A Hell of a Poet

John Ciardi’s was my first Dante, in high school. I read his Inferno as though it were a species of adventure story, and I suppose it is. Since the 1950s his Divine Comedy has become an unlikely bestseller, and earned Ciardi and his heirs (he died in 1986) a minor fortune, at least by a poet’s standards. But as a poet, Ciardi seems the forgotten man of his much-celebrated generation – Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Jarrell, Schwartz, Wilbur, Shapiro. His poetry is unapologetically enjoyable (a sin in some quarters), thoughtful, often funny, never academic or dogmatically obscure. He was a poet of family, of love and marriage, of nature, especially of birds, and a fine writer of limericks and poetry for children. He made no apologies for being Italian-American but neither did he posture as though his ethnicity conferred sentimental status. I think of him as a grown-up, a poet of the middle class, and he reminds me of L.E. Sissman, another poet for whom poetry was one half of a dialogue, the other half being life itself.

Here’s one of my favorites by Ciardi, “An Aspect of the Air,” from his 1964 collection, Person to Person:

“Through my hemlocks and the spruce beyond,
mist hangs and closes. What change is this?
Not a bird dares it. Not so much as a frond
stirs in the shadowless absence
of this light I see by, not knowing what I see,
there in the green caves and up into a sky
that isn’t there, except as there must be
some source for any light. I don’t see, I
conjecture sources. It is too still
not to be thinking out from things, not to feel
a presence of the unreality that will
mystify what encloses us. Mist is not real;
not by the handful. And thought is not
fact, nor measurable. It is simply there.
An inclosing condition. A dimension taught
The sourceless light. An aspect of the air.”

Doug Ramsey is the proprietor of Rifftides, the premier jazz blog. He is author of Jazz Matters, a book I reviewed ecstatically back in 1989, and last year of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond (funny, but I’ve always associated Desmond with L.E. Sissman – for their dryness and wit, I suppose). Recently, Ramsey has posted several times on his fondness for Ciardi as poet, etymologist and dictionary maker, and public radio broadcaster. Visit Rifftides to learn more about Ciardi, and stay for the celebration of music.