[ARETE] Dale Ritterbusch,

Fri Nov 25 10:05:59 CST 2022

Yes, a fine review by Don Johnson of a wonderful book. It truly is a book you can keep close at hand and dip into day after day at all times of the day or night. 
Well done, Dale & Don.
Ron SmithRichmond VA

-----Original Message-----
From: Connie Ann Kirk via Sport_literature_association <sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu>
To: Duncan Jamieson <DJAMIESO at ashland.edu>; sport_literature_association at lists.ku.edu
Sent: Tue, Nov 22, 2022 6:39 pm
Subject: Re: [ARETE] Dale Ritterbusch,

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.ThanksDuncan

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

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

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

              Moresignificantly, it’s the poet’s take on the recurrent tropes in all of sportliterature that distinguishes these poems, whose cumulative effect is persuasiveand powerful.  Among these areRitterbusch’s rejection of the father/son cliché mentioned above in poems abouthis daughter’s participation in athletics and outdoor sports.  Best among these is “Sixth Grade Hoops” inwhich 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 ofthe daughter’s reaction to his coaching. In this instance, however, he is surprised by the girl’s suggestion thatthey “shoot some hoops” together when they arrive home.  “There is plenty of time before dark,” shesays.  He smiles, agreeing that “there’splenty of time” even for him to learn “thisgame” of sharing a relationship with his daughter.

              Two other“givens” that the poet systematically questions are the popular notion thatsport teaches athletes about the game of life, and that it offers a vehicle fora kind of transcendence.   Epistemologyis a central issue in this book.  It’sremarkable to me how often variations of the words “learn,” “teach,” “know,”“lesson[s]” appear, followed up more often than not with the caveat thatlessons, even knowledge, evaporate once the athletic moment is past.  In the boxing poem, “Soft Hands,” forexample, the speaker describes his regimen of soaking his battered hands insalt water as, “penance / for the acquisition of knowledge,” but ultimately“what he knows is” is limited to muscular awareness with perfectequilibrium.”  Later in that same poem,after hitting the heavy bag, he admits that the “only lesson” learned in thisexperience resides not in his brain, but in his “skull.” It becomes a physicalrather than an intellectual resource.   In “Cecropia,” the description of a capturedmoth pinned to his bedroom wall morphs into a memory of his coach kicking himoff his high school wrestling team.  Hechalks this experience up as “another lesson” he “had to learn,” but admits inthe 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 hasdifficulty reassuming his place in the outfield and ultimately twists his anklein a gopher hole while going back on a “routine fly ball.”   After subsequent errors he is forced toadmit to himself that

 whatever he had learned 

 over all those years, 

 so sure and straight 

was uneven, likethe ground he played on,

the air shimmeringabove the diamond,

the light playingtricks,

and that one surething lost in the sun.

              In otherpoems what we learn is mostly internalized in an amalgam of visceralappropriation and memory that translates to a kind of transcendence, theproduct of heightened awareness often accompanying that isolated experiencewhen the participant is “in the moment.” Ritterbusch describes this experienceas 

                             thatmoment when the intellect

                             thebody, work with such perfect synchronicity

                             thatreverence, prayer, the eternal faith of 

                             thehopeful athlete, the committed fan, is drawn

                             contemplativelyto the pleasure

                             ofa perfect toss . . .

                                                                        “Beyondthe Haggis Toss”

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

              It’sinstructive that these moments emerge in these poems not through heroicendeavor, but mostly as a result of rather ordinary endeavor, commoncircumstances made extraordinary through the participants’ heightenedawareness.  But these, too, are onlytentatively accepted owing to their mysterious nature. The two poems in thecollection recounting the poet’s “bonding” with coyotes while he is out runningoffer perfect illustrations.  In “Runningwith a Coyote,” the poet is joined in his nightly run by a coyote who keepspace with him through a suburban neighborhood in Colorado.  In the poet’s mind, the two are linkedspiritually until the animal veers off and leaves the runner alone, but notwithout his wishing the coyote a night of good hunting and “a howl that willwake the neighborhood.”  “Coyote Sangha”describes another night run in the suburbs where the speaker, already at onewith his environment, watches a coyote’s dark shadow fade into the brush andimagines the totemic animal, already representing in the poet’s mind “theprocess of withdraw and return, / the eternal grace of resurrection,” urges himto follow, conveying the message that “the temple lies ahead, / just below theblossoming moon.”  These coyote “visions”illustrate as well as anything in TheStinger the poet’s faith in theepigraph from Wallace Stevens he selected to introduce the volume: “Thegreatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”

              One morepoint.  My most positive reaction tothese poems is the degree to which they evoke memories of other sportspoems.  “Playing Center in my Forties”brings to my mind David Bottoms’ “Sign for my Father, Who Stressed theBunt.”  “Old Guys Playing Hoops” makes mewant to re-read David Hilton’s “The Poet Tries to Turn in His Jock,” and “SheThrows Like a Girl” invites comparisons with Nancy Boutilier’s “To Throw Like aBoy.”  There are others. I would be thefirst to insist, however, that these parallels are communal rather thanderivative.  They signify DaleRitterbusch’s kinship with the community of writers and scholars envisioned bythe founders of the Sport Literature Association lo these many years ago. The Stinger offers its  reader not discrete bits of knowledge orspecific applications of experience of the kind often proclaimed on locker roomposters.  On the contrary, one mightargue that the reward the thoughtful individual might reap from sporting endeavorsshapes 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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