Why Does William Logan Hate Me?

He doesn’t even know me. But I know he hates me. If you’ve read his criticism, you know he likely hates you too. If you haven’t come across him yet, don’t change. This man writes his own poems and a lot of criticism about contemporary poetry and poets. He hates almost all of it and almost all of them. He gets a lot of attention for hating.

Call me old fashioned. Call me sappy. Call me analytically and evaluatively [sic] challenged. But I don’t get it? Naomi Shihab Nye says, “I try to be a friend to all poems.” I admire her for that, and try to be that too. I think that poems, all the arts, can be useful, practical in the most soulful of ways. And this profoundly important reason-for-their-being deserves respect.

Even those poems that will never find their way into the everlasting deserve caring attention and those who wrote them should not be humiliated for trying.

Logan is trying to exterminate what he believes is bad poetry. Gee, Bill, I can take care of myself, thank you. When and how did this “bad poetry,” as you define it, hurt the world? Logan would take the ball away from the guy who shoots hoops in his driveway because he doesn’t measure up to William Butler Lebron James.

There was a time when poetry’s ability to open up worlds both inner and outer was considered magical, spiritual, even animistic. Here were simple markings on a page, and for some reason the way these markings mixed together created sounds and experiences and a kind of proprioceptive feeling, a way of knowing a new reality, the access to which could come in no other way.

Perhaps you have read The Spell of the Sensuous, in which author David Abram describes how before print, the world itself was full of non-verbal languages. There was the language of the landscape, of the plants and animals, of sky, cloud, rain, of look, smell, taste, of pottery and drawing, light and dream. Everything had a language; everything “spoke,” and everyone lived listening and responding to these languages. Poetry was a way of life and grew to be a way of knowing.

William Logan says that he cares about the “state of poetry,” and about forming so-called “critical evaluations.” Clearly, I don’t. I always hope that if we would care about everything else, then the art we make would arrive from that caring. And the way the arts are being judged would  be revealed for what it is: the equivalent of a dog show. Worse than a dog show, but a judging that draws sole attention to the judge of the best in show. To hell with the dogs.

I remember asking the professor who led me to literature, what he was feeling when he retired. “Sad,” he replied. “Not because of retiring, but because of what has happened to what I care about. Literature is being replaced by a way of talking about literature that dismisses the value of the work and merely draws our attention to those showing off what they believe is intelligence.”

I also remember realizing that a poem can be, in the best sense, the end of a conversation because it can lead to a rich and reflective silence.

I trust that the odds are about a zillion to one that Logan ever sees any of my poems. I’m not fond of being defenseless and don’t want to be humiliated. Who does? And defenseless and humiliated is what I would feel if he skewered my wistful verses about my dog or my daughter or my wife or the trees along the creek out back. They each have their language, and they each speak clearly to me when I listen.

I certainly don’t believe when you’ve heard one tree speak its language, you’ve heard them all, when you’ve written an elegy for your grandmother that it’s already been written, that the poem you write when your kid rides off for the first time on a bike has been written a hundred times before. As Paul Zimmer wrote, “God-damn the man who calls this sentimental.”

I hope to keep coming across people who respond to our poems these ways:

” . . . He didn’t look as if he thought

bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
If they were baseball executives they’d plot

to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
could be saved from children.”

from “Mingus at the Showplace” by William Matthews

And

“Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry for one reason: so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”–Christian Wiman

I know that William Logan isn’t going to stop hating me. I’ll have to carry that around. The weight is lifted by a Jim Harrison quote a dear friend sent to me. He said, “I would rather give full vent to all human loss and disappointments and take a chance at being corny, than die a smartass.”

It Was Easier to Say, “I’m a Basketball Player” Than It Is to Say, “I’m a Poet.”

–to be published in Fastbreak to Linebreak, edited by Todd Davis

“How’d it go out there today? Did you work on your left hand? Shoot fifty free throws? Tap a hundred off the backboard? Work the key?” Those were the words I’d hear, often hear, daily hear from my father. He was a basketball coach. I was the coach’s kid. I practiced. I practiced a lot.

