HOBOKEN – Baseball is part of the very fabric of Hoboken. After all, the first game by Alexander Cartwright’s and “Doc” Adams’ modern rules was played in 1846 at Elysian Fields, just yards from where the Hoboken Historical Museum stands today. Maria Pepe, the first girl to play in a Little League game, played here in Hoboken. The national pastime is still alive and well in this city, which has its own vintage baseball club and close access to major league teams in New York and Philadelphia.
To celebrate, the museum’s Poet in Residence Danny Shot has assembled an all-star cast of poets, each with a unique perspective on the game of baseball, for “Batter Up! The Poetry of Baseball,” on Saturday, Oct. 15, at 3 p.m. All are welcome, and a $7 donation is suggested.
This two-hour public event will feature eight contemporary poets and writers reading a selection of their own work. Among the notable writers taking part this year are Quincy Troupe, Ed Charles, Elinor Nauen, Frank Messina, Mikhail Horowitz, Nick Acocella, and Danny Shot.
Actors from the Mile Square Theatre will also read a short play by Ellen Margolis from the theater’s annual 7th Inning Stretch.
The writers
Born in St. Louis, Mo., Quincy Troupe is an award-winning author of 10 volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works.
Ed Charles was the oldest of the “Miracle Mets” of 1969 at age 36. He was originally signed by the Boston Braves in 1952, where he played in the Braves’ farm system in the segregated Deep South for eight years, which inspired him to write poetry on the subjects of baseball and racism.
Elinor Nauen edited “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball.” Her writings on baseball have appeared in The Minneapolis Review of Baseball, Fan, the National Endowment for the Humanities magazine, and many other magazines and anthologies.
Frank Messina is known by sports fans as The Mets Poet. He’s the author of four books of poetry including “Full Count: The Book of Mets Poetry,” and “Disorderly Conduct.” He’s also a film and stage actor and has appeared in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, The Transfiguration, and 86 Mets: the Movie. He lives in Jersey City.
Mikhail Horowitz is the perpetrator of “Big League Poets,” the only (quasi) baseball book ever published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights press. He was a contributor to the seventh edition of Total Baseball (the official baseball encyclopedia) and a former contributing editor to Elysian Fields Quarterly, a literary journal devoted in its entirety to the national pastime.
Nick Acocella has co-authored a dozen or so books about baseball and currently publishes PolitiFax New Jersey, an electronic newsletter about politics in the Garden State. He has lived in Hoboken since 1992.
Ellen Margolis wrote the 10-minute play “A Little Chatter” for the Mile Square Theatre’s 5th Annual “7th Inning Stretch” in 2007. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Dramatic Art. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a professor and chair of Theatre & Dance at Pacific University.=
Mile Square Theatre is a leading Northern New Jersey regional theatre, located at 1400 Clinton Street at 14th Street in Hoboken. Its mission is to produce contemporary and classical works, while advancing theatre arts education for adults and children. Since 2003, MST has commissioned playwrights to write short works about America’s favorite pastime for its series, The 7th Inning Stretch, resulting in 54 plays finding their way onto stages across America, and many published by Playscripts, Inc.