Bill Kauffman’s Regionalist column is up at First Principles. The subject is, appropriately enough, baseball:

“April hath come on,” as Nathaniel P. Willis began his best poem. ’Tis the month of violets and baseball, and so I must tell you about last summer’s Baseball Poetry Night, or what I like to call Shoving Culture Down Fans’ Throats Night, at Batavia’s venerable Dwyer Stadium. Team President Brian Paris, a veritable one-man Chautauqua of self-improvement, and I misconceived the idea; with the declamatory assistance of my daughter Gretel and Holland Land Office director Pat Weissend, Brian and I filled the between-innings air of the August 17 game between the Class A Batavia Muckdogs and the Auburn Doubledays with recitations of odes to the American Game by Charles Bukowski, Grantland Rice, the Beat poet Tom Clark, and other bards of the ball field. It went over as disastrously as you’d expect. My Batavia, God bless her, is poetical enough in my imagination, but as for poetry appreciation . . . well, let’s just say that when Brian asked the fans, “Do you want another poem or a song?” the shouts of “Song!” rivaled the New Testament crowd’s cry of “Free Barabbas!”