Kirk Gibson Up to Bat,” is at Game 1 of the 1988 Series with the 2nd century Roman emperor and philosopher. Long, through Aurelius, offers a different perspective, to say the least, and Long reads the poem with conviction and drama.

Long’s reading was part of a session held in Donald R. Wright Auditorium at Pasadena Central Library in August, and this CD comes from that session. The host of the affair was Michael C Ford. Other poets taking part included Harry E. Northup, Joel Lipman, Fred Voss, Joan Jobe Smith, Eloise Klein Healy and Gerald Locklin.

The CD can be ordered through www.henhousestudios.com.

- Larry Stewart - Times Staff Writer

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Notes from the Shadows of Cooperstown - 1/9/2003

"A .278 CD"

I’ve reviewed a few CDs in Notes before, but they were musical CDs. The Los Angeles Bards: Live in Pasadena is a CD filled with baseball poetry. Here is how I arrived at the.278: nine different poets had their ups; I rated each from “out” to “home run.” with “double” being a midpoint. I tallied ten total bases, out of a possible 36:.278. When I was writing baseball poetry myself — back before the Selig Strike of 1994-95 — I found it hard to get feedback. Most people feel poems are personal things, subjective things, frail things, not to be tampered with. If they fly over a head, well, the head just wasn’t tuned in. Fortunately, my poems came under the scrutiny of the editors of Mike Schacht’s Fan Magazine, and I could easily see that my stuff indeed could be improved by others. I became a fair critic of my own stuff. Maybe that is why I remain a fearless critic of the poetry of others.

Let me first applaud the only poem I rated a four-bagger. It was not just read, it was performed by Philomene Long. “Marcus Aurelius at a Dodger Game: Kirk Gibson Up To Bat” is the title, and yes, the at bat Gibson is up for is the famous limping HR to win Game One of the 1988 Series. The poem is a conversation between two fans — one of them, the philosopher M. Aurelius. Is “the pursuit of the unattainable, madness?” You make the call, as Gibson’s familiar at bat plays again in slow-mo. This poem just stood out as major league, as no other poem did.

I called ground-rule doubles for the poems of Joel Lipman, whose Chicago barroom/brothel duties in the early seventies included delivering Joe Pepitone to the ballpark on time; and for those of Joan Jobe Smith, a former cocktail waitress recalling Ted Williams’ Tongue in one ditty, and Steve Bilko in another. I gave Chef Guillaume a single for even trying to make a poem out of the theological question, “How Does God Fit Into Baseball? ” No, really, He fits inside the ball! And the last hit went to Eloise Klein Healy, for two short ones that would have been fine poems even if they were not about baseball … or were they? Again, you make the call. And to be fair, listen to the poems a couple of times, in different places. The poems of the other four in the lineup were not awful, but they just seemed too ordinary. Very meaningful, no doubt, to the writers, but I just didn’t care about anecdotes from beer ball, growing up in Nebraska, Opening Day in Rochester, NY, in the forties, or the first game someone saw in 1951. It is quite possible that someone else would rate one of these a grand slam. But I doubt it.

I hope this CD succeeds wildly and is the first of many more.

- Two-Finger Carney - Writer

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The HSC Baseball History Newsletter - 1/3/2003

Winter is a great time to catch up on your baseball reading. Do you enjoy good poetry about baseball? At the last Seymour Conference, in May of 2002, I heard Tim Wiles of the Library at the Baseball Hall of Fame and Professor Brooke Horvath of Kent State recite some of the selections from their enjoyable new collection of baseball poetry, Line Drives, 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, published by Southern Illinois University Press. This book is a charming addition to the literature of baseball.

Now there’s a baseball poetry CD on the market, so you can hear good baseball poetry read by the poets themselves. Hen House Studios sent me a copy of “The Los Angeles Bards: Live in Pasadena,” on which I heard nine poets read some of their own baseball poetry. As the label said, they “dive deep into all realms of the baseball world.”

If there were any need to demonstrate the importance of our national game in American life, this set of poems, many of which are autobiographical, do so by showing the way our love for baseball affects all of us as we are growing up. The poems are evidence that, over the years, baseball experiences blend with other aspects of our lives to help form our personalities, our activities, and our goals. Fred Voss, for example, recalls playing “beer ball” when he worked in a factory. “Steve Bilko Taught Me How to Spit” is a poem recited by poet Joan Jobe Smith. Joel Lipman, in “Passing through the Big Leagues,” recounts how as a young man he rescued Joe Pepitone and got him to the ball park after a night of revelry. Philomene Long, in “Marcus Aurelius at a Dodger Game,” imagines how the philosopher would react to watching a ballplayer “in pursuit of the unattainable.”

This CD is a worthy complement to the Seymour book on amateur and semipro ball in America, Baseball: The People’s Game (New York: Oxford University Press), which documents the way we grow up devoted to the game that is our national form of recreation as well as our national spectacle.

The Baseball Reliquary, a nonprofit organization that fosters appreciation of American art and culture through baseball history, sponsored the original poetry readings at Pasadena on August 25, 2002, using a grant it received for the purpose.

- Dorothy Jane Mills - Staff reporter

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