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John Cardi’s Selected
Poems and John Cardi’s first
mention in surviving letters to a selected poems came on 1 October 1979,
when he mentioned to George Garrett that it was a book he ought to get
around to sometime “soon.” Then two weeks later he wrote to Garrett that he
would be leaving his word histories (his new, all-consuming passion) behind
when he got to Florida in order “to concentrate on a rigidly culled Selected Poems.” But in another
letter to Garrett seven months later, on 16 April 1980, Ciardi revealed that
he had not done much with the project and was beginning to feel a little
uneasy about it: “I have had too many chances to publish and consequently published
too much. I’d like time to prune and to see what emerges. If anything.” That
summer Ciardi asked Eric Swenson at W. W. Norton if he would be interested in
publishing his selected poems, but nothing came of the inquiry and he
repeated it some fifteen months later, in November 1981. He was thinking of a
three-hundred-page book, “a sort of retrospective show.” This time Swenson
answered that the size of the book was a problem and asked if it could be reduced.
With nothing more hopeful to go on than that, Ciardi may well have wondered
if there was a future for him at W. W. Norton, a reasonable question
considering that a month later Swenson wrote to say that For Instance, Ciardi’s last book of poems, was being remaindered
after being in print a mere two years. On 21 December, Ciardi wrote Miller
Williams, director of the University of Arkansas Press to say that Swenson
was “wary as Hell” of publishing his selected poems “as a commercial venture
and asked if I could get a U Press to do it. You, I know, are more or less
bound to Arkies, of which I am other than. Do you know of a U Press that
might go for it, possibly on a joint imprint and distribution?” Almost at
once, Williams offered Ciardi a contract to publish Selected Poems, and by 8 February 1982, papers were signed and
Ciardi was ready to begin working with his last publisher of adult poems. But from February
1982 to June 1983, Ciardi procrastinated. With his September 1983 deadline
fast approaching, Ciardi wrote to Stuart Wright in May that he had to get
“seriously to work” on the project: “I’ve told myself to get at it for 3
years and keep running into a block about going over old stuff, but I must
delay no longer.” Some six weeks later he wrote to Saipan buddy Ed Lawson: “I
find I hate going back [over the poems]. As a generalization, dead’s dead.”
As the summer wore on, Ciardi became more and more depressed about selecting
his poems; it was so disagreeable a job, in fact, that he fell into another
period of indolence rather than face it. On 23 June he wrote to John Nims: Beethoven festered
in his locked room working on the pastoral
[Sinfonia pastorale?] with trays of
food mouldering untouched, his clothes filthy, his chamber pot unemptied,
the score looking like the mud of a chicken run, snarling when the woman
knocked. I’m not quite that messy. And would that I had such a score at the
center of my wallow. But I have sunk into a doodlesome and compulsive rhythm
of nothing and a table piled like a dumpster. A
week later he wrote to Nims again, this time to apologize “if I gave off a
general sound of lamentation.” He explained that he was working on his Selected Poems: I could not have
imagined how hateful the task is (it is probably at the root of any bitching
I did). I have invented every way of dodging the task. Now I am out of dodges
and time and must do it. Having done too much, I end up dismally aware that
I have done nothing, and hate replowing my acre of stone. Thank God for the
blindness that permits an engagement with work-in-process. To look back is to
sight through the wrong (right?) end of the telescope, Dwindledom. Ciardi’s depression
was also caused by his sixty-seventh birthday on 24 June. His wife wrote to
Nancy Williams that she had served up a birthday dinner of mussels and
quiche, which she hoped had “boosted his morale.” Ciardi wrote to Gil
Gallagher, trying to mask his feelings behind self-deprecating humor: I have, alas,
birthdayed! I, dashing dancer, dandy man, golden boy gunner, promising young
poet, and Mother’s darling cuddle woke to find myself trapped in this crapped
out old man’s body! What am I doing here? Help! But
by early July Ciardi had somehow managed to get past his birthday and most of
the work for Selected Poems. He
wrote to George Garrett that he’d be sending the manuscript to Arkansas by
the end of the month and was much relieved to have it nearly behind him: Never will I have
taken greater pleasure in being rid of a weight of dead paper. At least I
have learned in trying to put this stuff into a book that there is no order
