John Ciardi's "An Emeritus Addresses the School"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 20 May 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

About the creative process itself, John Ciardi argued in the Writer that “it isn’t easy to make a poem,” adding, “It is better than easy: it is joyously, consumingly difficult. As it is difficult, too, though without joy, to face one’s failures.” Noting that the creation of successful verse requires definite skill, he wrote: “I insist that a poet needs at least as much training as does a concert pianist. More, I think, but that is already too much for the ignorantly excited.” Believing that “the minimum requirement for a good poem is a miracle,” he explained: “The poem must somehow turn out better than anyone—the poet included—had any right to expect. No matter how small the miracle, the hope of it is my one reason for writing.” He also felt the poem’s strength will lead the writer unerringly: “The poet cannot know where he is going: he must take his direction from the poem itself.”

-via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, May 20th, 2004.
0:09.2	Today's poem kicks off a week of poetry, devoted to the end of the academic year and to the graduates who are celebrating milestones in their student careers, looking ahead to what might come next.
0:23.6	This first poem is by John Chiardi, a former college professor and one of the great 20th century translators of Dante's Divine Comedy.
0:36.2	He helped found the writing program at Rutgers in 1953 and taught there for
0:43.1	eight years before resigning his position. More than a decade later in 1974, he wrote today's poem,
0:52.7	An Emeritus addresses the school.
0:57.3	And here it is.
1:01.8	No one can wish nothing.
1:05.6	Even that death wish, sophomores are Nouveau-Gib about, reaches for a change of notice.
1:12.7	I'll have you know, it will say 30 years later to its son, that was once widely recognized
1:18.0	for the quality of my death wish. That was before three years of naval reading with a guru
1:23.9	who reluctantly concluded, some souls are bank tellers.
1:32.0	Perhaps more than one would think at the altitude of intro psych,
1:35.9	or turned on to a first raga or joining polyglots anonymous.
1:41.8	One trouble with this year's avant-garde is that it has already taken at 50 years to be behind the avant-garde at the 20s with the crash yet to come.
1:46.8	And even free souls, buy wives, fall in love with automobiles and marry a mortgage.
1:54.0	At 50, semi-sustained by Bourbon, you wonder what the kids see in that galactic twang they dance the cosmic conch to.
2:02.9	You will have forgotten such energy, its illusions of violent freedoms.
2:09.0	You must suffer memory to understanding in the blare of a music that tires you.
2:14.9	There does come, a death wish, but you will be trapped by your begetting, love what you have
2:21.6	given, be left waiting in a noise for the word that must be whispered. No one can wish nothing.
2:31.3	You can learn to wish for so little a word might turn you all the bent ways to love.
	...

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