John Ciardi – 1916-1986

May 4, 1986
Lakeland

[Editor’s note: the following biographical sermon was apparently delivered with a number of books of poetry at hand; the poems themselves are referenced here, but as they are likely still under copyright, they cannot be reproduced here.]

When I read of the death of John Ciardi, a month ago, I thought of the time when this American poet spoke to a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Plainfield, New Jersey. I was deeply impressed with his wit, witness, and wisdom, his exuberant and warm personality. Following that service, he joined a group of us for lunch and drinks at a member’s home. He didn’t eat and run, but stayed for hours. The wine and whiskey flowed; jokes and serious talk cast a magic spell over the occasion.

John Ciardi was a poet, teacher, critic. Many of you I’m sure heard his weekly program on National Public Radio, “Word in Your Ear” - his resonant voice showing his love of words and their origins. Today, in sharing samples from his poetry, I’m conscious of how John Ciardi was an American speaking to us.

His words and thoughts are seldom sugared soap-opera lines; he loved living, but also knew life’s contradictions and cruelties as well as hope and happiness. Many would find him quite cynical, but his cynicism, laced with humor, was a product of wide-open eyes and a searching mind that had no patience with sham and pomposity.

John Ciardi was born in Boston, the son of Italian immigrants. In 1921, his father was killed in an auto accident. After college – Bates, Tufts, and the University of Michigan – he taught at Kansas State, Harvard, and Rutgers. For 16 years he was poetry editor of the Saturday Review.

In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was a gunner aboard a B-29 in the aerial offensive against Japan. He was decorated with the Air Medal and the Oak-Leaf Cluster. Out of that ... experience, he wrote several poems which tell us more about the war than most statistics:

An Alphabestiary - “B is for Bomber
In Fact – p. 5 - “My Tribe”
Strangest Everything – p. 56 – The Formalities

It comes through clearly both in his poetry and my recollection that he had little patience with sham and pomposity. In his poem, “an elegy for the American school system” his poetic scalpel is sharp, as he has fun with some of the jargon of the social sciences and language fog [CJW note: disdain for some of the language forms which erupted in the 60s – encounter and confrontation; the language of learned dissertations at teacher’s colleges....]

For Instance – p. 68

Ciardi was much in demand as a traveling lecturer. This both increased his income and increased his ability to look at himself with humor, and at the world with thanks.

The Strangest Everything – p. 9 (60s)

Like many of us, he was sometimes skeptical of politicians and VIPs:

Alphabestiary - “G”
In Fact - “Oration” - p. 33
“Waive” - not wave

He was a seeker of meanings beyond the orthodoxies or liberalisms of his day.

Strangest Everything p. 43 – A ballad of teleologies -
67 Project for a cliff face
“In Fact” - 49 – In My Father’s ...
For Instance – 60 – Roman Diary

Ciardi wrote many lines to love – love of parent for child, love of child for parent – love of man and woman. Of the latter, Ciardi once wrote, “Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.” (CONTEXT)

Ciardi loved children [and] was a parent. His poems for children are noteworthy.

For Instance – 44 – For John L
Strangest Everything – 28 - “Buy”
Woman – p. 57 – In Fact
“Strange wooing words....”

Ciardi’s eroticism and sensuality didn’t need 4-letter words.

Ciardi’s words and thoughts about religion walk strange and lonely paths.

Alphabestiary - “R” is for rat
The Strangest Everything – notes on Psalmist, p. 59
Daemons – p. 11

So John Ciardi, sleep well.

Kenneth Rexroth, a fellow-poet, said of Ciardi: “He is singularly unlike most American poets with their narrow lives and feuds. He is more like a very literate, gently appetitive, Italo-American airplane pilot, fond of deep, simple things, like his wife and kids, his friends, his students, Dante’s verse and good food and wine.”

So for those moments
When you’d like to meditate
On the poetic imagination
Of a man who loved life,
And loved it without rose-colored
Glasses, I recommend John Ciardi

(Lover’s quarrel with the world)
He is one

The theologians
gather dust upon the shelves
of my library, but the poets
are stained with my fingers
and blotted with my tears
I never seem, etc.