[ARETE] Dale Ritterbusch,

Tue Nov 22 16:30:15 CST 2022

All
Don Johnson's review of Dale Ritterbucsh's collection of sports poems is
attached and below.
Thanks
Duncan

Review of Dale Ritterbusch’s *The Stinger, Eclectic Blue Publishing, 2022*

              When I first looked at my review copy of Dale Ritterbusch’s
new volume of poems, I assumed the title referred to a football injury,
that numbed-shoulder shock that occasionally results from a particularly
hard hit and temporarily makes continued play difficult.  My assumption,
however, was incorrect.  The title poem is about baseball, a “fathers
playing catch with sons” story that undermines the popular notion of that
experience creating a life-long bond between father and son.  In “The
Stinger,” the father is a stepfather who regularly berates the son for
being a “Momma’s boy” and who uses play not only to embarrass the boy but
sometimes to inflict both physical and psychological damage by delivering
to him a pitch too hot for him to handle with ease, a “stinger” which
“burns [his} hand with each catch.”  One might expect the evidence of the
father’s cruelty to be a physical manifestation in the aftermath of that
burning, but Ritterbusch instead suggests the enduring psychic quality of
the injury with the observation that “the sky” under which the game played
out “reddened like a welt,” which would serve as a life-long reminder of
childhood indignities.  The poem begins the volume and also initiates the
poet’s pattern of persistent challenges to our perceived notions of the
myriad ways sport affects our lives and relationships.

              There are at least two football poems in this collection, and
the attention the poet pays to multiple sports is one of the features that
sets it apart.  Ordinarily one finds entire volumes dedicated to one sport.
I think of Tim Peeler’s *Touching All the Bases* or Jack Ridl’s *Losing
Season*.  Other collections include sports poems that support overriding
themes inserted in volumes whose subjects range from childhood to the
function of art.  Ron Smith’s *The Humility* *of the Brutes* comes to mind
in this regard.  Only Robert Hamblin’s *Keeping Score: Sports Poems for
Every Season *comes to my mind as a volume solely dedicated to sport and
offering a wide and varied range of activities.  But *The Stinger *at 128
pp. is a bit longer, and, if anything, more varied in its range of sport
and play:  baseball, basketball, fishing, running, tennis, sledding, and
wrestling.

              More significantly, it’s the poet’s take on the recurrent
tropes in all of sport literature that distinguishes these poems, whose
cumulative effect is persuasive and powerful.  Among these are
Ritterbusch’s rejection of the father/son cliché mentioned above in poems
about his daughter’s participation in athletics and outdoor sports.  Best
among these is “Sixth Grade Hoops” in which the father, who has guided the
young girl throughout her short “career,” has “learned / not to say
anything about the game” just completed for fear of the daughter’s reaction
to his coaching.  In this instance, however, he is surprised by the girl’s
suggestion that they “shoot some hoops” together when they arrive home.  “There
is plenty of time before dark,” she says.  He smiles, agreeing that
“there’s plenty of time” even for him to learn “*this* game” of sharing a
relationship with his daughter.

              Two other “givens” that the poet systematically questions are
the popular notion that sport teaches athletes about the game of life, and
that it offers a vehicle for a kind of transcendence.   Epistemology is a
central issue in this book.  It’s remarkable to me how often variations of
the words “learn,” “teach,” “know,” “lesson[s]” appear, followed up more
often than not with the caveat that lessons, even knowledge, evaporate once
the athletic moment is past.  In the boxing poem, “Soft Hands,” for
example, the speaker describes his regimen of soaking his battered hands in
salt water as, “penance / for the acquisition of knowledge,” but ultimately
“what he knows is” is limited to muscular awareness with perfect
equilibrium.”  Later in that same poem, after hitting the heavy bag, he
admits that the “only lesson” learned in this experience resides not in his
brain, but in his “skull.” It becomes a physical rather than an
intellectual resource.   In “Cecropia,” the description of a captured moth
pinned to his bedroom wall morphs into a memory of his coach kicking him
off his high school wrestling team.  He chalks this experience up as
“another lesson” he “had to learn,” but admits in the next stanza that
“explanations” [for his shortcomings] “seldom work; / reason its own
impasse, logic an impediment, experience the same.”  In “The Outfield
Coming Home,” a veteran has difficulty reassuming his place in the outfield
and ultimately twists his ankle in a gopher hole while going back on a
“routine fly ball.”   After subsequent errors he is forced to admit to
himself that