to my life. The style of it is whimsical random. On about 19 July,
Ciardi did indeed mail off the manuscript for Selected Poems, which he and Miller Williams agreed should contain
the entire Lives of X. However, he
had failed at providing an introductory note, coming up, as he wrote to
Williams, “with nothing to which silence was not to be preferred.” Perhaps,
he added, “the jacket copy might say that the poems are not strictly chronological
and that Lives of X is reproduced
entire for some reason I am not able to phrase.” Once he mailed Selected Poems, his spirits rose and
his energy for “work-in-process” returned. He wrote with relief to his sister
Ella that Selected had been
delivered to the publisher and that other things were afoot too: “Have also
finished a new book of dirty limericks. Am pounding away at the manuscript of
some children’s poems. And have a good bulge on Browser’s III.” And he felt better too: “My idiot son, Benn,” he
continued to Ella, “has become an unemployed golf nut. It was a pleasure to
go out with him yesterday and show him that wise old flab could still beat
ignorant muscle.” The potassium supplements must be working, he wrote to
Williams, for what else could explain his sudden ability to play eighteen
holes of golf, albeit by cart? (This seems to be the time, too, when he began
riding an exercise bicycle in front of the blaring television in Metuchen
every night, set loud enough to drown the machine as well as the raucous
rock music coming from the basement studio.) He was also up to resuming what
he thought of as his good-humored abusiveness. He wrote to Williams that he
would be seventy in three years: I guess I’ll be
able to stand it so long as no one is tempted to confuse me with Richard
Eberhart. I hope you do not live so long that you will become known as the
Robert P. Tristam Coffin of the Ozarks. I only breathe that hope to make the
point that there can be fates worse than death. When galleys of Selected Poems reached him about 20
August 1984, Ciardi wrote to fellow etymologist Walter Newman that he was
tempted to subtitle it “43 Blathering Years.” He and Judith spent the next
two weeks with the Fredlands on Nantucket where he rested, looked over the
galleys (which he was very pleased with), and kept up with a little
correspondence. One letter was to Jeff Lovill, a young man from Arizona State
University who was writing a Ph.D. dissertation on Ciardi and had written on
23 August with a variety of questions and comments. Roman Catholic himself,
Lovill was particularly curious about Ciardi’s apostasy, which John tried to
explain: I think of
[religion] as an adolescent imbalance I survived. . . . The
simple fact is that I do nothing with reference to God or an after life. God
and language seem to be its principal inventions, and I am interested in the
inventions as clues to the inventor. Dante and the Browser’s Dictionaries are part of one absorption in the same
curiosity. Isaac Asimov says he wants to know what universe we are living
in. So do I. But I don’t speak mathematics and the language of science.
Still, why pass through without looking? Part
of what Ciardi was looking for is revealed in his irony-filtered “Diary
Entry,” an author’s proof of which reached him about 1 September for
publication in a festschrift in honor of James Tate and which was later
published in The Birds of Pompeii
(1985), the last of his books that Ciardi saw through production and into
print. I was in a mood for
disaster but couldn’t afford
much. At the God store I
counted out my last three worn perversos and ordered an
ounce of avalanche. His thumb on the
scale, it came to one
grain of sand which He blew in my
eye, perhaps to teach me
something. Which He did. A
rule of thumb: all else being
equal, I’ll not be caught,
not soon again, trying to do
business on His scale. On 9 September 1983,
Ciardi wrote to John Stone and reported on the galleys of Selected Poems. “I’m a bit surprised,”
he wrote, “at how heavily Italo-American it is. If anyone gets around to reviewing
it, I’ll hear about that. And it will miss the point that the Italian
background was my first pasture, not where I went. So I’ll be typed. So be
it.” Many of his early poems, of course, plus many of the reminiscences in Lives of X, and a smattering of poems
that had appeared through the years displayed a strong pull toward his
Italian-American childhood and what is generally called a “cultural
heritage.” But to Ciardi, nationality was secondary to the process of looking
inward for self-discovery, which he always believed was a universal
experience that everyman could share. The outer trappings were particular to
the man, but the process of searching into oneself opened the poems to all
men—that is, if one could look deeply enough and write compellingly enough.
