Interview: Patrick T. Reardon and the Poetry of “Every Marred Thing”

Interview: Patrick T. Reardon and the Poetry of “Every Marred Thing”

 

By Dan Kelly

 

Originally published at Third Coast Review October 8, 2025

Writer Patrick T. Reardon has applied his chops to everything from journalism to regular book reviews for TCR. But his latest work returns to one of his favorite literary forms—poetry.

Writing since age 12, when he had a Father’s Day essay published in his neighborhood newspaper, the adult Reardon worked as a reporter at the Chicago Tribune for 32 years, leaving less time for poetry. Laid off in 2009, Reardon turned to researching and writing about favorite subjects. For instance, public transportation in his book The Loop: The “L” Tracks That Shaped and Saved Chicago.

Reardon eventually found his muse again, contributing poems to various journals and publishing seven collections since 2020. His latest is Every Marred Thing. I spoke with him about the collection and how it reflects today’s America, and more.

 

Talk about Every Marred Thing. What inspired this collection?

In the six previous collections, there were several common themes.  Because I am a lifelong Chicagoan and worked for so long as a reporter in the city, my poetry is deeply rooted in the grit and rust and cement of Chicago, sometimes the actual Chicago and sometimes a mythical Chicago.

Before I became a reporter, I studied for nine years to be a Catholic priest. I stopped four years short of ordination, but I developed a great love and enthusiasm for religious belief and for the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. So, a second theme in my poems has to do with spirituality.

A third theme ties the two of those together: I see all of us — each and every one of us — as part of the same fabric, regardless of politics, demographics, education, sexual orientation, race, whatever. Instead of writing about Them and Us, my focus is on We.  I have friends who write very pointed political poems and we need those kinds of poems, but I don’t do that, unless you consider that writing about how we are all connected is a kind of political statement.

But, then, amid all of the hyper-partisanship of the long lead-up to the 2024 election, I decided to write a poem that would comment on the country’s political landscape, and the result was “In those days,” which begins:

In those days, the self-afflicted were loud

like a rat caught in the dark pipe.

 

In those days, the dead buried the dead.

 

…I saw anger eaten with relish and

vomited with shouts of joy.

Eventually, I decided to build a manuscript around “In those days,” setting the poem in the center of a lot of poems that dealt with my usual themes, so they could talk to each other, in a way.

What’s an example of these other poems in the collection?

“Brick wall sculpture” starts: “Read the brick wall scripture,” and, in a few lines, gets to

At the ward yard,

city-blue trucks write psalmist lines in rock salt,

sing solemnities of garbage, asphalt, rat poison,

tree removal, votes, street-line paint

and precinct-captain doorbell-ringing.

The next line is “Every winged thing, every scarred thing,” and this begins a refrain that echoes every few verses or so, a refrain of “every” things, such as “Every crackling thing, every thing that chirps/every sick thing.”

These “every” lines were inspired by the story of creation in the Book of Genesis. In fact, there’s a kind of call and response between these “every” lines and other scenes in the poem, such as

Every stolid thing, every tall thing,

every thing close to the earth, every fragile thing.

 

A tender shoot from concrete, tall weed,

tight with yellow blossoms tense to transfiguration.

And the ending of the seven-page poem brings us the title of the book:

Prostrate yourself face-down

on the sanctified skin of cement sidewalk,

arms above your head in obeisance.

Every thing ordained. Every grit thing.

Every thing that holds its breath waiting.

Every thing that feels blessed pain.

 

Every marred thing.

Every thing born immaculate.

 

When you write, how do you prepare and what do you require?

Much of my initial writing takes place at McDonald’s where I’ll scribble something on a brown napkin and then something else and eventually may have four or six napkin sides with words and phrases, usually images in a riff, like jazz.

Or maybe I’m at Mass on Sunday and, on a scrap of paper, write down an idea or image that’s suggested by one of the pulpit readings or a stained-glass window or a memory.

Sometimes, I’ll take the napkins or paper scraps and, on my phone, type them into an email to myself. Also, I’ve had it happen that, while driving, I’ll pull over to the curb and say into a draft email in my phone some lines and ideas and send them to myself.

Either way, when I get to my PC, I’ll paste the email or type the napkins and scraps into a new document and then see what I can do with what I have. Often, I’ll take a draft and email it to myself and then work on it on my phone when I’m out and then update the working document on the PC back and forth until the poem feels done.

One thing, I find, that’s a requirement is to see the poem in several formats — on my PC screen, as a print-out, as an email in my phone. These different perspectives help me spot or come up with more and better ways for the words in the poem to connect.

 

In your opinion, what is the standout poem in the book? Walk us through it.

I’ve talked about “In those days” and “Brick wall scripture.”  One that I like a lot that it rather different is called “Precious chemistry,” and it features a little more than 50 very short lines of two or three words that comprise a single sentence. It begins:

The fireflies slash

a dogma across

backyard dark,

prophets of light

from light, true

moon from true

moon and night

sky light across

the face of the

deep, celestial

body of old high

school boy aimless

and unconsoled,…

This is the first of three men who appear in the poem.  He’s a high school classmate I had lunch with more than half a century after we graduated. And, as we sat, he was “announcing to me/the freight train/of his sorrows like/a fold-up timetable…”

This leads to

…my sweet

brother who

hummed with

bottled anguish,

compressed fury,

who shook, at the

end, with brittle

superstructure

when he held my

face in his weak

hands over the

phone, when he

knew where to

find the gun…

My brother David and I had a phone conversation a few hours before he took his life, and he often appears in my poetry.

And this leads to another high school friend, “the librarian who,/when all the/cuttings were/over, was tired,/went home, died/in five minutes…”

And the poem concludes with me and these three —

each of us, a

tiny firefly of

precious chemistry,

incubating, birthing,

mating and then

darkness, so much

for dogma, scripture

and freight trains

of sorrow.

There’s a palpable sadness to the poem, but also a sense of how the four of us and the fireflies and, by extension, all of nature are connected, how we are each a bit of light in the darkness and how, even though death comes for each of us, we have these moments to slash our dogma while we can, light from light.

 

Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish I had asked?

When I write prose, I have to think a certain way, rooted in logic.  When I write poetry, I have to think in another way, rooted in a willingness to leap beyond reason and rationality.  Both ways of thinking, however, influence the other.