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Remembering John
Ciardi Opening the blinds
above my desk to get a good look at the winter’s first snow, I pause and find
John Ciardi, smiling down at me in a photo taken that Sunday in June, 1984 at
our Setauket, Long Island home. John is wearing a burgundy sport jacket and
is smiling broadly, vital and robust; the Japanese azalea to his left, a
vivid lavender, shim-mers. The inscription reads: “For Vince Clemente my best
2nd friend.” Hard to believe John
has been gone eight years now, but his wife Judith did call from their
Metuchen, New Jersey home, that Monday morning, last day in March, 1986. I
can still hear her voice: “Vince, is that you? Now, I want you to sit down.
Are you sitting down, Vince?” I thought John had been nominated for a
National Book Award or for a Pulitzer, but her voice told me otherwise. “John
is dead, a massive heart attack—last night.” And the world I had been
carrying with me since I was twenty, a trainee in the 716 MP Battalion,
reading John Ciardi for the first time, by flashlight, and long after lights
out, ended. I felt as if someone had driven a Mack truck through my rib-cage. My life with the man
began in 1953, during an unscheduled company inspection, my final week of
basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Ideally suited to be a chaplain’s
assistant, I nonetheless, trained as a combat MP. I close my eyes and see the lunatic as clearly as if he had
walked through my study door—the Company Commander, Col. Walter “Moonstruck”
Murphy, storming through the barracks, the morning’s harvest, my well-worn
copy of John Ciardi’s Mid-Century
American Poets snug under his meaty arm, hanging there like a trophy.
Since it was standard policy that recruits weren’t allowed to keep
books—other than government issued—in their footlockers, I was given company
punishment. Confined to quarters for three weeks, I scoured pots, pans, and
bread tins until my wrists ached. First free weekend, though, I hitchhiked
along the Jersey Turnpike to New York City, to the Strand book shop on 12th
and Broadway. In no time, I had found another copy of Mid-Century along with John’s Live
Another Day and From Time to Time—books
I have to this day. I finally connected
with the flesh-and-blood man in 1978. He wrote, thanking me for a copy of my
own book, Songs from Puccini. Many
more letters followed (I have over eighty-five), some phone calls, and I was
back on the Jersey Turnpike again, this time headed for Metuchen, home of
John and Judith Ciardi. He was there to meet
me, wearing a white cardigan sweater, much like the man I had grown to know
in all those dust-jacket photos. Karl Shapiro, in The Bourgeois Poet, once described John as a “lover of gab and
gag . . . heart like a halfback.” John was about sixty-six at the
time, and although not formally teaching, had made the world, at large, his
classroom. He was still a great talker, especially about poetry and language
and children—and with a “heart like a halfback.” Oh, he was formidable:
barrel-chested, still a hulk of a man, looking like one more accustomed to
hard labor than to the “serious play” of a poet-philologist. “A word-freak
with all my bills paid,” he liked to describe himself, those last years. His
eyes shone as he quipped and joked. We hit it off at once: we were friends. It was a long visit,
and we were now in the living room drinking the espresso he had just made. At
end of day, he was relaxing in his favorite chair, the room a rosy glow. I’m
sure it was his red suspenders, the white cardigan left behind in the
kitchen. It was a good visit—such shoptalk—and I hated leaving, dreading the
interminable ride back to Long Island, and already missing him. “But before you
leave, I want to show you this, Vince.” He coaxed down from a glass cabinet
above him a mahogany plaque. “I’m really proud of this,” he beamed. It read: FOR JOHN CIARDI AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN POETRY FOR
CHILDREN NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH 1982 He
had told me earlier that day how “The critics have screwed up our view of
poetry—but the kids have a fresh eye. Why, I’d rather grab them than Helen
Vendler.” Now I recall how just four months before his death, he sent an
inscribed copy of—what was to be his last book for children—Doodle Soup, with the inscription:
“For Wee Vinnie and Lil Annie with doodles of love, Johnny Ciardi, Age 69
1/2.” And, knowing my passion for book collecting, he had written out the
lines: How
old am I? I really don’t know, But I can tell you I have spent My
whole life—up to a minute ago— Being younger than I am now. I Meant To
keep it that way, I suppose, But that’s how it is with time—it
goes. I
guess, only a man, who didn’t “know” his age could continue to write poems
for children, even into his seventh decade. And I remember
another Metuchen visit, this time in John’s attic study, a suite of three
rooms, really. Knowing my interest in Whitman he paused, searched through a
closet mortised with folders, many hundred, and somehow found the one he
wanted me to open. “Here, Vince, I think you’d get a kick out of this.” And I
did, for I soon had in my hands the 1869 “Moses” photo of Whitman, the one
signed by Walt himself, a gift to John from the Whitman collector Charles E.