 whatever he had learned

 over all those years,

 so sure and straight

was uneven, like the ground he played on,

the air shimmering above the diamond,

the light playing tricks,

and that one sure thing lost in the sun.

              In other poems what we learn is mostly internalized in an
amalgam of visceral appropriation and memory that translates to a kind of
transcendence, the product of heightened awareness often accompanying that
isolated experience when the participant is “in the moment.” Ritterbusch
describes this experience as

                             that moment when the intellect

                             the body, work with such perfect synchronicity

                             that reverence, prayer, the eternal faith of

                             the hopeful athlete, the committed fan, is
drawn

                             contemplatively to the pleasure

                             of a perfect toss . . .

                                                                        “Beyond
the Haggis Toss”

In “Aubade,” after making love, the poet compares the perfection of the
experience to childhood pleasures, “those years of play” that have not been
lost,” that “still course through the blood” and “have not been lost.”  In
“Sledding with Kerry,” the speaker experiences a return to childhood when
he and his daughter go too fast and become “airborne into a sea of snow,”
the beauty, exhilaration and heightened physical awareness scouring the
years off his body, making him a child again.

              It’s instructive that these moments emerge in these poems not
through heroic endeavor, but mostly as a result of rather ordinary
endeavor, common circumstances made extraordinary through the participants’
heightened awareness.  But these, too, are only tentatively accepted owing
to their mysterious nature. The two poems in the collection recounting the
poet’s “bonding” with coyotes while he is out running offer perfect
illustrations.  In “Running with a Coyote,” the poet is joined in his
nightly run by a coyote who keeps pace with him through a suburban
neighborhood in Colorado.  In the poet’s mind, the two are linked
spiritually until the animal veers off and leaves the runner alone, but not
without his wishing the coyote a night of good hunting and “a howl that
will wake the neighborhood.”  “Coyote Sangha” describes another night run
in the suburbs where the speaker, already at one with his environment,
watches a coyote’s dark shadow fade into the brush and imagines the totemic
animal, already representing in the poet’s mind “the process of withdraw
and return, / the eternal grace of resurrection,” urges him to follow,
conveying the message that “the temple lies ahead, / just below the
blossoming moon.”  These coyote “visions” illustrate as well as anything in
*The* *Stinger *the poet’s faith in the epigraph from Wallace Stevens he
selected to introduce the volume: “The greatest poverty is not to live in a
physical world.”

              One more point.  My most positive reaction to these poems is
the degree to which they evoke memories of other sports poems.  “Playing
Center in my Forties” brings to my mind David Bottoms’ “Sign for my Father,
Who Stressed the Bunt.”  “Old Guys Playing Hoops” makes me want to re-read
David Hilton’s “The Poet Tries to Turn in His Jock,” and “She Throws Like a
Girl” invites comparisons with Nancy Boutilier’s “To Throw Like a Boy.”  There
are others. I would be the first to insist, however, that these parallels
are communal rather than derivative.  They signify Dale Ritterbusch’s
kinship with the community of writers and scholars envisioned by the
founders of the Sport Literature Association lo these many years ago. *The
Stinger* offers its  reader not discrete bits of knowledge or specific
applications of experience of the kind often proclaimed on locker room
posters.  On the contrary, one might argue that the reward the thoughtful
individual might reap from sporting endeavors shapes and nurtures the soul.

Don Johnson

Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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