My father was infinitely patient. I really wasn’t that good. But how I worked. And how I imagined. The clock was always ticking as I took jump shot after jump shot at the hoop fastened to the back of the garage. The “court” was assembled from five by five squares of poured concrete, the cracks about a quarter of an inch between each slab. I knew without looking down where they lurked and could dribble left/right/back/left without hitting a one. When I stepped to the foul line, time had run out, we were behind by a point, and I was shooting a one-and-one. When tapping the ball off the board, I backed my opponent out and stood my ground. And along the sidelines, the fans were cheering or booing, and the cheerleaders were screaming and pushing back their long hair.

It wasn’t until my dreams of playing the point for my father and taking his team to the Big Dance, the Final Four, the NCAA championship had faded along with my jump shot that I realized how much my imagination had kept me going. Like I said, I wasn’t all that good, good enough for high school ball, starting from grade nine on, but never the star and never good enough to play in college and always all-but-terrified. It was my imagination that got me through. I could pretend. I could pretend that I was better than I was, pretend that the cheerleaders wanted to go with me to the dance after the game, pretend that one day I’d be at that foul line with the clock at zero and sink the winning two foul shots, pretend that one day I’d come back and everyone would point and whisper, “See that guy? He was the best guard this school has ever seen.”

But poetry? When Curry Kirkpatrick, then of Sports Illustrated, wrote a piece about my father, he said to my dad, “Something that intrigues me is that your son is a poet. That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? A coach having a poet for a son?” I always wished that my father didn’t have to be asked that question, that the question would have been, “How’s it feel to have your son playing for the Celtics?”

In the late 60’s my father became the head basketball coach at The University of Pittsburgh. When I first thought the crazy thought that maybe I could write poems, I sought out poet Paul Zimmer to help me. He said he would. I had about 50 profoundly sensitive pieces, bad news from the heart. I showed him a couple. He said, very gently, “Let’s start over.” I asked Paul what he would charge for looking at my stuff. He said, “You know what I would really like? I’d love to be able to go to the Pitt locker room after games. Do you think that you could arrange that?” I was floored. Ever since I was a child, I’d all but lived in the locker rooms of my father’s teams. It was time to put away childish things, buy a cape and a pipe and be deep. Zimmer wanted to see the chalk board and listen to post-game talks, watch the sports writers interview my father and the players, see guys celebrate or mope? This was definitely not deep. “Ok. Sure,” I said. Zimmer then added, “I have one little thing about the way I’ll work with you: I’ll tell you when I think you’ve written a poem.” That was fine by me. I’d already spent about a year writing songs, trying to push Paul Simon off the charts, and I already had the 50-some poems, even though Zimmer said we’d start over. This “one little thing” seemed only right to me. Why wouldn’t he tell me if I’d written a poem?

Four years later, he told me I’d written a poem.

Several times I asked Paul if he thought I should quit. He always answered, “That’s up to you. If you want to, you can.” Why didn’t I quit? I really think it was because I was and still am and always will be a coach’s kid. You practice. For years, you practice. And you practice without ever knowing you’ll get there. But you practice dreaming that you will. And you take it from the coach. You take it and you take it and you take it. And you keep coming back. And you slam the locker door, and you curse the coach and the cosmos, and you stop. But you don’t quit. You stop and wonder and doubt, and you think this is not only a waste of time but a waste of your life, and you think about all the people out there making money or having good times while you’re staring at a lame image. You think you must be insane. And then you keep going because the word quit cannot ever become part of your life. Your jump shot may have faded, but you didn’t quit. Your jump shot quit you.

And you learn not how to win but what to do when you lose. You never learn how to win. You just work the key and hit the boards and hope like hell and pick up the pen and listen to the words, the words, the words. And sometimes you feel that shake and bake, and the rhythms shake and bake, and the words fake left and go right, and you drive the lane and pull up or shoot a floater or break away for a slam dunk. And you get down and watch your opponent’s belly and wait for that slip-up and steal the ball and hit the open man. Sometimes. And when the mailbox brings another loss, you convince yourself that it was an upset and that you’ll win the next one.

Today I practiced again. Tomorrow I’ll practice again. The game never ends. The rhythms I learned on that backyard court are in me and in my language. The images are precise because there’s so little room for error between ball and hoop, between ball and opponent’s outstretched hand. And there is no such thing as getting it down, mastering it so you can do it all again the same way the next time. You can only prepare for the next game. You are always preparing for the next poem.

After I wrote the poem that Zimmer called a poem, he said, “You know you haven’t learned to write poetry, don’t you? You don’t learn to write poetry. No one learns to write poetry. You always have to learn how to write the next poem.” Practice.

