by Sean Prentiss
Sean Prentiss interviewed Jack Ridl on March 4, 2010, at Margaritas Mexican Restaurant in Holland, Michigan. Jack Ridl (pronounced Riddle) is a retired professor at Hope College in that town. Jack’s father, Buzz Ridl, was the University of Pittsburgh basketball coach from 1968 –1975. Jack’s newest book of poetry, Losing Season, is a chronological narrative of a basketball season in small town America. Jack also has another book of poetry Broken Symmetry published by Wayne State University Press to go along with three chapbooks. Sean Prentiss is assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.
SP: How did you become a writer? How did you go from being a coach’s son to a poet?
JR: Looking backward from my current age, I see that I would have been an artist of some kind even had I not been a coach’s son. My father, without pressure, taught me how to be an athlete. But I didn’t have much skill. I became an athlete through determination and an act of imagination. I had to do that to survive the expectations of most everybody. I had to pretend to be great. Developing a life of imagination was occurring all the time. It was how I got through things. I know I daydreamed all the time. I remember my father saying, “Get back here,” meaning, “Get back to the real world.” It was never mean-spirited. My wife, if she were here, would say I’ve always been this way.
SP: What athletes or coaches influenced you as a writer?
JR: I’ll start with my father because he was incredibly inventive. For example almost every coach in the game today would know about the offenses and defenses he invented, whether or not they knew he pretty much invented them. My dad was doing the motion offense back in the late ’50s. He just thought, “What if I have everyone move?” He created the amoeba defense, now called a match up, that so many teams now use. The idea he had was not a zone or man-to-man but to guard or fill passing lanes. The year he died, he taught John Calipari that defense.
But why he was influential to me as a poet was because he cared about the game, not what the game would lead him to. So I care about the poem rather than where the poem will take me. And my dad taught me how to respond versus impose. So when players came to play for my dad, he looked at their strengths and worked with those strengths. That’s so valuable as a teacher and a writer. It’s very William Stafford-y. You let the material come in and work with it rather than imposing your will on the material.
The player who influenced me was Oscar Robertson. I would pretend I was him all the time. What was influential about Robertson was that he mastered everything about the game. He wasn’t just a shooter or a point guard. And then he could respond like a jazz musician. You could tell this was a guy who respected the game and learned everything. To me, every part matters. The line breaks, whatnot, they all matter in a poem. It’s not one thing, it’s all the parts.
SP: Can you talk about why you wanted to explore America’s obsession with sports?
JR: What little American town doesn’t have a team? Sports just seem to be so central. On news channels, there is news, sports, then weather. The big three. My father didn’t understand the obsession. He loved the game but didn’t understand the energy that goes into being a fan. He once said, “I love the game. I just don’t understand why all these people are here.”
Also, where else can we go that allows us to laugh, cry, yell, boo? Rock concerts. I wish poetry readings would be like concerts. Everyone just sits there and assesses poetry. Where else can this natural part of who I am have a place to express who I am?
SP: Can you talk about the similarities and differences between sports and writing?
JR: One thing that is really really important is loving to practice. I loved practice. I did theater, and I loved rehearsal. You try this and you try that. I was always experimenting. I was always wondering if I could do this or do that. That experimentation enabled me to write without feeling defensive. It was always, “Let’s see what happens if I change.”
The second thing was learning to live without knowing the outcome. An athlete needs to accept this. Athletes always talk about the next game. So you learn that you never know what is going to happen. The poet Paul Zimmer told me, “You never learn to write poetry. You must learn to write the next poem.” What the next one asks of you, you don’t know. So for me, that lack of knowing is a place I’m very used to. I sit down to write having no idea what will show up. And if it is lousy, I never worry. I go on to the next one. It’s like losing a game. Time to go on to the next one. After that it’s all those buzz words. Just do it. Discipline. Hard work. But this kind of hard work is more play. Basketball players know this.
I also just like it. I am really grateful for the fact that something happens in the doing, in the writing, that is separate from depending on success. You can win the game and score 40 points, but what happens when you’re playing the game? Whether you win or lose, what happens during the game? That time you’re spending in the game is so enriching.
When our daughter was very little, she asked, “What is art?” We said art is a place, a safe place to be yourself. I always wanted students to think about what happened when they are writing. The monks say, “We’re in prayer.” I like being in prayer.
