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Triple play — National Baseball Poetry Festival returns to Worcester for third installment
Worcester Magazine
One Saturday night last spring, poets, baseball fans and unsuspecting strangers packed Boland’s Bar and Patio in Worcester for a home run derby of an open mic night during the National Baseball Poetry Festival.
Some had come from Polar Park after an afternoon Worcester Red Sox game, while others arrived from an earlier baseball poetry reading at the Worcester Public Library. Yet others were pleasantly surprised to hear festival organizer, poet, and open mic host Cheryl Bonin announce that a sign-up sheet was open.
“There was a lady who came in with a poem about hot dogs at the ballpark,” Bonin recalled. “One guy jotted out a little poem on a napkin while he was sitting at the bar, then proceeded to ask if he could get up and read it, and he was just there to watch the Bruins game on TV.”
This year, poets will gather once more to pay tribute to the national pastime at the third annual National Baseball Poetry Festival, which will take place over three days on the first weekend in May.
The festival consists of four main poetry events and two Worcester Red Sox games on May 2 and 3, plus plenty of opportunities for poets, some of whom will be traveling hundreds of miles to attend, to socialize and talk shop.
Organizer Tim Loew said the festival has been a natural evolution for Worcester, a city that has produced poets such as Stanley Kunitz and Frank O’Hara, hosted several historic baseball moments, and was the hometown of Ernest Lawrence Thayer, who composed possibly the most famous poem about the sport ever written, “Casey at the Bat” (“There is no joy in Mudville — mighty Casey has struck out”).
“Worcester has a tremendous history and relationship with baseball, and that’s why this festival is here, whether it’s the first perfect game in the history of professional baseball or the many major leaguers who have grown up around here or Ernest Thayer and ‘Casey at the Bat,’” Loew said.
Plenty of joy in Worcester
Each of the festival’s two poetry contests, one for students in grades 4 through 12 and one for adults, saw dozens upon dozens of entries when submissions opened in March, and fans of baseball, poetry or both will get to hear several of the winning poems in both contests read live over the course of the weekend.
Festival founder Stephen Biondolillo said poets from 37 states and four countries submitted their work in the adult contest, while the youth poetry contest garnered entries from nine states.
Sarah Connell Sanders, a media specialist teacher at Burncoat Middle School and frequent Worcester Magazine columnist, played a major role in organizing the youth poetry contest, encouraging her students to enter their poems as part of a unit where she teaches the basics of literary analysis through sports poetry.
“The kids look forward to it now every year, and my hope is that kids, not just in Worcester Public Schools but nationwide, can have it as a shared experience,” Connell Sanders said. “Every fourth grader will have written a baseball poem during their time in a public school in America.”
‘The single sport most entwined with the fine arts’
Biondolillo first began wondering about the possibility of a baseball poetry festival in 2021, when he was leafing through a West Coast poetry magazine and came across a listing for a fishermen’s poetry festival.
“How come there’s no baseball poetry festival, given baseball is the single sport most covered, entwined with the fine arts?” Biondolillo recalled thinking.
Baseball and poetry were two subjects that already meant a lot to Biondolillo. He found sanctuary on the Little League diamond after his father died when he was 6, then again on the high school varsity team at Girard College in Philadelphia.
As he recalled, while he spent his teenage afternoons playing second base, he also paid close attention in English class, where he dove headfirst into writing and learning about poetry, eventually going on to study it at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
It was natural, then, that he would be the one to start the National Baseball Poetry Festival in Worcester, which made its debut in September 2023 after only seven months of planning, then returned for its second edition in May 2024.
Contests, ‘Star Wars,’ and ‘Casey at the Bat’
This year’s celebration begins with a Friday-afternoon reception for poets at Polar Park’s DCU Club on May 2, where famed Washington, D.C. poet E. Ethelbert Miller and NPR sports broadcaster Bill Littlefield will both read. Singers will perform parts of Worcester composer and playwright Stephen Murray’s musical adaptation of “Casey at the Bat.”
After a quick tour of the ballpark, some of the festival’s big-name guests will throw out the first pitch, and the WooSox will play the Toledo Mud Hens, the Detroit Tigers’ AAA affiliate.
The May 2 game will celebrate not only the National Baseball Poetry Festival but also the “Star Wars” movies, and the night will end with the fireworks show that concludes every Friday-night home game at Polar Park — only this time, the bursts of light will be set to the “Star Wars” soundtrack.
Festivities continue on May 3 with a 2 p.m. poetry reading at Polar Park by several entrants in the student poetry contest, for grades 4 through 12. At 4:05 p.m., three of those students will throw out the first pitch before the WooSox and Mud Hens face off again for a late-afternoon game. Fans who stay at Polar after the game can bring a ball and glove onto the field and play catch.