Degrading the Grade

I wrote this essay for an anthology about teaching being prepared by my pal, Jeanine Dell’Olio, at Hope College. My students already know about my approach to grading, of course. Julie thought this would be a good place to keep this essay, with hopes these ideas can continue to stir up trouble.

……………………………

Degrading the Grade

Jack Ridl

I have spent my classroom life teaching in the arts, specifically poetry writing. Among the questions I am most asked is “How do you grade a poem? Isn’t it completely subjective? Isn’t it impossible to grade any art?”

Well, of course you can grade a work of art. You can decide to award an A for accomplishing effective use of various artistic elements or a grade based on improvement. You can grade based on a determination of quality. You can determine the criteria. I had a writing teacher whose grading system was A if you wrote as well as Shakespeare, B if  you wrote as well as Hemingway, C for “most of you, likely.” Another teacher offered this system: “C if your work makes me think. B if it makes me feel. A if it makes me laugh.” So, yes, you can grade an artwork.

But how to grade was not the issue for me. Why grade, and what are the consequences of grading, and does the grade help a student develop? These were the questions that would not leave my mind alone when I took a walk. Then one day came the epiphany. It was rather simple as epiphanies go: Grading was preventing my students from being artists, poets.

Grading interfered with the value of constructive critique. The grade was not an assessment, not even a reward or a punishment. It was a consequence. As soon as I would suggest to students that they could do something else with an ending or a line break or change the tone, all they heard was a grade plummeting. Defenses rose. They refused to see any alternative to the way they had composed the work, and stood firmly for the A grade they deserved. The result was stifled growth, inauthentic work, begrudging changes that took little if any effect, a hostile relationship between what should be a coach/mentor and a growing writer.

So I eliminated grading. I eliminated it in order to suggest, respond, criticize. And what happened? The students–ALL of the students–began to welcome suggestions and options and alternatives and even challenges. They were not unlike anyone learning to play the piano or to swim or to build a campfire. They wanted to create an effective work. They had always wanted to, but understandably because of school and its achievement evaluation based on measurement, they had to make their grade not their first priority but their first concern. Eliminating grading of their work enabled them to connect their priority with their concern.

And the reward became, dare I say, spiritual and communal rather than a “seal of approval.” They discovered the real reasons for creating. What became important was not confined to the “product.” Importance and value expanded into the process, not because it led to a product, but because the process itself brought valuable experiences, insights, revelations. The students began offering to one another both their poems and the value embodied in them and stories of what happened in the process, both of which enriched the entire class and created a deepening of community. One time I was challenged in a faculty meeting about what I was doing: “Why will your students do any of the work if it’s not going to be graded? What makes them do the work?”  My response was simply “The right reasons.” That sounds glib. It isn’t.

Something that surprised and liberated the students was that they began to discover real value in everything written, successful or not. We had complex and provocative conversations about the importance of the material. We decided together whether it resulted in an effective poem or not. Any image, moment, insight, any line break, the implications of the impact of the rhythm of lines could lead to conversation and worthwhile realizations. The poem did not need to be successful for us to find remarkable and worthwhile content and artistic attributes, ones well worth discussing. I realized that it was my job not to demand that they write successful poems, but to teach them what it took to write poems. They have the rest of their lives to write successful poems

Emily Dickinson didn’t sit down to write a poem for a grade. David didn’t write the 23rd Psalm and say to himself, “That’ll get me an A.” There were very important reasons for composing poetry. The students deserved to have access to that discovery.

But I was worried. Won’t some students blow this whole thing off? Won’t my reputation go down the tubes? Won’t I become a laughing stock, an “easy grader?” And won’t the students create mostly mediocre work?

That’s when another surprise arrived. Instead of mediocre work, the work improved. Not one student blew off a single assignment. And while many students never became full-fledged poets, more than in the past did. In 15 years since my epiphany, more than 60 students have gone on to the best MFA programs in the country and are publishing. No, there is no data.  But what I do know for sure is that every single one of the students had poetry restored to their lives, and have kept it as an important part of their lives since their graduation.

