A Handpicked Poem
by Michael Todd Steffen
The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’
Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World
The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.
After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,
Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.
The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:
Ring around the rosies,
Pocket full of posies,
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.
Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:
His father was an immigrant from Calabria.
These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.
Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.
When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—
Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.
Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.
Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.
At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.
He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…
That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.
The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…
The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.
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