Jack

Author’s Note: Jack Ridl is a frequent commenter on the Reformed Journal. I thought our readers would enjoy knowing more about him.

When he was 19, Jack Ridl climbed into the top bunk of his college room and opened a book by Reinhold Niebuhr. His next memory is of waking up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital. Thirteen electric shock treatments followed. In today’s world of psychiatry, electric shock treatments are humane and often very helpful. That was not the case in 1963.

He’d been found catatonic. Following the electric shock treatments, he stayed in the hospital for two more weeks.

Now 80, Ridl is one of the nominees to be Michigan’s second Poet Laureate (“Why would they ever choose an 80-year-old white guy?” he asks) and is awaiting the October publication of his latest collection, All at Once, from CavanKerry Press. Ridl has published eight books of poetry, three chapbooks, three anthologies, and two textbooks—one on poetry and one on literature, that have been reprinted multiple times.

How did he get from there to here? I’ve been ruminating lately on the rejections, absurdities, and moments of grace that could make someone a poet. What forces send a person into this difficult art, where anonymity is assured and financial reward all but nonexistent? How does the stuff of life become this particular craft?

A few years ago, Ridl wrote a poem called “After the Thirteenth Shock Treatment”:

I asked for two fried egg sandwiches,

and a blueberry milkshake. I got soup.

And it was raining, so instead of trying

again to read Middlemarch,

I lay on my side and watched the rain

glide down the window. I used to love

to go outside. My sister was a high school

cheerleader, someone everyone loved

to be around—if anything was good,

it was great. I needed to know. My God

spoke only in doubt. The nerves at the ends

of my fingers never slept, and when my fists

bloodied my forehead, only the comfort

of bandages let me look out across

over the parking lot, out over the vans, Audis,

and pickups into the trees where I could

see how the leaves held to the limbs.

At home my father stayed alone in his

gardens. My mother carried her knitting

to a neighbor’s and talked about dinner.

                                                                                     for Rebecca Klott[1]

I will come back to the nerves at the ends of his fingers, but am immediately intrigued by the poem’s treatment of his parents. I ask Ridl, “What did your parents say when you came out of the hospital?”

“Nothing,” he says. “They never talked about it. I think internally they wondered, ‘Why us?’” On another occasion (Ridl was placed in psychiatric hospitalization five times over 20 years), a hospital in Pittsburgh invited them to do family therapy. They declined. “But they would put me in the car and drive me to the hospital. They just wouldn’t talk about it.” We all have our own coping strategies. How did Ridl’s parents’ way of dealing with pain affect him?

“When I was a teenager, I thought I had the wrong parents. I wanted to talk about heavy things, but my father’s background was sports and things practical, not the things I had questions about, like politics, sex, and religion. And then add in the arts. How could they know what to do with me? I didn’t fit. My dad would say, ‘It’s getting dark, better mow the lawn,’ and I’d say, ‘But I want to know where Jesus got his ideas.’

“In my 50s, I began to realize it wasn’t that I had the wrong parents. It was that they had the wrong son. My sympathy changed towards them. I was just the wrong kid for them.”

Jack’s father, Buzz Ridl, cast a long shadow. He was a star basketball player at Westminster College outside Pittsburgh, and went into the Army after graduating in 1942. He became the white captain of an all-Black company that fought across Europe and then was sent to the Philippines immediately after VE Day. After the Army and a couple of jobs, Ridl became assistant basketball coach at Westminster and then head basketball coach in 1956 (and, Westminster being a small college, an assistant with the football team and head baseball coach as well). Ridl took his basketball team to the NAIA Final Four on multiple occasions and his 1962 squad was named by the UPI the nation’s top small-college team.

In 1968, Buzz Ridl became the head basketball coach at the University of Pittsburgh, successfully moving to the upper echelons of college basketball. His 1974 team made the Men’s NCAA Basketball Tournament Elite Eight, featuring the innovative “Amoeba Defense” Ridl had created.

“My dad had a brilliant mind for sports,” Jack says. “But he was always more comfortable with his players than me. Everything would change when one of his players walked into the house. My dad would come alive. I was good at sports but I was never comfortable as an athlete. I would stand at shortstop saying, ‘Ihope they don’t hit it to me.’ It was too risky—I never wanted to fail in front of him.”

Buzz Ridl met Betty Rogers while they were students at Westminster–they sat by one another in daily chapel. She was the life of the party, they became sweethearts, and won the college jitterbug contest. They married in 1943, when Buzz had a few days leave from the Army. Their son Jack was born in April, 1944.

Betty was an only child who had a strong attachment to her father, who contracted tuberculosis and died two weeks before Christmas, 1944. She was devastated by the loss, which was compounded by her husband being unavailable in Europe.

“My mother declared,” Jack says, “that she was never going to love anyone again—except her husband—after her father’s death. She wouldn’t hold me. My grandmother did that. To her dying day, I can’t remember her hugging me. She never hugged my wife. We could hug her, but she would stiffen up. I don’t remember if she ever told me she loved me.”

I am also intrigued by Ridl’s very specific recollection of reading Niebuhr when he went catatonic. “I’d been following an Evangelical youth minister,” he says, “who really was teaching us to follow him instead of Jesus. There were six of us in the group, but I was by far the most committed. We were, in a way, culted. When I got to college, the youth pastor was saying to reject any religious ideas other than his. I’d been assigned Niebuhr and as I read, I couldn’t reject what I was reading. The result was what they called, at the time, a nervous breakdown.”

Is there a thread between the nerves on his fingers never sleeping—which one could read as a poetic expression of having a heightened sensitivity—and Jack being the member of the youth group who was traumatized by the experience?