SP: I’m thinking about sports movies and how so many sports movies are overly sentimental. Yet I know you promote sappiness and sentimentality in your poems. Why?
JR: Well, my friend Mary Ruefle wrote an essay about sentimentality and how the word “sentimentality” has “sentiment” and “mentality” in it. I like that idea. I’m just trying to be sort of Zen-y with that word. Though I don’t think sentimentality is the right word. I just wish we had appropriated the word for what we want it to mean. I don’t want overly emotional. I don’t want anything to do with that. So I don’t know what the word is for not telling the reader to feel but instead inviting them to feel. Showing the reader emotion, that’s not what we should be afraid of now. It’s dishonest emotion that I hate.
When I was teaching, my students would tell the class, “Sorry this is cheesy.” They didn’t understand the difference between tender and cheesy. My daughter said, “I’m worried about being cheesy.” I said, “You can’t be cheesy if you are yourself.” When a poem fails with sentimentality to me, it’s because I tell the reader what to feel.
“Dare the sentimental,” said Richard Hugo. If you pull back so far what have you got? Dead wood.
SP: A review said that Losing Season “is a book that can bring people into poetry.” Can you talk about this? About if you were hoping to bring people into poetry?
JR: I wasn’t trying to bring people to poetry. Now, I think this is going to sound cutesy, but I wanted to bring these poems to people not the people to poetry. By writing this book, I get a chance to give people something that has been taken from them—poetry. School is often the last train station for people. If they don’t get poetry when they are in school, they might never get it. I’d rather have them love the worst poem than take it away from them. I hold out hope that what we do enriches people’s lives. So these poems were like that. I wanted to give them to people who might be at the last train station.
And one of the things that writing does is show a culture. Poetry in general hasn’t really looked at one of the central parts of this culture—sports. It’s looked at politics, religion, the arts, education. It writes about just about anything else. Sports, uh-uh. So I thought, it’s only right to do. Then I felt permission to write about sports because Thoreau writes about beans. Melville writes about whales. Poe writes about a bird. American literature is really strange.
SP: This book has a sustained narrative, a beginning, middle, and end. What were the challenges and the rewards to working with a chronological narrative in a book of poetry?
JR: Well, that was not a challenge at first because I didn’t realize it was happening. Then I noticed it and said, “Oh my god. There might be a narrative.” Later I thought, “Can I try to have the narrative not be there? What if I create a series of poems in such a way that the reader goes, ‘Is this a novel in poems?’ and then thinks, ‘No, I’m making it up.’” Could I create this book of poetry in such a way that the reader turns this into a novel? It seems as if that did happen.
Once I realized this book could be novelistic, I had to search through and make sure I didn’t manipulate anything. What I expected was a response where people say, “This is more like Spoon River, the book by Edgar Lee Masters.” I thought they would see this as a documentary of a town. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted them to see this book as a novel, so I’m glad you did.
SP: Along with my last question, was it hard to construct a book that had to have each poem stand on its own while also working as a whole?
JR: I did write them to stand alone. Paul Zimmer said to me, “Never write a poem that can’t stand alone.” Richard Jones at Poetry East wouldn’t know a basketball from a kumquat, (don’t tell Richard I said that!) but he took a bunch of these basketball poems and published them. So I figured they were working on their own, even outside of sports. So I really tried to make them so they’d stand alone. So someone can say about each poem, “Yeah I can experience that” and not need the whole book.
The Gym, January
Ice hangs from the roof.
Inside, the great furnace
huffs the heat up into
the bleachers. The cement
hallways shine. The glass
in the trophy case shines.
The trophies shine. In
the locker room, each scarred
locker stands solid against
the concrete block walls,
the benches steady in front.
Against one wall, the blackboard,
chalk and an oily rag sitting
in its trough. In the corner,
a water fountain. One door
opens outside, another
to the court. The gym floor
glistens. The blue W in the center
circle glistens. Above it all,
the scoreboard. Outside,
the temperature stays below zero.
SP: What made you decide to have this be a losing season? Why not a successful season? Why not a championship season?
JR: Because that’s what you come to know best as a coach’s kid. You know the consequences of losing. Winning is just the absence of losing. For my sister and me, our fears were all about what happens when you lose. The barber scares you about your old man. I remember being eight-years-old and getting a haircut. The barber has his scissors in his hand and asks, “Why didn’t your dad play Doran?”
