John Cardi, the Theodore Morrisons, and Robert Frost at Bread Loaf.
A Memoir-Review of John Ciardi
I.
Edward Cifelli, in his 1997 John Ciardi, A Biography, did what a biographer is supposed to do. He captured the spirit and essence of his subject. Nearly the whole man is there: the braggart who constantly boasted of being the richest poet in America, the super-overachiever, the workaholic, the public orator and dictatorial director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the loving but seldom-present father who was what the social workers these days call an “enabler,” one who conspires to enable another person or other people to continue in self-destructive behavior, as Ciardi certainly did with his children, perhaps in an attempt to make up for his non-presence, either physical or mental, while he rambled around America and the world making money or sat alone in his study pouring out columns, poems, articles, lectures, book after book.
If my thumbnail sketch leaves a negative taste on the tongue, it is a deliberate effect, intended to mirror what I think may be the effect of Cifelli’s biography on the reader. I can hear that reader saying, “If this is what he was like, then Ciardi deserved to speed downhill, out of control, after his heyday in the 1960’s. He was clearly out of touch with the times, a personality that mirrors all that was worst about the generation of World War II ex-GIs who came home to make a cozy, unthinking success of things.”
But that’s essentially a false impression of John Ciardi. What I miss in the biography is a sense of his sense of humor. It is utterly true that he did all the things Prof. Cifelli says he did, but Ciardi did them drolly, with an air of self-deprecation and satire. He knew he was acting the boor, but he hated boors, and he let you know it. Cifelli properly noted that Ciardi had many, many friends, but the reader may have a hard time understanding why they all loved him so much, so long and so deeply. I would have liked to see more anecdotes in this book, such as this, for instance:
At Bread Loaf in 1961 Robert Huff, Richard Frost and I shared one of the little cottages near Treman Hall. One night we were sitting around reciting limericks to one another and, of course, laughing and carrying on after each one. We were making enough noise to arouse the ire of some women who lived in another cottage close by, and they complained to John that we were making too much noise. John came by — it must have been after ten p.m. — to do his duty and tell us to quiet down. He asked us what we were doing, and after he had fulfilled his function as policeman he sat down with us and began to recite limericks himself from his prodigious memory, most if not all of them original, just as Cifelli has described Ciardi’s doing on other occasions. All those present became, over the course of the next several hours, hysterical to the point that our sides ached. We were making much more noise with John present than we had been making before he arrived. I have no idea what the women did, or how they managed to get any sleep at all that night.
It is true, too, as Cifelli pointed out, that there was a hierarchy at Bread Loaf, but it was much more malleable than it appears to be in this book. That same year, as one of the Poetry Fellows, I was expected to put in time at Treman Hall with the faculty and the other Fellows. Scholars, such as A. R. Ammons, who were a step below, were not allowed in, nor were the Waiters or the conferees of various types, including Contributors and Auditors.
The evening that Robert Frost came by, he was seated in an armchair with a shawl over his knees on one side of the room. I was astonished at the super-sophistication of the staff and fellows: no one except John seemed to pay any attention at all to him. But that there was great awareness of Frost was clear if one looked at what was happening, for the conversation and drinking and walking about were as usual, but there was a clear line of demarcation over which no one stepped: a semicircle around Frost’s chair. Everyone was careful to pretend indifference to Frost. It was a form of fright.
I stood at the edge of the circle staring at Frost who looked very lonely. John went to him and said something and then came toward me. He said something like, “Why don’t you go and talk with Robert? He’s being ignored.” But I was too timid.
John left, I continued standing until I heard Frost mutter, “Won’t someone talk to me?”
I gathered up my courage and went over to introduce myself. “What will we talk about?”
“You start,” he replied, so I told him a story about a woodchuck that had chased my wife once in Connecticut. He responded by telling me something about his adventures the first time he had gone to England. Soon we were joined by two young women, sisters whose names I forget. We talked with Frost almost the whole evening; hardly anyone interrupted the whole time.
Hardly anyone. During the course of the conversation I told Robert that a namesake of his was at the Conference, the young poet Richard Frost who was attending on a Danforth grant, not one of the official Conference fellowships; thus, he was barred from Treman. I asked Ciardi if it would be all right if I brought Dick in to meet Robert, and Ciardi gave the okay. I went and got Dick and a copy of my First Poems, recently published, which I gave Robert as a gift (I was too shy to inscribe it to him) after I had introduced Dick. They exchanged pleasantries, decided that they weren’t related, and Dick left after an interval.
At one point Ciardi came by again and said, “Robert, the Waiters want to sing a song for you.”
Frost said, “All right,” and Ciardi waved the young people in from the front door where they were clustered.
They came in, gathered around us in a semicircle and sang, to the tune of “Hernando’s Hideaway,” “Whose woods, these are, I think I know. / His house, is in, the village though. / He will, not see, me stopping here, / to watch, his woods fill up with snow, Olé!”