Connell Sanders said over the past three years, she has encouraged her students to write and submit poems for the student poetry contest each time the festival has come around, and every year, she has seen more and more enthusiasm.
“The biggest motivator is that ticket to the game. They all want to come read their poem on the mic at Polar Park and watch a game with their friends and family,” Connell Sanders said. “Worcester Public Schools is so multicultural, and I find the sport of baseball is a great unifier.”
“They all got T-shirts the first year, and they all planned to come to school on Monday after the festival wearing their shirts,” Connell Sanders said. “Now, so many of our students have these T-shirts that I see them in constant rotation around the halls of our school building.”
Stepping up to the mic (or to the plate)
While the WooSox take the field after the youth poetry reading, the Jean McDonough Arts Center, in downtown Worcester at 20 Franklin St., will host a “poet-to-poet” reading from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Poets will be able to read their work in front of peers who both know the craft and share a love for baseball.
“At the poet-to-poet reading last year, we had grown men in their 60s and 70s in full baseball uniforms coming to read their poems. They had batting gloves hanging out of their back pockets,” Biondolillo said. “There were three of them, together. It had a little Halloween aspect to it.”
It all culminates back in the Canal District with a Saturday-night postgame open mic at Electric Haze on Millbury Street, where anyone can sign up to read, whether you’ve studied poetry for years or whether you came up with your first haiku at the ballpark a few hours before.
“I’m excited about having everyone in one location,” Bonin said. “It could be really overwhelming because we could have 60 or 80 people who want to read, but they’re open until 2 a.m., so we might just be pulling an all-nighter.”
Bonin has a mix of older and newer material to read at the open mic, including poems about her father, who recently died, and a humorous piece about having a forbidden, shameful crush on Yankees shortstop Bucky Dent while growing up as a diehard Red Sox fan in the 1970s.
The Electric Haze open mic may also include some covers, so to speak, as Bonin and co-host and fellow Worcester poet Malt Schlitzman have an eye on bringing in history alongside the present.
“There’s been some discussion about reading vintage baseball poetry, going back through the archives and looking for some more historic baseball-themed poems,” Bonin said. “This isn’t a new concept and there’s been a lot of poetry written about baseball, so we were thinking we would each maybe highlight one of those poems as well as our own, and get the old and the new.”
‘That poem stopped me in my tracks’
The featured poems at the past two baseball poetry festivals have both covered a wide variety of topics alongside baseball, ranging from family bonds to growing up to identity to, of course, the Red Sox.
Connell Sanders said many of her female students find baseball to be a symbol of the kind of gender equality that generations of women have fought so hard for, and their entries into the festival’s youth poetry contest often reflect that view.
“I have a lot of girls who talk about wanting to make the baseball team and be the strongest girl on the field. There’s a lot of feminist virtues that come out when my seventh-grade girls talk about getting on the ball field,” Connell Sanders said. “I love the empowerment they feel writing about being strong athletes.”
Biondolillo remembered one of the winning poems in a previous year’s adult poetry contest, about a man who watched the Red Sox finally break their 86-year championship drought in 2004 and drove to the cemetery, feeling he had to deliver the good news to some Red Sox fans who had not lived to see the Curse of the Bambino come to an end.
“People went to the graves of their dead relatives to mourn and celebrate,” Biondolillo said. “That poem stopped me in my tracks as he described the scene. He went thinking he was alone, but there they were, dotted throughout the cemetery, people who had the same idea.”
This year’s festival comes to an official close with a morning of coffee for poets and visitors at the Homewood Suites at 1 Washington Square, but the festival’s organizers are already looking ahead to 2026 and beyond.
“Getting to the third year is often the big test for an event,” Loew said. “We’ve gotten to our third year, it’s grown every year, and I expect it’s going to keep growing every year. Our challenge in future years is going to be what to add to it to make it even more exciting.”
Biondolillo, meanwhile, is thinking back to the past, as well, placing the National Baseball Poetry Festival in the context of thousands of years.
“The ancient Olympics were a sports and arts festival, and we would not know the name of a single ancient Olympic champion if it wasn’t for the poets who wrote about them,” Biondolillo said. “Here we are bringing that back a little bit.”
The National Baseball Poetry Festival
When: May 2-4
Where: Polar Park, 100 Madison St, Worcester, as well as other nearby venues, including the JMAC and Electric Haze
How much: Most events are free, but tickets may be necessary for WooSox games which immediately follow poetry events. For more information, including event locations and tickets, visit baseballpoetryfest.org/schedule.
