Cosmic Baseball Association  How does it feel to be back in a cosmic baseball uniform?

Anne Sexton  Well, you know, it's just as exciting now as when I was a player, although the stress of baseball field management seems greater...I don't remember being this anxious as a player.

CBA   You had difficulty functioning as a mother of two young daughters. Are you concerned that managing intelligent strong-willed women will be too much for you to handle.

AS   That's a fair question and it's one that [Vestal Virgins team owner] Ms. [Yoko] Ono asked me right after she bought the team. I think I've resolved some of the issues that tormented me as a parent. I'm sure deep down in the dark drawers of my soul there are still issues frothing and churning about. But I think I can handle the players on this team. Also, the medication I take helps.

CBA  It must be nice to be reunited with your friend [Vestal Virgin starting pitcher] Sylvia Plath.

AS  Oh yes. Of course our relationship precedes our time playing cosmic baseball together.

CBA   The two of you originally met in 1958 when you were both in Robert Lowell's poetry class at Boston University, right?

AS  Right. We both shared a mutual obsession with death, so it was natural that the two of us would be drawn to poetry and each other.

CBA  Sylvia went 10-11 last year with an excellent ERA of 3.33 but she pitched 249 innings, are you worried her arm will collapse.

AS  I'm concerned. I told Sylvia that I wanted to reduce the overall number of innings she pitched this year. She's got to think long-term. She's such a competitor she never misses a start.

CBA  Anne, if you had to sum up in a few words the major themes of your poetry what would you say?

AS  Oh my, that's difficult. My work is about religious quest, transformation and dismantling of myth, the meanings of gender, inheritance and legacy, the search for fathers, mother-daughter relationships, sexual anxiety, madness and suicide, issues of female identity. Things like that.

CBA  For obvious reasons, you have never commented publicly on the controversy surrounding the publication of Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of you. You are aware of that controversy, yes, where your psychiatrists files detailing aspects of your psychotherapy were made available to Middlebrook?

AS   You know I don't want to get into that in any detail. Middlebrook quoted Voltaire when discussing her reaction to the controversy, "We must respect the living, but only truth is good enough for the dead." I'll let it stand there.

CBA  Thanks for your time, Anne. And good luck this season.

AS  Thanks. I enjoyed talking with you.

Other Field Manager Interviews

• William Allingham
• Kurt Cobain
• John Lennon
• Ayn Rand

Cyd Charisse is a second year starting pitcher for the Pisces. Charisse made a name for herself with her beautiful legs and dancing abilities. She was Gene Kelly's dance partner in the famous dancing scene from the movie Singin' in the Rain. Charisse, now in her seventies, was during the 1950s adored for both her dancing talent and her sexual appeal

Robert Bork is widely known as the U.S. Supreme Court nominee who got rejected for a seat on the bench because liberals thought he was too far right. The concept of "borking", to reject someone on purely ideological grounds, originated with him. Bork is also a second-year pitcher who came into his own during the 1999 Cosmic Universal Series.

Wyatt Earp, legendary lawman and gunslinger rounds out this group of second-year Pisces pitchers. Earp achieved fame (or infamy) at the shootout near the OK Corral in Tombstone in 1881. The forces of good and evil met on an overcast October afternoon but who was good and who was evil isn't all that crystal clear. Despite his often violent life-style, Earp ended up passing on peacefully in 1929 in a rented cottage near Hollywood.

Want to know more?

We looked at four above-average Beat-related sites on the Internet. We used a triad rating scale to determine the overall rating for each site. Values between 1 (worst) and 10 (best) were assigned to each of three categories: Content- How much original content is available at the site and how well-written and edited is the content. Design- How does the site look and how intuitive and/or interesting is it to navigate through the site. Linkability- How many and how useful are the external hyperlinks to other related sites.