Knowing full well that a diagnosis can be both a prison and the key that unlocks the prison, I ask Jack about his diagnosis. “I’ve had a lot of diagnoses,” he says. “My illness came at the very beginning of working with the mentally ill as medical patients. My doctors were trying to figure things out. The diagnosis that has stuck is panic attacks. And then, with everything they put me through—not just the shock treatments but all the different medications. . .” His words trail off and he pauses. “I had to go cold turkey once and at another point they had to restrain me up against a wall—that was worse than shock treatment, that was the worst physical experience I’ve ever had. The end result of everything I have gone through, from my childhood to ‘try this drug, try that drug,’ is post-traumatic stress disorder. For that, I’ve worked with a therapist doing the specific therapy EMDR. It’s been effective. At one point in my life the PTSD was always there. Now it doesn’t incapacitate me. Every once in a while there is a trigger, but I know how to make it dissipate. Without question, though, the most important cause of my healing and continued mental health has been my wife, Julie. We’ve been together for 44 years. When you’re recovering from mental illness, you wonder what normal is. With remarkable patience, Julie has provided that affirmation.”

After college, Jack worked at Colgate University and then at the University of Pittsburgh in admissions. He also started writing song lyrics and imagined he might have a career as a songwriter. Eventually, song lyrics led him to poetry. The poet Paul Zimmer was the director of the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Ridl took him a handful of poems. Zimmer read them and said, “I’ll help you, but let’s start over.” Jack was full of sensitivity and good intentions but had little idea what poetry was. Zimmer had him read other poets, and Ridl was like an eager intro to poetry student, taking everything in. Zimmer was kind and patient, and after 17 months of working together, Zimmer told Jack he had finally written a poem. It took a long time, but Zimmer had brought poetry out of Jack Ridl. Jack wondered what he should pay Zimmer, and it turned out he had something Zimmer wanted—access to the basketball team’s locker room. Zimmer wanted an inside look at big-time college sports.

In 1971, Ridl entered into conversations with Hope College in Holland, Michigan, about becoming their admissions director, even though Ridl’s interest in admissions was waning. What he really wanted was to write and teach, and as it turned out, Hope was also looking for a working poet in the English department. Through several twists and turns, Ridl was hired onto the faculty. He taught at Hope for 37 years, and along with his poetry collections and other books, over 300 of his poems have been published in journals and magazines. Four of his poetry collections have won national awards. In 1996, the Carnegie Foundation named Ridl “Michigan Professor of the Year.” Over 100 of his students have been published and 91 have earned MFAs.  

“I don’t think of myself as a teacher,” Jack says. “I’m a poetry coach. It turns out I learned that from my father. Poetry is not like math or history, where there is a curriculum the teacher is trying to get across to a class. Instead, my focus is individualized, like how my father coached. He was player-centric. He studied each player and tried to help each be the best he could be. That trickled down to me. I work to bring out each unique voice.”

I can’t quite get over the misfit kid in the psychiatric ward becoming such a prolific poet and teacher. I wonder about a correlation between creativity and mental illness, and ask Ridl if he thinks there is a relationship. He doubts it: “I hosted a lot of writers at the college over the years. Sure, plenty of them were eccentric. Galway Kinnell showed up carrying only a Dopp kit. Joy Harjo asked where the nearest rollercoaster was. Another didn’t want to stay around breakable antiques. But that didn’t make them mentally ill.”

And yet I wonder if the heightened sensitivity that left him vulnerable hasn’t also led to the gift he gives the world through his poetry.

“What poets need is empathy,” Ridl says. “And empathy can be painful, difficult. But suffering doesn’t necessarily make someone a poet. Lots of people suffer and don’t write poetry. Empathy matters. A wide range of empathic responses can lead to transforming a wide range of experiences into poetry. My mental illness and the 20 years of attempts to explain it and rid it from me are simply experiences I draw from, something many would understandably refrain from exploring. I decided it might be helpful to others were I to be open about my illness. Getting the subject ‘out there’ in order to make people comfortable talking about it is important. And for those who have been mentally ill, it’s important for them in overcoming their own self-consciousness in social situations, and the unfortunate stereotypes offered when some fear the ‘other.’

“I’ve been relatively okay for 38 years. When I was younger, I kept making the mistake of going back to my parents’ home and expecting them to parent me. A breakthrough came when a therapist said to me, ‘You’re an orphan.’ Then he told me to go visit those people and have a good time with them. That shift enabled me to have an easier relationship with them.”

The misfit kid found his place in the misfit world of poetry. “After about 20 years,” he says, “with poetry at the center of most of what I do, I recognized I was thinking in poetry. It’s like becoming fluent in another language. I never look at something as an ‘it.’ I see something sacred in most everything. Most poets start with something small and make it big. I start with something huge—like I have a poem called ‘Love Poem’—and by the end it’s so small that it ends with, ‘Never say anything more lovely than garage door.’”

 Another mark of his work is putting together things that don’t go together. “Things ripple out, and everything is connected. People say, ‘Those things don’t go together,’ but for me, everything goes together. That’s a gift from my childhood.”

This is Jack Ridl: The baby whose mother wouldn’t hold him; the coach’s kid who didn’t feel likean athlete, the teenager who couldn’t figure out how he fit in that family, the college student whose heightened sensitivity led him to endure 13 shock treatments, the would-be songwriter who turned into a poet, the poet who has suffered but insists suffering doesn’t make someone a poet, the teacher who has brought poetry out of hundreds of students, the 80-year-old who has things to say.  

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[1]  Jack Ridl, St. Peter and the Goldfinch (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2019), 23. Rebecca Klott is a psychoanalyst. In the poem, Reinhold Niebuhr has become Middlemarch.