Does humor belong in music, poetry, baseball?

Looking over the pieces the Parlando project has presented so far, I think we’re a little over-representing the romantic and the tragic. It’s easy for the page-poet to fall into that kind of thing. After all, there we sit with a mute page and all the time until a piece of paper rots in front of us. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to set down those final things, time to let the future know we have felt the tragic pangs of life.

Oh, and it’s a lot easier to go that route. Say sad things badly, muff the music, grab at the easy statements that this is so hard—no matter—we’re overcome with tragedy and within our just-past-real visions. Such imprecision is to be forgiven, even expected. After all, we suffered for our art, now it’s your turn.

That’s something live spoken-word poetry balances better than page-poets I think. In any case, page-poets and critics favorable to them, will make that case for me while marking down live spoken-word poetry as relying too much on humor; but when you have an audience in front of you the need to entertain, to connect, to make it worth their while, is hard to escape.

So as baseball fans look forward to the start of the World Series this week, we present this piece about Yogi Berra who participated in 21 World Series, meaning that the man was in almost a fifth of all Word Series ever played since 1903. As time passes, fewer remember him as one of the greatest baseball players of all time, a deadly serious student of the game, yet his rhetorical gift for humorously expressing the quantum state in many a duality lives on, and that’s what this piece celebrates.

The voice and author of Yogi Berra is Dave Moore. Musically, the LYL Band just lets it rip and avoids making any wrong mistakes or playing harmonica. To hear it, click on the gadget that should appear just below.