An Emeritus Addresses the School

By John Ciardi 1916–1986 John Ciardi

No one can wish nothing.

Even that death wish sophomores

are nouveau-glib about

reaches for a change of notice.

“I’ll have you know,” it will say

thirty years later to its son,

“I was once widely recognized

for the quality of my death wish.”

That was before three years

of navel-reading with a guru

who reluctantly concluded

some souls are bank tellers;

perhaps more than one would think

at the altitude of Intro. Psych.,

or turned on to a first raga,

or joining Polyglots Anonymous.

One trouble with this year’s

avant-garde is that it has already

taken it fifty years to be behind

the avant-garde of the twenties

with the Crash yet to come.

And even free souls buy wives,

fall in love with automobiles,

and marry a mortgage.

At fifty, semisustained by bourbon,

you wonder what the kids see

in that Galactic Twang

they dance the Cosmic Konk to.

You will have forgotten such energy,

its illusion of violent freedoms.

You must suffer memory

to understanding in the blare

of a music that tires you.

There does come a death wish,

but you will be trapped by your

begetting, love what you have given,

be left waiting in a noise

for the word that must be whispered.

No one can wish nothing. You can

learn to wish for so little

a word might turn you

all the bent ways to love, its mercies

practiced, its one day at a time

begun and lived and slept on and begun.

John Ciardi, “An Emeritus Addresses the School” from The Little That Is All (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974). Used with the permission of the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust.

Source: The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (University of Arkansas Press, 1997)

Biography

To millions of Americans, the late John Ciardi was "Mr. Poet, the one who has written, talked, taught, edited, translated, anthologized, criticized, and propelled poetry into a popular, lively art," according to Peter Comer of the Chicago Tribune. Although recognized primarily as a poet and critic, Ciardi's literary endeavors encompassed a vast range of material. From juvenile nonsense poetry to scholarly verse translations, . . .

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