Feinberg. But there was more.
Before I left, he pointed to a pile of brown-leather books, in the corner
under a window overlooking the garden. “Here, take them; they’ll do better
with you.” How can I ever thank him: a gift of the ten volume, Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, the
1902 G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Knickerbocker Press edition. And before I left, he
inscribed Volume 1, “for Vince from John, Sept. 1981, Hail the Big Voice!”
More than Walt’s “Big Voice”: he had given me John Ciardi’s notes on reading
Whitman. In January 1986, just
two months before his death and about the time I began working on a John
Ciardi Festschrift that was later published by University of Arkansas Press
as the memorial volume John Ciardi:
Measure of the Man, he invited Annie and me to his Key West home. The
cottage was ours for two weeks while John and Judith were at Miami for one of
John’s speaking engagements. My daughter Gina had been ill for much of the
year, and John felt the Florida sun would do us all much good. Of course he
was right. John Ciardi was no
cartographer, but his earliest military training was in navigation, so he
alerted us to the perils of Florida driving with a half dozen maps, warning
me, that were I to take a wrong turn, I would find myself in an “old
cemetery, never to be found.” Right again! I did, however, extricate the
family and soon found the cottage. On the kitchen table
propped under a vase of just-picked flowers, was a long note, John insisting
that he was “not the best of house-keepers.” He went on to say, “Please don’t
tell Judith I mismatched the sheets and pillow cases. She’d scold me.” Not
only had he gotten us here safely from Setauket, Long Island, tidied up the
house, stuffed the fridge with enough good food to take us into the
summer—the man had made our beds. As I write this, I recall what the novelist
John Williams had said in Measure of
the Man, remembering John at Bread Loaf: “The salient quality of the
man’s character is loyalty.” And didn’t he call
one night, after the evening news report of the devastating hurricane damage
on Long Island, imploring us to “pack a bag” and stay with them, and “for as
long as you want, Vince,” he added. John Ciardi was that tutor in the ways of
loyalty. I spent hours in his
study, the size of a monk’s cell, really, certain not to disturb things, all
the works in progress: a mound of new children’s poems, etymological notes
for Browser’s III, drafts of new
poems for a volume after The Birds of
Pompeii, sketches for lectures, letters to publishers and editors and
friends. And all this spilled out of his study and into the cottage. Every
corner was a writing station. And every corner held the man who carried with
him, always, the earth trace, and for all of us in his debt, a way, a rhumb
line, a path of sure-footing. John and Judith did
finally get to our home. It was the first weekend in June 1984, the weekend
he was to be honored at the Walt Whitman Birthplace as its fourth
Poet-in-Residence. A trustee, I helped with publications, with the visiting
writers program, and wanted that John be so honored—was there an American
poet more deserving? The Ciardis were our house guests. I recall how we
walked along Stony Brook Village, stopping for ice cream at the County
Kettle, how John (already having problems with his legs) enjoyed the walk
from the fire station to Stony Brook Harbor, pointing out to Annie and me the
poplars and giant silver beech along the way, the thrasher in a juniper
bough. How he loved the telling, like Adam in Paradise called upon to name
his helpers. Next day, that first
Sunday in June, I introduced John to an overflow audience at Sweet Hollow
Hall, at West Hills, a chapel-like building, all green and piney and just a
brisk walk to the Birth-place, for his talk and reading. Later that day we
met at the Birthplace with an invited group of Long Island poets, published,
serious poets, as well as youngsters from local high schools and colleges for
some good shop-talk. John remembered Whitman as the “consummate craftsman,”