Literary Kicks
By now this is the grandaddy-o of Beat Generation sites. Levi Asher put the site up on June 23, 1994 making it probably the oldest Beat site on the World Wide Web. In an interview almost two years ago Levi said the site was receiving between 4000-6000 hits per day. The strong point of Literary Kicks is its content and the easy-going clear writing style of Asher. We rate it a 9 for content. It is not a glitzy site and it doesn't make use of frames or other fancy web design features. It rates only a 4 on our graphic design scale. The site includes only a handful of external links so we give it only a 3 for link usefulness. But for the individual new to the study of the Beat Generation this is one of the best places on the Internet to get started. Overall rating: 8

Beat Generation Archives
Webmaster Colin Pringle put this site up in 1995. It includes over 40 links to related Beat sites. There are several special pages worth checking out like the review of the Herbert Huncke Reader. This is a good site to find other links and we give it an 8 for linkability. It doesn't shine graphically, we rate it a 3 for design. While there isn't much original content at this site what there is is interesting and well written so we give it a 6 for content. Overall rating: 7

Beat Generation Resources
We aren't sure how long webmaster Marcus Williamson has had this site on the Internet but we first saw it about two years ago. With each visit the site gets better. There are up to date "News" and "Events" sections and a variety of links to different types of Beat sites. For example there is a section with links to "Chronologies" and "Bibliographies." There are 26 links to webpages about specific Beat personalities (16 of these take you to Literary Kicks, see above.) There are links to Beat-related newsgroups (but not mailing lists) and links to publishers and booksellers who specialize in Beat publications, videos and films. There isn't very much original content, we gave the site a 3 in this category. The design isn't spectacular but it is practical and fairly well organized; we rated this site a 5 for design. The site, as it's name suggests, is very useful as a source of access to other Internet Beat information; we gave this site an 8 for linkability. Overall rating: 7

Beat Generation News
Mary Sands is fast developing one of the best Beat sites on the Internet. Her site includes dozens of up-to-date links to other resources and current news of interest to Beat fans. She has also created some excellent original content including the wonderful Kerouac Diner Menu page. She solicits work from others in the Beat community, such as the respected Kerouac scholar Dave Moore and Beat wise-man Adrien Begrand who have contributed well-written book reviews. The site is well-designed using frames and menus and is kept up to date. For design we rate this site an 8. For content we rate this site an 8 and for linkability we rate this site an 8. Overall rating: 8

The Presidents have faltered in the last three years failing to break .500 in the win column. The team also had to weather the "Clinton controversy". (Starting pitcher Bill Clinton was suspended for the 1999 season because of the Oral Sex Scandal in the Whitehouse.)

Many were hoping the beloved Franklin would last one more year before retiring but owner George Washington and his wife, Martha, the team's General Manager decided not to wait.

Hancock, 31 years younger than his predecessor is a wealthy merchant from Boston. He is most noted these days for his right-handed holographic signature displayed prominently on the Constitution. He served as a president of the Continental Congress (1775) and was a longtime governor of Massachusetts (1780-1785; 1787-1793). The Presidents' management team will be busy this season as they evaluate the candidates for the next rookie position opening in 2001.

Yoko Ono was born February 18, 1933 in Tokyo. She came to the United States as a teenager, attended high school in Scarsdale, New York and attended college at Sarah Lawrence. In the early 1960s she became involved with the avant-garde Fluxus art movement in New York City. She burst upon international consciousness in 1969 when she married Beatle John Lennon (Lennon manages the Psychedelphia Woodstockings, CBA's Middleleague team of 1960s personalities).

Ono joined the Cosmic Baseball Association in 1995 when the Vestal Virgins drafted her as an infielder. In four seasons she produced a .260 batting average and was considered an above average utility thirdbasewoman. The Virgins deactivated her after the 1998 season. As a cosmic player Ono brought a distinctively feminist perspective to the field, sometimes alienating team mates but more often rallying them to defeat the more masculine teams in the Overleague like the Wonderland Warriors and Dharma Beats.

In a 1999 interview Ono reflected on her feminism: "On the level of society it is important to be equal, but otherwise I wouldn't want to be a man. Simply because women are more intelligent than men. We have to be more intelligent because we create human beings and take care of them." It is likely that Ono will bring her provocative style to bear as the team's owner. How she balances the masculine quality of competitiveness with her feminist orientation in the running of the team will be interesting to observe.