Those are some of the reasons I had for loving John Ciardi, who was an unstuffy, funny son-of-a-bitch who would do absolutely anything he could for you if he liked you and if you needed help. Cifelli in his book notes that after that same conference he gave the broke Miller Williams and his wife money to get back home. It was the least he could do since he had talked Miller into coming to Bread Loaf in the first place. That two hundred dollar investment was one of the best Ciardi ever made, and he made many — he wasn’t called “Lucky John” for nothing — for after Ciardi’s reputation had run down to a trickle, Miller kept it alive as publisher of the University of Arkansas Press, a position that was the direct result of the contacts and friendships Miller made at Bread Loaf that year, for at the time he was a high school biology teacher. Within the next year or so Miller made the transition to teaching college English, and Williams in 1997 retired as a Distinguished Professor. It is Arkansas that published Cifelli’s biography, the edition of Ciardi’s The Collected Poems that Cifelli also edited in 1997, and many other books including Vince Clemente’s John Ciardi: Measure of the Man (1987).
Even on the public rostrum, which is mainly how he made his money, Ciardi could be very funny in the midst of a serious lecture. In Cleveland in the early ‘60’s he was giving a talk at John Carroll University. He was doing his famous discussion of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which he pointed out that the form of the poem was an interlocking rubaiyat which should have ended by circling back, in the last quatrain, to the first stanza to pick up the main rhyme again. Instead, Ciardi said, Frost broke the form, and in breaking it made the poem a hundredfold more effective than it would otherwise have been had he maintained the requirements of the rubaiyat.
The house was packed. One of those present (besides my wife and myself) was a woman named “Yetta Blank” (that was really her name), one of those whom Cifelli in his biography characterized as an “arm-grabber.” John recited the first two lines of the last stanza of Frost’s poem, then the third line, “And miles to go before I sleep.” He paused dramatically, looked at the audience and said rhetorically, “Now, how would you have ended that poem?”
Yetta Blank leapt to her feet and called out, “And now I lay me down to sleep?” In the hall, dead silence. Ciardi leaned across the podium, rested on his forearms, lanced her with his gaze and said, “You really think so, huh?” Bedlam. I don’t know how many minutes it was before order was restored, but it is the funniest moment I can recall at a public program, and I have spent a lifetime attending them.
If it is objected that the inclusion of more such incidents (Cifelli does include some) would have unconscionably lengthened the book, then my reply is, cut out some of the many catalogues of Ciardi’s itinerary. They are not exhaustive, but they give the impression that they are. One can only begin skipping and scanning when they arrive periodically throughout the book.
On October 8th 1997 my wife and I went to dinner at a local restaurant with one of our former colleagues at SUNY Oswego, a professor of music. When she asked what I was doing at the moment, I told her I was reading the biography of John Ciardi. “Who is he?” she asked. I could hardly believe she didn’t know. When I told her about the poet’s many books, his magnificent translations of Dante’s great poems, his television program, his “Manner of Speaking” columns in, and his poetry editorship of, The Saturday Review, his radio program on PBS, his books of poetry, of etymology, of children’s verse, his directorship of Bread Loaf, she just shook her head. Then I said, “Don’t you recall that huge flap about Anne Morrow Lindergh’s poetry?” That, finally, rang a bell, but evidently not a very loud one.
II.
John Ciardi was born in 1916 and educated before World War II, first at Bates College which he entered in 1933, and then at Tufts, to which institution he transferred eighteen months later. Edward Krickel, writing in his book John Ciardi (1980), said that at Tufts Ciardi "found in John Holmes, just the teacher one insane adolescent had been starved for." Krickel further observed, "It is a turning point in the development of every budding young intellectual or artist when he finds his first real master. And he is lucky if in his full maturity he can recall the experience with gratitude. Holmes was the first such experience for Ciardi, as Roy W. Cowden of Michigan was to be the second."
Ciardi was loyal to his friends, in particular his early teacher at Tufts John Holmes who wrote personal poems in formal structures. Holmes taught this approach to John Ciardi and to his other pupils at Tufts and elsewhere, including Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, who became known in later years as members of the “Confessional” school of poetry. Like them, Ciardi learned from Holmes how to write the autobiographical poem that told a story or sang a song, but Ciardi was never a breast-beater like Sexton or Sylvia Plath. Nor was Holmes who, during his lifetime, was largely ignored, although a few people (such as yours truly) paid him the compliment of remarking upon his classical New England control over his egopoetic subject matter.
Holmes' Selected Poems was published posthumously, with an introduction titled "A Man's Voice" by John Ciardi, in 1965. In it Ciardi wrote, "Certainly it is a freshet that carries forward the poems of The Fortune Teller [1961]... despite what I feel to be the willful intensity of the title poem. It is still fact that speaks. The instant this voice finds fact to say, it says more than fact. "Order Clearly Asking" might serve as that voice's description of itself and of its purpose: 'It is not style. The design is in the materials."
