December 5, 2021

Jack Ridl

THE LAST DAY OF NOVEMBER

My wife is at her spinning wheel. She
first cleans, dries, and combs the fleece,
then dyes the wool. She will spin yarn to make

a shawl, stocking cap, socks. She disappears
into her gentle quiet. I am a third of the way
through reading four books, but I don’t want

to read any of them. I want what I know you
want: to be happy, actually happy, to love
in a happy world. Today there was yet another

school shooting. Some students felt it coming.
Three kids who thought they were grown up,
dead. One more thought likely to die, did. The

others will live. The news dares to say recover.
Tonight we played Christmas carols for the first
time this season. Yes, ’tis the season. This morning

surgeons at three different hospitals awakened
assuming yet another routine day of rounds and
operations. When they were seventeen, did they

imagine advent would offer them the inevitable
impossibility of saving the assumption of a future,
that they would never again be able to say, “Happy

Holidays,” “Merry Christmas,” “Happy Hanukkah,”
“Happy New Year” without being caught in an ambush
of memory? Tonight thousands of parents will be unable

to sleep, or tomorrow, or on into ever. Teachers
who each day hope it will not, cannot happen again
will think again about construction or an office job.

And guns? They will sleep in the garage, a cabinet,
on the top shelf. They will rest and be at the ready.
No, I don’t want to read; I don’t want to hear again

about God’s mercy, the peace that comes from above
or meditation, Calvin’s endlessly facile legacy of blame,
the need for prayer and legislation. I am tired of pursuing

happiness. I want to breathe it in as ubiquitous as air.
And while we’re at it, I want the curriculum revised
to teach sentimentality, that it is not any more false

feeling than the unguarded synapses in the shooter’s brain.
Scholars, put away the safety of secondary sources. Sit
with your students, abandon the inhumane hideaway of

objective distance. Throw open your hearts. Let sentiment
break our shielded souls before another rifle and surgeon’s
words have to. My wife never asks for the meaning. She

sits in silence at her wheel twisting a lamb’s wool into
yarn to knit whatever it takes to keep another warm.
Our dog is asleep, head on his paws. The twin sister cats

curl together. I’m not going to pick up my books. I’m
going to begin to trim the tree wondering how many
five-year-olds will sit on Santa’s lap and when he asks

“What do you want for Christmas?” will answer, “A gun.”

from Poets Respond
December 5, 2021

__________

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)

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October 4, 2021

Jack Ridl

ON FINDING A WREN BELOW OUR BEDROOM WINDOW

It would have lived had where we sleep
still been the woods that now begins
thirty feet or so from the window.

It lay in the palm of my hand. Its head
sloped away from its wing and 
opened the calm pink of its neck.

I think of our daughter. I think of
my wife. I think of it all as I lay
the wren under a layer of mulching

leaves under the bird feeder, the leaves
entering the alchemy of compost,
what we and all there is can become.

Above her soggy last nest, and a darkened
space, the feeder is sunflower-filled. I walk
back into our house, go to the window.

Chickadees, white-throated sparrows,
a cardinal are back at the feeder. Later
today I will need to fill it again.

from Rattle #72, Summer 2021

__________

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)

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August 29, 2018

Jack Ridl

CAN WE KNOW?

After nibbling at his food,
our old dog’s sleeping
again, breathing heavily.

We say, “Well, he’s old. Maybe
that’s all it is.” The birds come
to the feeder. We don’t know them.

We assume we know our dog
who barks when it’s time
for his walk or to pee. Was

it because of us and biscuits
that he alchemized from
abandonment into one of us?

Damn anyone who calls us
sentimental for our years
of loving him like family.

We believe in the comfort
of his wag, his lying every night
amid our long and given marriage.

No one asks for loneliness.

from Rattle #60, Summer 2018
Tribute to Athlete Poets

__________

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)

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November 30, 2015

Jack Ridl

“TOGETHER IN THE BACK YARD”

—an artwork by Sidnea D’Amico

Even if the morning sky turns blue,
the sunlight glazing the hog’s back.

Even if the night sky is a scrim
for each star they can see. Even

if a light rain rattles on the old tin roof,
fills the trough and softens them

to sleep, they will wear the same rat-
tattered clothes, her dress hemmed

in mud, his shirt a torn and filthy
robe of slop and swill. Where are

the children? The hog is huge. The
days are days. On every slab of land

the same muck. And they stay, stand,
slogged: she, he, the rain, and the hog.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

__________

Jack Ridl: “I write poems to sustain my connection to what matters, to the world I live in, not the one imposed on us minute after minute.” (website)

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August 30, 2014

Editor’s Pick

for Summer 2014

Practicing to Walk Like a HeronPracticing to Walk Like a Heron

by Jack Ridl

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.

Timothy Green, editor (June 1, 2014)

. . .

Readers’ Picks

for Summer 2014

Saint FriendSaint Friend

by Carl Adamshick

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.

Brian Beatty, subscriber (August 10, 2014)

__________

Book of HoursBook of Hours

by Kevin Young

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.

Grant Clauser, subscriber (August 5, 2014)

__________

The BossThe Boss

by Victoria Chang

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)

. . .

Note: Rattle‘s MicroReviews are intended to be honest poetry book recommendations. If you have no relationship to the author of the book you’d like to recommend, you can send 75 – 125 words about why you enjoyed the book through our Submittable portal. Simple acquaintance to the author is not disqualifying, but we cannot accept reviews from family, co-workers, present or former students, or even casual friends (if you met the poet once at a reading, that’s fine; if you stay in touch, that’s not). If any significant relationship is discovered, the review will be deleted and the reviewer will no longer be allowed to contribute reviews. If you’re unsure about whether your relationship to the author is disqualifying, just ask when you submit the review. Reviews are added regularly to the MicroReviews page, and posted for archival at the end of every quarter.

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March 4, 2013

Jack Ridl

HARDSHIP IN A NICE PLACE

The roof on our house slants out
over the garden and if it rains
the water falls on what blossoms

still arc in late August. My wife
is sleeping through her day. There
is a breeze here on the porch. There

is a certain slant of light collapsing
through the beech trees on the hill. One
tree fell this afternoon. I could hear it

cracking into the quiet, saw an angle
of trunk begin to lean and then rustle
its branches across the limbs along

the stagger of woods. At night, sounds
come I can never identify. It’s often
like that, our long days lacking much

of anything that can be named. My
wife will sleep. I will walk back from
the mailbox with our dog and wait.

from Rattle #37, Summer 2012

__________

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)

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