Jack Ridl: “The news story is the school shooting just outside of Detroit. Our daughter is an art teacher. Her room is the first room after the huge entry at the school. Not a day goes by that this father doesn’t fear for her. She tries to believe all her students would never carry out a killing.” (web)
Jack Ridl: “My father was the head basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh. After failing to make it as a writer of songs, I thought, ‘Why not poetry? Same thing, right?’ I was introduced to the poet Paul Zimmer and brashly asked if he would help me out. He asked to look at some poems I was lugging around. After reading a few, he said, ‘Sure, I’ll help you out. We will, however, start all over.’ I gulped, said okay, and asked what I should pay him. He said, ‘Ya know what I’d really like instead of cash? I’d like to be able to go to your father’s locker room any time I want, before and after a game.’ I was dumbfounded. That’s where I grew up. Nothing full of wonder there. It was my first lesson in vulnerability and exploring the unknown, but of course I didn’t realize it. He then said, ‘I’ll tell you when I think you’ve written a poem.’ After six weeks, not a word about what I gave him being a poem. Then six months. Then a year. I asked if I should quit. He said, ‘If you want.’ Coach’s kids don’t quit. Two and a half years later, Paul looked up from what I’d handed him, smiled, and said, ‘You wrote a poem.’ That was 50 years ago. I can’t imagine having a richer life.” (web)
Jack Ridl: “I was a point guard, the last ninth grader to start on a varsity high school team in Pennsylvania until years later, when anyone could play a varsity sport. I was also a shortstop, good enough to play on a traveling All-Star team with the likes of Dick Allen. My father was the basketball coach at Westminster College where his team was ranked number one in the country in 1962 and toured South America. I, as an entering freshman, played on that team. In the mid-’60s, he became the head basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh where he also invented what became known as The Amoeba Offense, a variation of which every team from third grade to the pros now use. The recipient of many coaching awards, my father was likely the greatest influence on my being a poet—not in choosing to be, but because he instilled in me a love (believe it or not) of practice and discipline. Working to get a line just right is a joy compared to dribbling for an hour with your left hand every day and fielding bad hop ground balls into a late evening.” (web)
There’s a deep pleasure in getting to know someone or somewhere intimately, and that’s how I feel reading Jack Ridl. What’s more, he seems to know where his talents lie, as shown in the book’s epigrammatic opening poem, “Write to Your Unknown Friends.” We’re given a friend’s access to his mind’s eye—and it’s such an attentive eye, page after page revealing the magic in the quotidian. Most of the poems are set in his house or backyard, which could be my house or backyard, if only I’d stop to notice the wonder of it. And after reading this book, for a while, I do. That joy alone is worth the cover price.
Ridl’s poem from Rattle, “Hardship in a Nice Place,” is a good example, but the poems in this book are all that strong—which, at over 150 pages, is saying something.
The first line of the first poem in Carl Adamshick’s second collection, Saint Friend, may name-check Kenneth Koch, but the transparency and lightness of touch to this Walt Whitman Award winner’s lyrics don’t feel particularly New York School. His occasional lists—“Autumn sweaters, mittens, scarves, hats,/ crepuscular Missouri, and a leaf/ in my sister’s hand.”—situate Oregon-based Adamshick well outside the hip boroughs of NYC, as do the two extended poems that predominate this collection. “Pacific,” a monologue in the voice of Amelia Earhart, contemplates loss on multiple levels. “Near Real Time” recounts and refracts a difficult February day-by-day. Saint Friend’s shorter lyrics are likewise welcomed alternatives to overly familiar MFA exercises and experiments for their own sake. We care because it’s clear Adamshick has taken great care.
Kevin Young writes big books. His 2008 Dear Darkness contains 196 pages of poetry. His new Book of Hours comes close to that with 181. Where other poets would have published several smaller volumes, Young packs them all into one cover, giving him room to thoroughly excavate a subject, such as the death of his father and the birth of his new son. His poems have a way of staggering images and syntax—a technique that’s emphasized with heavily enjambed lines, contrasts and stanza breaks that turn phrases on their angles. Young especially takes pleasure in sounds. His rhythms and rhymes are not formally arraigned—he makes up his own rules—reminding the reader that poetry can still be music in the right hands.
Without any punctuation and with each poem composed of four-line, consistently-staggered stanzas, I will say that the style of The Boss first caught me off-guard. But this unusual format quickly proved to be a strength of the collection—Chang is able to execute this style extremely well thanks to her pacing and deft ear. Similar-sounding words and internal rhymes propel the reader through lines:
I ask for the password he says www.gmail.com he looks it up in his brain
locks up he wonders what a
password is letters number symbols
dumbbells
The poet examines how we occupy many roles at once—being a child, a parent, subordinate to others or in a position of authority—and how we move between them. Rhythmically and linguistically beautiful and inventive—a great collection.
—Brandon Amico, subscriber (July 22, 2014)
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Jack Ridl: “I’m 67. Over the years why I write poems has twisted and turned and hopped and shifted in many ways. But one thing has stayed the same: writing poems places me with what matters in a world that pulls us every hour away from all that clings to our hearts. I love poems because they can connect us to what we might never discover. They’ve kept me always at ages 7 and 70.” (web)