Edward J. Rielly 1943

Born December 22, 1943, in Darlington, Wisconsin, Edward J. Rielly grew up on a farm where he spent many hours playing baseball against an old red barn. He played softball during recess at his one-room country school, collected thousands of baseball cards (which he still has), and was on his high school baseball team. His favorite team was (and still is) the Chicago White Sox, and his all-time favorite player is Nellie Fox. He still remembers his father coming in from milking and sitting down beside the radio to listen to the White Sox or Milwaukee Braves games until he would doze off, usually around the seventh inning.

Rielly got his BA at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, and his MA and PhD from Notre Dame. He moved to Maine in 1978. He now chairs the English Department at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, from which he recently received a faculty fellowship. He has published two books on baseball and American culture, is doing a related book on football, and has written a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He has published many baseball haiku and other baseball poems. His “entry into haiku” was a result of his reading the haiku of his creative-writing professor at Loras, Father Raymond Roseliep, one of America’s early haiku masters.

Rielly has lectured at the National Baseball Hall of Fame on the relationship between baseball and haiku. His paper “Baseball Haiku: Bash, the Babe, and the Great Japanese-American Trade,” is a seminal essay in English on the subject. Among his nine chapbooks of poetry are five collections of haiku.

 

 

the boy not chosen

steps over home plate,

picks up his books

 

 

spring melt…

a baseball rises

beneath the forsythia

home run drive

into the cornfield—

fielder and girlfriend disappear

autumn wind

rain blowing into

the young catcher’s face mask

 

 

April shower

the obituary leads me

to an old baseball card