Dan Quisenberry, the poet
By Allan R. Andrews
American Reporter Correspondent
WASHINGTON - Dan Quisenberry and I met on the Internet. I initiated our e-mail exchange because I wanted to interview him as a poet not as a pitcher.
The former all-star pitcher for the Kansas City Royals died yesterday at age 45. He had been battling a brain tumor since it was diagnosed last December.
In late 1996, I came across a poem called "The Bomb" in the somewhat obscure academic journal called Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, written by Dan Quisenberry. A contributors' note cited Quisenberry's 16-year baseball career and added, "He now plays with two teenagers, words, dogs, mountains, and golf clubs."
With the help of a local poetry society in Kansas City, I tracked down Quisenberry's e-mail address. It was August when he agreed to be interviewed by e-mail after I asked him some introductory questions about his life and career. A second exchange brought his answers to a baker's dozen of my questions about poetry and writing.
It was my intention to follow up with more questions, but the press of life and work got in the way. I went back to my notes every spring when baseball season began hoping I could find a news peg that would allow me to finish my interview and get Quisenberry the poet in front of readers.
In January of 1998 I read of his medical problem and put my project on the back burner, sending him one last message bidding him prayerful peace. It's time to share his answers to my questions.
Because I was working for a military audience, I asked him if he'd ever been in the military.
"No," he wrote. "Just wanted to play ball. Vietnam looked too scary, scarier than throwing Dave Winfield fastballs outside."
After retiring from baseball, Quisenberry toyed with the idea of buying a business, but said he "discovered I like writing more." He took courses and played at writing fiction but found himself attracted to poetry. Then he told me to "fire away" with my questions about poetry and writing.
That was how we met via e-mail. Here's what he told me about himself as a poet. Quisenberry remembered only scribbling "jests" while in college, though he said his wife "has received poems from me almost since we met."
He did not write poems while he was playing with the Royals, "But now that I have written some," he reflected, "I think I thought poems then, just didn't know it at the time. But I loved words, did, do, and what they mean and don't mean."
I asked him to expand on his attraction to poetry. "Loving words," he said. "Word lovers write, talk a lot or at least read a lot. Me, I read a lot, then talked a lot, now attempting to write (but not a lot yet).
"I write poetry because it seems to say what I cannot in other ways. I try to get too funny in person. I can't stay on course in a story or essay. A poem gets to the core. Usually happens fast. A quick swim in cold water, a few strokes, a peek to see what's down there and then lurking out the other side.
"The attraction is voice, soul, something that stops the mind to focus on what is said. It helps me to hear it out loud; it's hard to slow down enough to listen, as well as write. My rpms run too fast most of the time to hear a poem inside. It takes slowing to look, listen, quiet enough to gather and understand these words that carry power. Almost mystical."
Quisenberry called himself a scanner of poetry more than a reader. He said his favorite poets included William Stafford; Rumi, an Islamic mystic; Robert Bly; Lucille Clifton; Carolyn Forche; Adrienne Rich; Gary Snyder; Pablo Neruda.
He confessed to not having read Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson. He said he intended to read James Merrill because he'd heard that Merrill "is supposed to be very good." He said he liked to hear local Kansas City poets rather than read them.
Taking writing courses and poetry workshops led him to reading his poems in libraries, churches and coffeehouses around Kansas City. He talked about the places he'd published poems and said he considered any thought of self-publishing as a kind of "cheating, throwing spitters, telling all that I am a poet."
About his work, he concluded, "I'm just trying to get better and hope whoever reads it likes it; knows, feels something."
With clear assessment, he admitted his being a baseball player got him attention as a poet, but "a poetry journal won't take me a second time just for the novelty of it."
I asked him if there was any relationship or metaphor in his poetry to match his side-arm style of pitching.
"To try to mix pitching and poetry is a stretch for me. In pitching, I was trying to win, beat the guy with the bat, do the team run-for-the-pennant thing. So much of that was physical; drive, win, beat, go. In poetry, I don't feel the competition; it isn't competition. It's mining, sifting, creative contemplation, more like swimming underwater and looking at stuff one doesn't see on the surface."
Concerning active athletes as writers, Quisenberry turned analytic. "In sports, it's difficult for the player-athlete to open up to what's going on inside; it means to say sometimes 'I'm scared, doubting, lost.' We were coached, taught, pushed to go on no matter what. That means to avoid, deny, push away all that gets in the way of the performance. To focus on being, doing well, one has to block what the fans are yelling, what the opposing dugout is doing, the moth over the bill of the cap, the heat, cold, the general manager. The creative writing on sports is written by the observer, rarely the active participant."
He noted that most sports books are written "as told to." His only guess as to why sports generate so much literature was, "it triggers this little kid in us that says we can do anything, play anything, I guess."
If he had it to do over again, Quisenberry said, he would have pitched armed with a journal, writing stuff "as it happened" recording "knowledge from the belly of the whale."
Comparing writing to athletics, Quisenberry said, "Both take practice, lots of practice." The very best players he knew, he said, were good at practicing.
"In practicing," he wrote, "new stuff seems to happen. Maybe not great poems or novels, but sometimes just a fun sentence or an insight I didn't know I knew."
I told him I'd observed that poets often tend to be reflective, even religious, persons with some kind of commitment to searching for spiritual truth. To that he responded, "A poem can tell about the unexplainable. It is spiritual, not in a Nirvana sense, but in a following sense. One feels inspired by poems, or a thought that leads to a poem.
"I like God poetry, even if it questions the church, the pope, or scripture. The questions lead home eventually. Searching for the truth does too. Faith is at the heart of this stuff, or the search for truth is. The presence in the poem is."
Quisenberry was just embarking on a poetry career when a brain tumor curtailed it. His poems can be found in several literary journals and in a chapbook called "Down and In," published by Helicon Nine Editions in Kansas City.
The last lines from "Down and In," part of a poem called "Baseball Cards," summarize much of what needs to be said about Quisenberry the poet:
I look back
At who I thought I was
Or used to be
Now, trying to be funny
I tell folks
I used to be famous
I used to be good
They say
We thought you were bigger
I say
I was
The Kansas City Star has posted a memorial site to Quisenberry, devoted mostly to his baseball career but with key links to his writings and to interviews with him. I'm not certain how long they'll keep it posted, but it's worth a visit.
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