On 9 September 1983, when he wrote to his friend Vince Clemente about the
galleys of Selected, Ciardi
repeated his concern over “how Italian it is” but remembered again a story he
liked to tell about Robert Lowell. In the final analysis, he wrote to
Clemente, anyone who noted “how Italian” his new book was would miss the
point: Lowell missed it
once. I published in The Atlantic
“SPQR, A Letter from Rome,” and he wrote to say it was the best Italian-American
poem he had read. As if he wrote Am and I wrote It-Am. 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 ebon. Later it was two martinis on an expense account lunch tab. Clemente had, in
fact, drawn Ciardi out about his Italian Americanism five years earlier, in
November 1978. Clemente at that time was thinking about putting together a
book of poems and commentary by Italian-American poets who were to describe
how their common backgrounds helped to form their poetic consciousness.
Ciardi wanted to help his friend and had agreed to provide an introduction to
the book, but he had reservations. I like the sense of
the project you suggest. I find myself, however, oddly blocked by “the Am-It
esthetic.” Can another word be found? I am not sure there is such a thing;
and if there is I doubt I have it. It isn’t that I am l’Italiano dirazzato [denationalized Italian], 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. Five days later,
still troubled with the idea of an Italian-American aesthetic, Ciardi wrote
again to Clemente with a stronger version of the Lowell story he had told in
September: I don’t know of
anyone who thinks in terms of Italo-Am poets. I had a longish poem about
Italy in the Atlantic some years
back, and when Robert Lowell wrote to praise its Italo-Am voice, I took
offense. Did the s.o.b. suppose I had used an Am. Eng. inferior to his or
that . . . mine [was] less Am. Eng. than his? Well, even the good
ones can be fools. At
Christmas 1978, Ciardi wrote to Lew Turco that although he was still wary of
Clemente’s project, he would do what he could “short of cash—not with one son
in law school (Jonnel) and Benn and Myra successfully (and permanently, I
suspect) unemployed.” He couldn’t shake
entirely free of the Italian-American question whenever he wrote to Turco or
Clemente, and there are references to it on and off over the next couple of
years. He wrote to Turco on 28 February 1979: I really don’t know
what to make of so much Italo-Am. I’ve never thought in terms of I-Am poetry.
I don’t know any I-Am poets, as such. Lew Turco is an Am. poet who happened
to have It. parents. T. Roethke is a ditto with Ger. parents. Still
toying with the idea two weeks later, in the afterglow of having just
finished typing the entries to his first book of word histories, A Browser’s Dictionary in Key West,
Ciardi repeated himself once again to Turco, but added a reflective
afterthought on his own work as a poet: Increasingly, I
have the feeling that I write only for the dead, and that the mind and idiom
of those I write for and to, once the last few have died, will not be
duplicated. I have the feeling that we are coming to an age that lacks
memory. For whom, then, are poets to do their remembering? Scratch it on the
inside of the skull wall—maybe the last church mouse will find it to puzzle
at. No one else gives a damn. Maybe it all died the day Kenneth Rexroth
decided to list Bob Dylan as a leading poet. No,
he wrote, “I’m just not sure there is anyone out there . . . there
certainly is no one out there along It-Am lines. Tend your garden.” The entire question
seemed to fluster Ciardi. He liked Turco and Clemente, but he did not feel
the same connections to an Italian-American poetry that they seemed to feel.
