BY JAY BODAS
Staff Writer
John Ciardi On a quiet street downtown Metuchen lived a man who was born into poverty but who became a millionaire doing what he loved ––writing poetry.
He shared Thanksgiving dinners with Isaac Asimov and lectured students at Harvard. He was a guest twice on “The Johnny Carson Show.” All this after he managed to survive World War II, flying B-29s over Japan, where many of his own crewmates were killed.
This is the story of John Ciardi.
Ciardi was born poor to immigrant parents in Boston. His father was killed in a freak car accident when he was only 3 years old, leaving him to be raised by his mother and three sisters. As a result, his early life was marked by both emotional and financial hardships.
PHOTOSCOURTESY OF CIARDI FAMILY Poet John Ciardi’s children, Myra and Benn, gather with their children recently to discuss their father’s life and work, both as a teacher and writer. He went on to graduate from Tufts University, after an initial stint at Bates College, and then completed a master’s program at the University of Michigan.
It was at that point that he completed his first book of poems, Homeward to America. He was published at 24.
Not long after, he volunteered for combat in World War II, and served as a B-29 bomber pilot.
“At that point, he was the second-oldest man on the crew,” said his son John, who is now a prosecutor with the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts.
Their father was known as “Lucky John,” since “most of his life, things went his way,” said his son Benn, 50, who has two children of his own.
He managed to survive WWII, flying over Tokyo and conducting 26 bombing raids over Saipan. There were many times when Ciardi was nearly killed but was spared by luck or random chance.
In one such instance, his crew had already released their payload of bombs, armed with instantaneous fuses, when a fellow plane flew directly underneath. Had the bombs gone off as they were supposed to, both planes would have been obliterated.
In another instance, Ciardi was ordered off flight duty to write letters of citation and condolence. His plane was shot down and the entire crew was lost on the third mission without him.
After the war, he took up teaching. He began teaching as a guest lecturer at the University of Kansas-Missouri, where he met his future wife, Judith, a journalism professor, who he married four months later. They would remain married until Ciardi’s death more than 40 years later.
From there he was offered a part-time teaching position at Harvard, making $3,000 a year to start.
There the students voted him one of the top three English professors year after year. He later moved on to Rutgers, where he accepted a full-time post.
At Rutgers he was known as a tough professor who would demand excellence from his students.
“He had just come back from war, and he did not have much patience for students who were not serious about life,” said Benn. “He demanded a thousand percent, and he taught as much as you could learn. He was real tough on young people.”
He was also popular, however, and he would occasionally have students over at his house.
“He was twice voted favorite professor at Rutgers, and he had a real knack for teaching, and was very captivating,” said John. “I have run into judges who were students of my father when he taught at Harvard,” he said.
But Lucky John did not get to where he was by luck alone. “He often made his own luck since the harder he worked, the luckier he got,” said Benn.
One of the strongest memories the Ciardi children have of their father is of a man who was always working.
“I would come home at four, and he would be at his desk working,” said John. “I would go to sleep later that night, and he still would not have moved. I would wake up the next morning and leave for school, with him still at his desk. His ability to concentrate and focus like that was amazing … I wish I could concentrate like that.”
“Sometimes, he would sit in his chair three days in a row,” said Benn. “He would make himself some coffee and get to writing, and write, write, write.”
“There was always the sound of the typewriter in the house. There was no television and the family listened to operas on Sundays, daughter Myra said.
“He also spent many an evening at the Metuchen Country Club,” she said.
Ciardi could have been a prolific writer in virtually any genre, but he chose to focus on poetry as his specialty, no matter what might have been the potential financial rewards of exploring other work.
“He could have written books, screenplays, or anything else, and we all wanted him to write the next ‘Jaws,’ so we could all retire, but he didn’t,” said Benn. “He wrote for himself.”
One of Ciardi’s greatest literary achievements was his translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a massive undertaking that took him 16 years to complete.
Poetry remained so central to Ciardi’s life that he wrote an introductory textbook on the subject, “How Does a Poem Mean?,” which is still used in many college classrooms today.
He wrote it so that there would be a text that properly introduced poetry to the novice reader, said Benn.
On the first page of the text, Ciardi emphasized that the writing of good poetry required “technical tricks” such as “hendecasyllables, synechdoche, and kinds of rhyme,” which great poets such as Robert Frost “reveled in.” The book was about the “beauty of poetry, and the technical sources of that beauty.”
Ciardi could count not only Frost, but also a wide range of other literary figures, such as Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison, as his friends. Thanksgiving dinners were never complete without science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
“They would take turns insulting each other in dead languages,” said Benn. “What my father didn’t know, Asimov knew.”
In his later life, Ciardi toured the country on the lecture circuit and wrote many books of children’s poetry. He read his poetry to children at the Metuchen library, where one will now find a plaque memorializing him near the front entrance.
Ciardi died of a heart attack on Easter Sunday 1986 in his Metuchen home.
“He grew up poor, the son of immigrant parents, but he went on to do what he loved and realize the American dream,” his son, John, said.