John Ciardi: Poetry, Prose, and PCA

Somewhere between the hack writer living off the slicks and the "divine afflatus" genius penning prose lyrics incomprehensible to all but himself, lies the elusive middle road that all young writers spend their apprenticeships trying to find. Occasionally, a guide appears who can help fuse the sometimes contrary desires for literary expression and cash returns. It is the growing realization that the best of these guides are the writers themselves that has called John Ciardi to the Briggs-Copeland assistant professorship of English Composition.

To his students in English A-1, Ciardi is just about the perfect writing coach. Affable, sincerely interested, seldom contesting his students' aims but dealing with their methods and treatment, Ciardi's criticism of the short stories that make up the bulk of the courses is often a formulation of the writer's own vague misgivings, and hardly ever clashes with the writer's own standards and opinions. Ciardi tries to steer his students down the middle road. Personal standards are indispensible; but on the other hand, the "purpose of writing is to be read" and prose must be communicative.

There are two schools of writing, this shaggy-browed poet tells the class; inspiration and craftsmanship; he then proceeds to debunk the notion, ("a hangover from romanticism") that all writing is the produce of the divine word alone. The artist must create from within, the says, but it can't be done until techniques becomes habit, and devices spring up automatically. Craftsmanship is the key to the successful writer's trade. Only when the apprentice learns the craft and chooses his weapons will his message, no matter how great, be heard. "But no real prose talent is going unpublished," he says.

Ciardi glumly admits that "practically no poet makes money." Publishers are in business for profit and poetry is carried as "a kind of charity which decks up" the rest of the material. American reading tastes, he claims, "depraved by Hollywood and the damned emphasis on reading speed," leave no room for poetry, he laments.

Born three decades ago in Boston, Ciardi spent his undergraduate years in Bates and Tufts, and then moved out to Michigan for his M. A. in English. There, in 1939, "I suddenly found myself very rich" when "Homeward to America," a book of verse, won the annual Hopwood prize and was accepted for publication.

From Michigan, the young poet traveled to a teaching job at Kansas City University. The call to Khaki followed almost immediately, and Ciardi spent four years in the Air Force. His second book of poems, "Other Skies," a personal record of the war years, was published last fall.

While in Missouri, where he returned briefly before coming to Harvard, Ciardi married a journalism teacher at KCU and started working with the Progressive Citizens of America, whose activities now take up much of his time. An executive member of the Massachusetts State Progressive Party, Ciardi believes that political issues are vital right here in the University. American colleges are on the road to a state of "military subsidization where there will be no freedom of speech and they won't be worth anything," be warns.

Criticized on the grounds that he "writes to himself" in his war poetry, Ciardi frankly admits it. "Poetry has to deal with the immediate," he says, defending his method with the argument that every serviceman was thinking of the same things in personal terms. "There was more collective consciousness in the Army than in any other group," and yet, he admits a little ruefully, "you still can't reach across to anybody else."