Interview with Sandra Marchetti

By Lora Keller

Sandra Marchetti won The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year with her book Aisle 228 which features poems like “Listening for Bob Uecker” and “Pete Rose and Ichiro Meet in Baseball Heaven or at a Card Show.” As mentioned in the introduction, we met through WFOP connector, Esteban Colon. She seemed like a natural to interview for this Bramble issue since she’s a sports aficionado and an educator as well as a gifted poet.

(LK): What do you say to people who categorize sports as not in the art realm?

(SM): They’re missing out on one of the great metaphors. Sport explains life, it stands in for life, helps us discover meaning and facets of life we wouldn’t otherwise explore. Artists who ignore the rich topic of sport strike me as close minded.

(LK): What kind of sports fan are you? A screamer? A stoic?

(SM): I’m a talker. Sitting quiet is tough for me. In the really intense moments, I like to get up and stand in front of the tv, way too close. I have been known to yell at the tv, and my husband hates it! But, overall I love to talk through strategy and discuss what a player or coach should/shouldn’t do in a situation, etc.

(LK): As a child you watched baseball while playing with your Barbie doll. Tell us more!

(SM): That’s true. I lived in a pretty small house as a kid, and was an only child. When my mom went to her part-time job at night, I’d sit with my father in our “toyroom” (the TV room) and we’d watch baseball and I’d play with my dolls. I was blessed to have tons of Barbies and loved to comb their hair and change their clothes. My dad enjoyed it too! Barbie watched with us. Even today, some of my dolls are right next to my baseball caps and pennants in my writing room and whenever I give video interviews you can see both in my background.

(LK): What is your favorite sports poem?

(SM): I could name dozens, but I’ll go with one that folks may be less aware of. Jason Koo’s “Bon Chul Koo and the Hall of Fame” by Jason Koo. This is the sort of Cooperstown experience I could imagine having with my own father. The imagery is so crisp and lifelike—it’s a narrative poem but so beautifully written it feels like a lyric.

(LK): You said that Milwaukee Brewers’ announcer Bob Uecker inspired your rhythms. Can you tell us more?

(SM): In my book Aisle 228, I have a few poems about Ueck and of course I was so sad to hear of his passing at 91 this past offseason. What I am so glad for is that he got to do what he loved until the end, and he was able to celebrate up until the end. As someone from Chicagoland, I’ve listened to many a Brewers game on the radio for the past few decades, and I’m going to miss him. A few things about his tone and cadence influenced me—his classic “and the pitch…” line, but also his stories—of course! I wrote a poem about a story he told about fishing out on a boat with Jonathan Lucroy while advertising his bobblehead day. He was a whiz in that he could even make ads into stories that you wanted to hear. Here’s another Uecker poem I wrote.

(LK): How was writing your last book about baseball different from writing your most recent book about a woman’s hunger?

(SM): Well, as I’ve been talking about and reading from both DIORAMA and Aisle 228 lately, I’ve realized what they have in common—they both explore my love of Chicagoland and the Midwest. They both explore our built and natural environment. I wrote them on parallel tracks—both over the same 10-year stretch, as well. I’m not used to having dueling projects, but each helped the other along. When I wasn’t writing baseball, I was still able to feel like I was making progress on something else of value.

(LK): Poetry is classified as non-fiction. To counter that categorization, you said poets lie, too. What’s one of your biggest lies?

(SM): Poetry books don’t have “plots” like novels do, but they do need a narrative arc most of the time to keep a reader interested. Poets like to separate the author from the speaker of their poems, and that’s something I do. Oftentimes the speaker will do things in a book that I would never do myself. I’ve also arranged poems in a certain order to present the speaker as doing something salacious or wild that I might not do in my personal life. Smoke and mirrors!

(LK): Who encouraged you as a writer when you were young?

(SM): My teachers in elementary school were effusive in their praise for my writing. In graduate school, I was not a “favorite” in my MFA program, but sending to journals and telling them I was just starting out publishing helped me to gain some feedback from editors. And, winning a chapbook prize a few years before my first full-length came out was crucial to keep me going.

(LK): What’s something you saw or read recently that radically opened your mind?

(SM): Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” If you’re a writer looking to sharpen your observational skills and your image-crafting using all five senses, read that book slowly.

(LK): It seems like your poems are informed by a lot of research. Do you research first or research as you go or…?

(SM): I write first. Drafting is the hardest part of the writing process for me. I’m currently writing a couple of long form feature articles (one on baseball and one on figure skating) and I needed to do a good bit of fact checking for both. But, getting the draft out is crucial. Fortunately, I try to stick to subjects I know something about before I start. Also, I think envisioning the work before you start writing can help your brain begin to think about the subject beforehand. It’s kind of like when you buy a car and then start seeing people driving that car all over the roads.

(LK): What’s one thing poets can do to improve their poems immediately?

(SM): Sit with the poem. Revise. Revise more. Try different things like reordering lines, re-writing it in prose, translating to another language. Don’t write it and think it’s done immediately. Put it away for six days, six months. See how much better you can make it. It's usually something new writers struggle with or don't want to do, but for me it's the most fun part! I think of it as playing with Legos or toys and getting immersed in language and all of the gooey bits of it. It's a dance, a game, etc.

Sandra Marchetti is the 2023 winner of The Twin Bill Book Prize for Best Baseball Poetry Book of the Year. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, DIORAMA, forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press (2025), Aisle 228 (SFA Press, 2023), and Confluence (Sundress Publications, 2015). Sandy is also the author of four chapbooks of poetry and lyric essays. Her poetry and essays appear widely in Mid-American Review, Blackbird, Ecotone, Southwest Review, Subtropics, and elsewhere. She is Poetry Editor Emerita at River Styx Magazine. Sandy earned an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from George Mason University and now serves as the Assistant Director of Academic Support at Harper College in Chicagoland. You can find out more on her website.