He had commented to an interviewer in 1978 that he often did not like
Italian-American gatherings because they tended to become “jingoistic,” as
though Italian culture was “infinitely better than some other culture.” He
could not agree with that point of view. “I think Italy has bequeathed
magnified things to Europe and Europe has bequeathed some magnificent things
back to Italy, but I’d like to be known as a person of European culture.” He
wrote almost apologetically to Vince Clemente on 2 September 1981: What can I tell you
about this “Italian question”? It has never meant as much to me as it seems
to have meant to others. I was born in the North End of Boston but taken to
Medford as a baby. I grew up “in the country” (seven miles out). I did, of
course, visit relatives in the North End frequently, but was early aware of
it as a self-insulating non-America. The Italian community, as I felt from my
earliest perception, was afraid of breaking out of its shell and strongly
disapproved of children who gave up the ghetto patterns. I loved many of the
people I visited and forgave them their narrowness, but I also knew from the
start they were foolishly turned in on themselves. . . . And so it was with
genuine surprise that Ciardi noticed “how heavily Italo-American” Selected Poems had turned out to be,
although it may be argued from one point of view that this was more optical
illusion than reality. What made the book look more Italian American than it
was was its arrangement. There were 136 poems in all, broken down into seven
parts or chapters. Ciardi opened with a twenty-three-poem section that he
called Tribal Poems, taking him autobiographically from his baptism in “The
Evil Eye” to the death of his mother in “Addio.” Then, by way of additional
ethnic emphasis, Ciardi ended with his entire Lives of X, about half of which included long sections on his
Italian background and family memories, plus his experiences as an
Italian-American boy in a German-Irish neighborhood. Exactly half of the
book’s 222 pages (but only 36 poems) were given over to these two chapters,
and sandwiched in between them were five additional chapters (I Marry You,
Thickets, On the Patio, Bang Bang [World War II poems], and Conversations),
105 poems in all. Italian American or not, the book had an attractive
quirkiness to it, with poems grouped in such a way as to make them appear
fresh in their new surroundings. A key to Ciardi’s
mindset when he put Selected
together was his inability to think long about poems from the 1940s, ’50s,
and ’60s and his decision to reprint great amounts from the 1970s: all of Lives of X, twenty-two poems from The Little That Is All, and
twenty-seven from For Instance. The
real imbalance in Selected was not
the inclusion of too many Italian poems but the omission of too many
excellent early poems: there is nothing from Homeward to America, only four from Other Skies, two from Live
Another Day, six from From Time to
Time, and so on, with the best representation among early books coming
from As If (nine), 39 Poems (nine), In the Stoneworks (eleven) and Person to Person (thirteen). With respect to subject matter,
Ciardi chose more of the things that were interesting him in the 1970s over
earlier subjects, as for instance, he included nearly twice as many suburban
poems in On the Patio as there are World War II poems in Bang Bang. During
the forty years that had elapsed between the dramatically important and
life-threatening events of World War II and Selected Poems, Ciardi had been transformed from a reluctant
warrior into a successful member of “po biz,” with a suburban home in
Metuchen and a winter residence in Key West, all of which accounts for his
heavy interest in observations made from the patio—and the unfortunate
imbalance in Selected. Moreover, by
selecting a mere thirteen percent of his poems for Selected (and not so much as a single triplet from his great
translation of The Divine Comedy),
Ciardi chose a way of representing himself that was far too narrow, for
Ciardi reads best when one spans the decades with him, reading at length
among the poems that were important to him moment by moment and year by year.
Only then do his love of family and art, his religious skepticism, his search
for identity, his fascination with everyday events, his passion for the
unimportant poem—emerge as an impressive catalogue of concerns, themes
deliberately developed over a lifetime. And only then does his voice, described
so well by Edward Krickel as “slangy yet learned,” emerge as warmly human in
its sympathies and mercies. County College of Morris |