Jack Ridl
Literary Life
758 Wealthy St SE, Grand Rapids
Dec. 17, 7 p.m.
literarylifebookstore.com, (616) 458-8418
Jack Ridl knows his way around both the basketball court and the English classroom. His newest work, Losing Season, combines Ridl's great love of both poetry and basketball in a way that is nothing if not unique.
His latest collection, Losing Season, takes the form of poetry-as-chronicle. It's the story of one year with a high school basketball team in small-town America. In each poem, Ridl takes an aspect of the sport-how it feels to take down competition in a hard-fought battle, or what impact a tiny mistake on the court or off can make in that final game-and illuminates it, bringing it to a greater audience. After all, it's not too often a poet picks up a basketball, or a player picks up a volume of sonnets or a quill and parchment. So for the unlikely bedfellows of poetry and sports to meld so naturally is truly remarkable, and well worth a second look, even if you'd rather just stay on the court for another hour or two.
Ridl is a former Hope College professor and the co-writer of several academic volumes on writing and poetry collections. His recently released Losing Season is a follow up to his last lauded work, Broken Symmetry.
By taking a look at his awards shelf, the poet can boast that he's been named one of the 100 most influential sport educators in America by the Institute of American Sport, Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation, and Favorite Professor by perhaps his most important audience, his former students at Hope. And when it comes to a love of sports, and basketball specifically, it's in his blood. His father, Buzz Ridl, once coached the University of Pittsburgh's basketball team.
Before Losing Season, Ridl toyed with a similarly unlikely combination of topics: mathematics and language. Broken Symmetry, the fruits of his labor, sheds light on differing perspectives on our surrounding world. It's a topic similar to what Ridl covered in his chapbook Be tween, a mark of a promising career and poet on the rise if there ever was one.