and knew lines and sections of poems by heart. And then on to his favorite
subject, that all-illusive “poem-ness” in poetry, what he learned to call the
last years of his life, that “prayer behind the prayer.” A few days later, he
wrote from Metuchen: The Birthplace is
impressive! How on earth did time manage to freeze around it leaving it so
substantially as it must have been in 1820, while everything else went weedy
and modern around it? It must have been a remote farmhouse. Did the land ever
stretch to Long Island Sound. . . . But didn’t there have to be
some Whitman admirer and benefactor to preserve the place from the building
that went on across the street? “Across
the street,” Old Walt Whitman Road, is a garage, a deli, a print shop. The
apple orchards beyond the house in Whitman’s childhood, “The orchards of the
spheres” in his poems, is now Route 110 that stretches not to Long Island
Sound, but to the Walt Whitman Mall, a colossal complex, the size of an
airport: Paumanok’s memorial to its Bard. As part of his
residency, I asked John to write a brief piece about Whitman. I remembered,
though, how he once said in a letter that he felt like “a Byzantine standing
before an Apache chief,” and how Whitman represented “an enormous something” to him. John never quite
knew what to make of Walt, but reading his annotated Whitman, I found he was
warming up to the “Apache,” discovering what they shared as American poets:
faith in the experience and language of common people, belief in the miracle
of the quotidian. I looked forward to his comments, then, and since they
represent his final words on Whitman, include them here: Walt Whitman was
the last American artist who was able to pose as the limitless man. It was a
pose, to be sure—a pose and the press agentry for it—yet the sense of
limitless and divine purpose was deeply, if briefly, implicit in our new
continental nation. We were a new stage and possibility for mankind.
Political rhetoric lowered gaudy on that assumption. Whitman grew firm to
that illusion but brought it to a daring and painstaking craft of a master
artist. For never let it be forgotten that behind the pose of his impromptu,
Whitman at his best was a meticulous worker who spent most of his life at
bone-hard revision. I find his poetry overwhelming and over
powering. In one sense it is like a hypnotic and endless tribal dance. It
seizes my body rhythms and carries me off. But I am a breed of lesser men,
and I must soon drop off exhausted. Yet my exhaustion never fails to place me
more securely within my smallness. Not too long ago I
received in the mail from University of Arkansas Press The Selected Letters of John Ciardi, jolted yet pleased by the
cover: a young John Ciardi—age of my daughters—cigarette in hand, looking
more like a matinee movie idol (at Tufts, he did play Troc in Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset, indeed living the part)
or a burly hockey player, out of place in worsted suit and matching tie, than
as a young poet. But it was John, all right, and I found that the editor had
included eleven letters to Vince Clemente, in addition to John’s last,
written just four days before his Easter Sunday death. The complete
Ciardi-Clemente letters, eighty-five or so, touch upon many things: poetry;
marriage and children; Whitman and other American poets like Eberhart,
MacLeish, Wilbur, Wheelock, Karl Shapiro; etymology and the pure fun of word
tracking; my work on the Ciardi Festschrift that became a memorial volume.
If, however, there is a taproot, a preoccupation, it must be our shared
common heritage: American-Italian, working class; in fact, our long
conversation began with this “Italian Thing,” nothing more than the Henry
James’s notion that it is indeed “a complex fate being an American.” Somehow,
his own “complex fate,” was inextricably tied to his volume of verse, Lives of X, certainly his masterwork,
his “lost child,” and an authentic neglected American classic—Huck Finn come
to Medford, Massachusetts. I fired off my first
letter to Metuchen in the fall of 1978, along with a copy of my own little
volume of verse, Songs from Puccini.
