John Ciardi Forty years ago, two pieces of Metuchen history intersected. In a gala event to mark the 60th anniversary of the Metuchen Golf & Country Club in 1975, renowned Metuchen poet John Ciardi toasted the occasion with the decidedly comical composition, “Lest We Forget”:
“Today, memorially stewed,
We pause in drunken gratitude
To praise the flash of their plus-fours,
Remembering as we post our scores
Those wooden-shafted iron men
Who walked their rounds to glory when
The baffie’s ball and niblick’s click
Sailed the bail straight for the stick.”
Poet laureate of New Jersey at the time, the late Ciardi was also a member of the country club.
A true American success story, Ciardi was born into financial and emotional hardships, with his father killed in an accident when he was 3 years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his three sisters.
Ciardi managed to graduate college and attain a master’s degree. His first book of poems, “Homeward to America,” was published when he was 24.
Not long after, he volunteered for combat in World War II and served as a B-29 bomber pilot.
Once a hardluck story, the wordsmith who became known as “Lucky John” went on to share Thanksgiving dinners with Isaac Asimov and become a two-time guest on “The Johnny Carson Show.”
A part-time English professor at Harvard University, Ciardi became a student favorite there. Though he got to be known as a tough professor at Rutgers, where he later took on a full-time post, he was equally popular there.
As his son Benn has pointed out, Ciardi’s “luck” came on the heels of a lot of hard work. He was a fixture at his typewriter, sometimes for days on end, in the Metuchen home he shared with wife, Judith, until his death in 1986. When he wasn’t working, he spent many a night at the Metuchen Golf & Country Club, his daughter Myra said.
An award-winning figure in the literary community, Ciardi received many honors, including the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and recognition from the National Council of Teachers of English for excellence in children’s poetry. He was renowned for his translation of Dante’s “Inferno” from Italian to English.
To help her father’s legacy live on in Metuchen, Myra donated more than 1,000 materials to the Metuchen-Edison Historical Society in 2014.
A grant from the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission allowed the society to inventory the 1,089 donated items, also creating a finding guide for the prolific poet’s works, known as the Ciardi Collection. The collection includes works that were unpublished and unavailable elsewhere.
“Many of these items reveal the difficulties Ciardi experienced due to his left-leaning political ideology, and many others seem to be unique to this collection,” Tyreen Reuter, chairwoman of the society, wrote in a report to the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission.
The collection can be accessed at www.metuchen-edisonhistsoc.org/8.html.