eulogy for Ottone Riccio

Going to a funeral service Thursday for my old friend and mentor Ottone "Ricky" Riccio. Wrote this --


Like many of us, I first knew Ricky through his writing – in the beginning was the word – and then as a student, and then as a friend. Most of his students were his friends soon enough.

I had stopped writing poetry as a conscious decision in 1970, when I started writing fiction for a living, unwilling to serve two masters. But about ten years later I picked up Ricky's Intimate Art, because it looked so interesting, and his generous enthusiasm drew me back into poetry.

In 1983 I moved to Cambridge to teach at MIT, and while I was killing time in a coffee house, ran across a listing for Ricky's class. I walked in the next day, unannounced and late, and by the weirdest of coincidences they happened to be studying one of my poems.

Ricky didn't think that was odd at all. He believed that there were mysterious forces at work in all our lives, and we don't have to understand them to benefit from them.

I'm a skeptical scientist by training and nature, but I didn't really disagree with him, and still don't. Just because we can't put a name to something doesn't mean it isn't real.

What name would you put to the thing that Ricky did? He was a public poet, and a teacher – but that simple word doesn't well describe what he did so well. If poetry was an intimate art to him, so was teaching, and anyone who sat down in a classroom with him was accepted as a confidante, a potential fellow rebel, but not one without a cause.

There's no simple word for that cause, but everyone who knew him knew what a broad net he cast. Humanism and forbearance were there, but outrage was there, too, and an unwillingness to suffer fools. He didn't mind people who were ignorant – he would be with Will Rogers on that; "we're all ignorant, only on different subjects" – but he had no patience for people who did know better, but acted worse. He didn't praise many politicians – or any bankers.

(Actually, he probably would praise a banker if the banker had room in his heart for poetry. He loved the paradox of Wallace Stevens, the insurance salesman who wrote quiet meditative poems.)

For half a century, Ricky tried to help people find their individual voices through poetry, and he had dozens, maybe hundreds of successes in that endeavor. The world is a smaller and much less generous place without him.

Joe