(The book’s argument is in its epigraph: “The only music I can make is of
small things.” Puccini said that, but I also had Ciardi in mind, who all his
writing life, insisted we “keep the poem lifesize.”) In the letter I spoke
about John’s writing an introduction to an anthology of American-Italian
poets I was preparing, a project, I fear, never realized. It was here,
though, that I introduced the subject that would occupy us until John’s
death, our common forebears. This is what he had to say in his initial letter,
dated November 10, 1978: It isn’t that I am L’italiano dirazzato [of the Italian
race], though I guess I am. Though I also know I am not. I have poured out
endless poems about the Italian “Roots.” Yet Jefferson, Tom Paine, and
even—God save the mark, Emerson—are as much at the roots of my mind and
feeling as the It of my Am. . . . I took the whole crew to
Italy some years back to give them that memory, but when my surviving cousins
began to overflow upon us, they couldn’t believe it. I confess that even I
felt I had been time machined back to the egg and had been born again in the
Middle Ages. And add that, in part, I loved it. Yet it is no longer my way. I
know how to let it echo in me like memory I am glad to have summoned. You mention the complexity of being an
ethnic. . . . Have I been so arrogantly introspective that I
never noticed. I am an American man of letters. My most revered friend is
Archibald MacLeish. I kid him for wearing a Scotch cap and we laugh together.
Perhaps I’ve been blinded by habituation. About two weeks
later, I received another letter, John insisting, “We are the children del cafone [of peasants]. We may have
found a cultural continuity by ourselves, but it is not an ethnic tradition.”
He paused, then summoned up a long-ago note from the poet Robert Lowell,
praising the “Italo-Amer. voice” in his poem “S.P.Q.R. A Letter from Rome.”
The “praise” Lowell had in mind, missed its mark with John: I had a longish
poem about Italy in the Atlantic
some years back, and when Robert Lowell wrote to praise its Italo-Amer.
voice, I took offense. Did the S.O.B. suppose I had used an Amer. Eng.
inferior to his, or that I inherited and made mine less Amer. Eng. than his?
Well, even the good ones can be fools. No doubt the Lowell
remarks cut deeply, for in a letter almost five years later, anticipating the
reviews for his soon-to-be published Selected
Poems, he again had Lowell on his mind: If anyone reviews
it [Selected Poems], I suspect much
will be said about how Italian it is. Which it is. But that will also exactly
miss the point. Lowell exactly missed it once . . . wrote to say
the “S.P.Q.R. A Letter from Rome” was the best Italian-American poem he had
read. As if he wrote Amer. and I wrote Italo-Amer. Well, yes and no. About the
way Archie MacLeish, bless great memory, wore a tam with a Scottish clan
emblem. Mine was a pick and shovel rampant, gold on a dinner pail ebony. Whatever this
“Italian Thing,” it was an ambiguity never resolved, yet always deeply felt,
and for both of us, to the very heart-wood of our Being. In another letter,
he said: As a kid, I was
sometimes snubbed by fools (ours was an Irish neighborhood, though mixed),
but I knew them to be fools, and I had my attention to form. A sort of ethnic
pride is fine—I feel happily not-at-home in Italy—but only up to a point of
asserting one ethnic set to be better than another, at which point it becomes
xenophobia. One doesn’t love Yeats and hate the Irish, or love Dante and
scorn the Italians. One recognizes that every culture has a top and a bottom,
and that one’s attention should be aimed at the top. John Ciardi was no
whiner, but few things in life disappointed him as much as the failure of his
“gut book,” Lives of X, to find its
audience. Published in 1971, it is the only Ciardi volume of verse, prior to
the 1984 Selected Poems, not to go
beyond a first printing. Late in 1979, I had
given two lectures on John Ciardi, at local Long Island libraries, of course,
focusing on Lives. I wrote John
about my deep pleasure of “rediscovering” the book, after a first—and
cursory—reading in 1971. He wrote: My book Lives of X was autobiographical, and
went as deep as I could reach into roots. I gave it everything I had. I will
even claim that I brought to American poetry a kind of fictional technique
that amounted to multiple technical expansion. No book of mine was more
important to me and none was ever more thoroughly ignored. Just
two months later, he added: I did something in that book, and though I’m
not a stewer or haggler, the thoroughness with which it was ignored left me
feeling as if my pocket had been picked. . . . It’s not too
fancy to say, in a sense, that I wrote the book for you. For myself, of
course, but for some multiple self that includes you, all of us. Thank you
for taking in my lost child. And in his last
reference to Lives, in a January
1984 letter that began, “I am beginning to be an old man,” he went on to say,
“What the hell: I wrote it in a wild, wonderful, prolonged
entrancement. . . . I’d give much to find myself so empowered
again.” In his last letter,
just four days before his death, he had just returned from a speaking tour,
“the lecher circuit,” he called it, seriously ill with the flu, he wrote: “I
just don’t have Sgt. Ciardi’s resilience these days—nor the bastard’s legs.”
