If you can hustle down to the National Arts Club by 8 PM tonight (May 22, 2007), you can participate in a Celebration of Haiku & Baseball with Billy Collins. Here’s how the NAC Events Calendar describes tonight’s presentation:
Reading & Booksigning
Former poet laureate of the United States and bestselling author Billy Collins will read from and talk about his recent book of haiku, She Was Just Seventeen. Former president of the Haiku Society of America, Cor van den Heuvel, will then read and discuss haiku from his new book Baseball Haiku (co-edited with Nanae Tamura), and three of the featured poets in the book—Alan Pizzarelli, Ed Markowski, and Brenda Gannam—will read their baseball haiku
We’ve been sharing poems from Baseball Haiku (Cor van den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura, eds., W.W. Norton Press, April 1, 2007) over the past couple of months (see here, there, here). f/k/a is proud to have so many of its Honored Guests featured in a volume of “The best haiku ever written about the game.” We’re especially proud that over 20 of the 200 poems were penned by “our own” Ed Markowski. dagosan and haikuEsq would love to be at NAC this evening to hear Ed read a selection of his poetry. Here are a few:
April rain
my grandson practices
his infield chatter
late innings 
the shortstop backpedals
into fireflies
bases loaded
the rookie pitcher
blows a bubble
spring training . . .
flamingoes graze
on the mansion lawn
winter reverie
the faint scent of bubblegum
on an old baseball card
……………………. by ed markowski
larger: haiga, MagnaPoets, April 11, 2007
sacrifice fly —
markowski’s
on third
poem: David Giacalone
photo: Mama G.
squinting to see him —another generationsent to right field
……….. by David Giacalone, Baseball Haiku & Roadrunner Haiku Journal (V:4, Nov. 2005)
update (May 23, 2007): The newest edition of Simply Haiku (Vol. 5:2, Summer 2007) has a review of Baseball Haiku, by professor of English, and poet-editor Johnye Strickland. The same issue features the baseball senryu of Cor van den Heuvel, with 7 poems from Baseball Haiku.