And as for me? I put away being a tough grader and became a “tough responder.” All that means is that I was no longer hesitant to make suggestions and corrections for fear I might “stifle” a sensitive soul. I no longer had to tell them the lie that they needed to develop a tough hide in order to take criticism. They could maintain their vision and voice and sensitivity. They could welcome critical response because it was in their behalf and their poem’s behalf. Critical response did not lead to a grade which had led them to play it safe and learn little. Critical response led to growth and the intrinsic joy that comes when beginning artists realize what can be done instead of hiding within what they can already do.

Sappism

Sappism. In this literary world abundant with theories, I’ve decided to found a new one for the new year–Sappism. Those who subscribe to its tenets will be referred to as Sappists. Fear of the sappy, the cheesy is a plague upon us all, cutting the tender from its mooring in the authenticity of heart. What’s to fear–The accusation of sentimentality. And yet sentimentality itself has had such a bad rap for so long that most of us can’t remember when it fell into the grip of easy disdain. Actually the accusation of sentimentality is usually applied solely and soulessly to anything smacking of the gentle, the tender, the straightforwardly affirming. And yet the most often used definition of sentimentality is an emotional reaction inappropriate to its stimulus. If that’s the case then why not apply the definition to the full range of emotional reactions inappropriate to their stimuli. Seems to me that there is more sentimentality in the range of rages, cynicisms, hype, baroque use of artistic technique, rampant excitement over trends in entertainment and art, shock, imposed distress, and on and on than in the range of responses to kitties (kittens), loneliness, honest love in the midst of all that mitigates against it, flowers, rain, and the kindness of strangers. And so, Sappism. Sappists. Join this ism. Risk the ridicule. Make it a movement.

Sappily yours,
Jack

About Jack

jack@ridl.com

Jack Ridl’s new collection, Broken Symmetry, was published in 2006 by Wayne State University Press. He is the author of two other full-length collections, and three chapbooks, including Outside the Center Ring from Puddinghouse Publications, a collection of circus poems published in 2006, and Against Elegies, which was selected for the 2001 Chapbook Award from The Center for Book Arts in New York.

Ridl, who has taught at Hope College for 36 years and who with his wife, Julie, founded the college’s Visiting Writers Series, is co-author with Peter Schakel of Approaching Poetry: Perspectives and Responses, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, and co-editor, with Peter Schakel, of both 250 Poems and Literature: A Portable Anthology, also from Beford/St. Martin’s. Their Approaching Literature in the 21st Century was published by Bedford/St.Martin’s in 2005.

Ridl has published over 300 poems in more than sixty literary magazines including Poetry East, Harpur Palate, The Georgia Review, FIELD, Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, The Denver Quarterly, Chelsea, Free Lunch, The Journal, Runes, Water-Stone and elsewhere.

In 1996, The Carnegie Foundation named Ridl “Michigan Professor of the Year.” He was chosen by the Hope College students for the “HOPE Award” given to “Hope’s Outstanding Professor Educator,” was selected the student body’s “Favorite Professor” in 2003, and has twice been asked by the students to give the college’s commencement address.

In the past 15 years, more than 40 of Ridl’s former students have gone on
to MFA programs and to publishing their work nationally.

Ridl grew up in both the world of basketball where his father was a well-known head coach at Westminster College and the University of Pittsburgh, and in the world of the circus inherited from his mother’s family.

Of his poems, Naomi Shihab Nye has written, “Jack Ridl writes with complete generosity and full-hearted wisdom and care. His deeply intelligent, funny, and gracious poems befriend a reader so completely and warmly, we might all have the revelation that our lives are rich poems too. What a gift!”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote: “Against Elegies arises from a sense of curiosity about life in both its plain and puzzling aspects. These poems feel their way forward and are attentive enough to the reader to make us feel included–happy accomplices to his search.”

Richard Jones wrote, “A sweet intelligence and compassionate eye are the hallmark of these wise poems–just the sort of art we need in these dark and unenlightened times.”

And Conrad Hilberry has written “one group of poems is unmatched, I believe, anywhere in American poetry. I mean the sports poems. These bring to the world of midwestern high school basketball the sort of authority, the sure nuance and detail, that the movie Bull Durham brings to minor league baseball. They are so compelling, so varied, so familiar to anyone who knows high school and sports that they may well introduce a new genre.”

Ridl’s speaking calendar and publications list and ordering information are kept up-to-date at www.ridl.com.

Ridl lives along a creek that winds into Lake Michigan with his wife, Julie, two dogs and two cats.