He went on, to wish me well, working on the festschrift, and that the book
“bring you sweet rewards in addition to those you and Annie have in one
another.” He signed off, his last words to me, recalling his old Bread Loaf
friend, Robert Frost: “With Frost I find it is time to bow and accept the end
of a season.” John knew it was time, his time, “To yield with a grace to
reason, / And bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?” The program read,
“Celebration of Life: In Memory of John Ciardi.” I was the first peaker, to
be followed by the poet-cardiologist, John Stone, then by Isaac Asimov, who
was “too ill to travel.” I was not prepared for Kirkpatrick Chapel at Rutgers
University, nor for the weather that twenty-fourth day in September 1986. It
felt like July 24—it was that hot, intolerable, and the Chapel was the size
of a cathedral. First to speak, standing at the podium, I felt diminutive,
out of place—an interloper. Then it hit me: I was at the very spot, clinging
to the very podium, where in 1958 John introduced Robert Frost. The talk I
had memorized, I had suddenly forgotten; luckily I had a copy with me, but it
took a while locating the thing. Judith Ciardi nodded,
I began, “‘Words alone are certain good’, some for my friend John Ciardi.” I
was certain not to go beyond my allotted eight minutes—the longest eight
minutes of my life—now reading from a text I had memorized, at odds with my
own words, ending with a poem I had written for the occasion, “In Ciardi’s
Attic Study.” I returned to my seat, embarrassed, certain not a single
individual in the crammed chapel heard a word I had uttered. My worst fears
were confirmed, as I was to learn later that day: the mike was turned down so
low, my flickering voice was barely audible. I like to believe, however, that
the day was saved by the composer Vincent Persichetti’s improvisations around
lines in John’s poems, as well as by the poignant recollections of John
called up by the poet Miller Williams and by Myra Ciardi, John’s daughter. To
this day, I’m just not sure. Now, all these years
later, I still miss the man, imagine a book in the mail, a phone call from
Metuchen, John with me along the harbor, naming the shorebirds, the spartina
beyond the mudflats. In Ciardi’s
Attic Study Who would
believe the junk one man’s
life could gather— why enough
to sink the Metuchen town dump. But, John,
how you spill out of this
room, the place is porous
with your blood. It
hemorrhages you. I know
you’re somewhere in this old house a cool
corner, I suppose, leaning in
dusky shadows, serene
repose. Yet I recall
a visit long ago and you an
inland plover hidden under
meadow thatch, belly-deep
in song. John, you
taught, a Capuchin bent above
parchment glow the
sacramental bread of unimportant things: a gull’s
updraft flight, the nape of neck, a child’s
crib-tilt in the cold night, a rainbow
the yard hose makes spraying the
parched tomato patch. You had
Josef Stein say it, but let me
place it on your lips before I let
go of you,
brother in milk and candle and somehow
ahead of thought: how clean white paper waiting under a pen is
a gift beyond history and hurt and heaven. Stony
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