Holmes was known as a remarkable teacher, but despite his devotion to craft, he too, like Ciardi’s contemporaneous close friend Richard Wilbur and the anathematical Beats, held the creative process in mystic awe and didn't want to scrutinize it too closely. In Ciardi's Mid-Century American Poets (1950) Holmes wrote,
"The fact is that I do not really want to know how and why I write, and I had rather keep my ways and means to myself. A miner, a carpenter knows what he has to work with, and what he can do. Poets don't know; at any rate, I don't. As an additional handicap to my deliberate ignorance, I teach college students how to write poetry. This year-in-year-out gamble is sometimes good for them, sometimes for me. They get the thrill, which I deprecate, of studying poetry with me, an actually published poet, and they get a certain amount of useful suggestion, and not very much severity. I always mean to be severe, and never am."
In his practice, Ciardi made up this deficiency of his teacher, for he could be very severe.
However, this curious example of American poetic double-think, which is far from being idiosyncratic in Ciardi, Holmes, and Wilbur, was the official policy of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference even before Ciardi became its Director and Defender of the Faith. I think it is one of the reasons why Ciardi’s reputation as a teacher diminished so quickly in the 1970s: “It is impossible to teach ‘creative writing’; therefore, it will not be taught (Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference is not a school), but technique will be discussed.” The Beats and the other activists of the 1960s agreed with the first half of this “formula,” but they were more consistent in refusing to teach “technique” either. The split mind of Holmes and Ciardi, it was clear to the younger generation, was hypocritical — either you can teach writing or you can’t; if you can’t, then you must go all the way and abjure craft and formalism. It was a conundrum that Ciardi was unable to resolve, and it led to his becoming more and more irrelevant as time went by. It would have been much better for him if he had not temporized, if he had said, “True, one cannot teach talent, but one can, indeed, give the young poet tools to use in his or her craft.”
In the two years preceding his unexpected death in the spring of 1986 John Ciardi published two books of his poetry. The Selected Poems appeared from Arkansas in 1984; it was Ciardi's first showcase collection since the 1955 As If: Poems New and Selected, and it contained work from that volume as well. The following year, 1985, Ciardi published a book mainly made up of lyrics. He didn't find it necessary to invent new prosodies or forms in order to speak colloquially yet musically — the old forms did very well in The Birds of Pompeii, just as they had done for Ciardi's Bread Loaf colleague of many years, Robert Frost.
When Ciardi wanted to be subjective he understood that he had to sing in order to keep the reader's attention, as in the prophetic "At Least with Good Whiskey":
She gave me a drink and told me she had tried
to read my book but had had to put it down
because it depressed her. Why, she wanted to know,
couldn't I turn my talent (I raised my glass)
to happier things? Did I suppose it was smart
to be forever dying? Not forever,
I told her, sipping; by actuarial tables
ten years should about do it. See what I mean?
she hurried to say — always that terrible sadness.
Well, maybe, I said. (This is good whiskey, I said.)
But ten years, plus or minus, is not much time
for getting it said — do you see what I mean? — which leaves me
too busy to make a hobby of being sad.
He didn’t have ten years.
The one incident that most clearly showed how far from his palmy days as a public figure John Ciardi had fallen took place after his death, at a NEMLA meeting in Boston in 1987. There was to be a session on Ciardi during which Vince Clemente’s book, John Ciardi: Measure of the Man, was to be published by Arkansas. At that time both Vince and I were employed by branches of the State University of New York, and we had both been invited to a conflicting SUNY Writers’ Festival in Binghamton where we were to read and where Allen Ginsberg was to be the featured guest. Vince chose to go to Binghamton to read his poetry instead of attending the NEMLA convention to be present at the birth of his book. I sat with Judith Ciardi and her family while X. J. Kennedy read the main paper of the session. Aside from those people who were officially a part of the program or were associated with the University of Arkansas Press, I was the only member of the audience other than the Ciardis. Judith turned to me and said, “I guess it’s a good thing the family came.”
Here is a limerick I wrote for John long ago, which I have included as his epitaph in the just-published book, Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012, 85 pp., trade paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1, available from Amazon: Epitaphs for the Poets:
R.I.P. JOHN CIARDI
June 24, 1916-March 30, 1986
The lately great limerist Ciardi,
Whose muse was nigh onto untardy,
Whenever he sang
In his New England twang,
Made rum sounds like, "Paw me a toddy."
"A Friend in Need, a Friend Indeed: A Memoir/Review," was originally published in Voices in Italian Americana, ix:1, Spring 1998, pp. 189-195 and collected in A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs by Lewis Turco, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 0965183564, jacketed cloth, $35.95; ISBN 0965183548, paper, $24.95, 254 pages; may be ordered from AMAZON.
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