[ARETE] Dale Ritterbusch,
Connie Ann Kirk
connieannkirk at gmail.com
Tue Nov 22 17:35:41 CST 2022
What a beautiful review! I had planned to place this book on my holiday
"Wish List" this year, but this review only makes me "wish" to receive it
all the more.
Congrats on both the book & the review!
~Connie Ann Kirk, New York
On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 6:19 PM Duncan Jamieson via
Sport_literature_association <sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu>
wrote:
> 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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>
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