I always wanted other parents in the town’s eye like my dad was. I wanted newspaper headlines like, “Buick dealer blows sale at the end of the day” or “You call that a root canal?” for the dentist.
Being a coach’s son was just too hard on us as kids. It was an exciting world, but I don’t know how many people know how awful it is. My father always said, “It’s my world. Don’t let it bother you.” That’s not something as a child you can handle. Blood stuff. It’s tough. Tough stuff.
SP: This book has a very ethereal feel. There are all these quiet moments with snow falling and empty hallways and sad lives and desperate hopes. Can you talk about that mood?
JR: Hearing you call this book “ethereal” means the world to me. You being along with me in these poems, that makes me so happy.
The book opens with Coach at age fifty realizing what he can’t do anymore—hit his free throw shots anymore, hit the jump shot. So he steps outside of time and pulls weeds. The book opens with that word, but spelled t-h-y-m-e. In the first poem in the book. Coach “gets up, goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball, stops and pulls some weeds growing through the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.”
And Scrub is forever hoping, Scrub is about neglect. He’s thinking, “I’m on the team, but not really. I’m in the family, but not really.” He’s in so many ways outside time.
There’s not a poem about an actual game. So there are no moments of high tension. Yes, the equipment manager is doing his job, but the big moment is when he looks at a car in the parking lot and reflects on his wife. Or Star goes into K Mart and has this metaphorical experience where he thinks, “Maybe I have wasted my life.”
The snow throughout the book is meant to be snow, but it’s also the objective correlative, the spirit of things. Sometimes the snow comforts, sometimes it hides a dead dog. Sometimes it just piles up against the door, like at the end.
Night Gym
The gym is closed, locked
for the night. Through
the windows, a quiet
beam from the streetlights
lies across center court.
The darkness wraps itself
around the trophies, lies
softly on Coach’s desk,
settles in the corners.
A few mice scratch under
the stands and at the door
of the concession booth.
The night wind rattles
the glass in the front doors.
The furnace, reliable
as grace, sends its steady
warmth through the rafters,
under the bleachers, down
the halls, into the offices
and locker rooms. Outside,
the snow falls, swirls, piles
up against the entrance.
SP: Can you talk about the endings of your poems? It seems like sports poems’ endings can be easily made to be loud and big. But so many of yours are slow and quiet and hushed. Why?
JR: I didn’t, um, know consciously that my endings were doing this until I was on a panel with Naomi Shihab Nye and Conrad Hilberry. A question from the audience was about structure of a poem. Conrad said the poem usually begins with something small and opens out into something big. Then he went on to add, “Except for Jack’s poems that start really big and get smaller and smaller except that the small thing in the end does something big.”
There was a poem I wrote called “Love Poem,” and because of its cheesy title, I’ll affirm it by saying it was in the Georgia Review. The beginning line is, “The smaller the talk, the better.” The ending lines are, “When we wake I want us to begin again never saying anything lovelier than garage door.” The implication at the ending is subverting the whole notion of love, that we really can’t live up to it. So, I think that these poems in Losing Season are similar. When the Equipment Manager leaves the gym, he sees these kids kissing in this car. He realizes that he’s older than when he left the building, and he thinks about his wife and all they’ve repaired, which is a great word because it also means to re-pair. It’s this quiet moment, this hush, this resonance of lifelong love.
Maybe a poem that undermines all that is where Scrub is dreaming of making his last shot. It’s all tense. But, still, the big moment disappears. There is no last shot. And what appears to end that poem is Scrub at the dance with his dream girl, “and Jennie cups her hand around Scrub’s neck.”
It’s hushed but it’s huge.
SP: Can you talk about your titles? They seem very telling, as if you’re letting the reader know exactly what is to come. A few examples are “Pep Rally,” “Coach Tells His Wife about the Big Game,” “The Big Snow,” and “Before the Game.”
JR: It was a big decision to do that. And these titles are very different than my other poems where I really have a great time coming up with titles like “The End of Irony.” These titles in Losing Season were like newspaper titles.
There were a couple of reasons. These weren’t poems to figure out, these were poems to experience. So with these simple titles, I was like, “Here it is, go experience.”
I think with poems, more than with novels, titles have an integral part to play. The poem’s title is doing something to the poem. In one sense, in this collection I put the narrative in the title. The poems are the lyrical response to the narrative titles.
Students very often, because they are taught that poems should be difficult, try to have their reader figure out the poem. So students think that poems should be hard. But students seldom get to experience those complicated poems. They figure them out and then they move on to the next difficult poem. But they never really read them. I don’t want to figure out that a poem is about a dog. Just tell me. Now I’m in that experience with you. All kinds of things can open up because you’ve given me the bottom line. I’m not telling someone to not write a dense poem. It’s that Donne didn’t write a poem thinking, “This will be hard to figure out.”
SP: Can you talk about form? Almost all of your poems, except maybe two or three, seem to be long and thin. Why?
JR: That was to embody pragmatism. Americanism. Cut to the chase. No long lines. Because it seemed appropriate for this small town, nothing artsy fartsy. The world was fix-your-car, utilitarian. How do you get a structure that suggests Americanism? Nothing fancy here. I grew up in that culture. Mill working people. Don’t put on airs here. My father was very impatient with anything that seemed to be showing off. I remember him saying, “Why do these Sports Illustrated articles always toss in things I don’t know anything about?”
SP: Why are readers so drawn to Scrub, the bench warmer on the team?
JR: Because he’s a dreamer, but he has a very moving reason for his dreams. He dreams to survive. He doesn’t have any way to get through life if he doesn’t dream. It’s the only world he has. Every other world has kicked him out. And then he’s so goofy when he thinks, “Someday I’m going to come back home and have a dog.” He just wants an everyday life. But he’s got no hope of getting out. He’s still going to be in the same damn town all his life. Poor guy. He doesn’t dream of getting out of there and showing up the town. He just wants to be with them, but he never gets to.
Walking Home Late After Practice
Walking home late after practice,
Scrub kicks the snow, imagines
each flake a phony word, a lie,
a promise he believed, floating
up off into the air, mixing
in the wind, melting. Scrub
keeps walking, passes
under the streetlight across
from his house, sees the light on
in the kitchen, pauses, looks
back, suddenly starts to dance,
dance under the long deflected pass
of the moon’s light. His feet
slide softly over the layers
of snow piled and trampled hard
by schoolkids, teachers, people
heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,
the dancer, whirling himself
into the soft night, into the wild
applause of the falling snow.
SP: I read that Losing Season took you 20 years to write. Can you describe the process?
JR: Twenty-five really. My wife says, “I remember you starting this. It was twenty-five at least.” This book was material that was there all along but I put it aside for very human reasons. I didn’t want to be the coach’s kid. I wanted to be my own person. So you publish three volumes of poetry and three chapbooks and you become your own person so you can write about being the coach’s son.
But what really killed me while writing this book was “belief,” “not belief,” “belief,” “not belief.” “Will this book work? Can I create a narrative in this book?”
The process was one poem at a time until there were maybe twenty of these. And then a few journals were so affirming of these poems that I thought, “I can create a town, and then I thought I could create a novel-in-poems that takes place in this small town.” So it was nice that way, just coming to me. The writing is so much smarter than I am. It’s helping me along.
SP: You’ve won lots of awards, and some very big ones, for your teaching. What role do you see teaching playing in your life?
JR: I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m amazingly grateful for my students. A little tiny school like this, Hope College. I’ve had sixty-five students go on to get MFAs and do great things with their writing. It’s crazy. They went to terrific programs. It’s not me, it’s them, these great students.
I’m grateful that I love teaching so much. The poetry thing would have killed me. The competitive side of it. To place my wellbeing in that, I just don’t know if I would have survived.
I appreciate your understanding that I’m saying these things about my students in a delighted way. I love to give stuff to people.
SP: Jack, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for a great conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
JR: Yes. It means everything to have someone attend to the poems as thoughtfully as you have, Sean. Thanks so much.
Losing Season: Everybody Talks
It’s the way December
turns into March. It’s
the teeth on the right side
tight, all eyes finding a way
to see around the corner. It’s
not making the coffee,
not saying good morning
anymore, not fixing
the dent in your car,
the draft under the door,
the difference between
the two of you.
Sean Prentiss is the author of the memoir, Finding Abbey: a Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography. Prentiss is also the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, a creative nonfiction craft anthology. And he is the co-author of the forthcoming environmental writing textbook, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology. He lives on a small lake in northern Vermont and serves as an assistant professor at Norwich University.