Word: ciardi
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...middle road that all young writers spend their apprenticeships trying to find. Occasionally, a guide appears who can help fuse the sometimes contrary desires for literary expression and cash returns. It is the growing realization that the best of these guides are the writers themselves that has called John Ciardi to the Briggs-Copeland assistant professorship of English Composition...
...students in English A-1, Ciardi is just about the perfect writing coach. Affable, sincerely interested, seldom contesting his students' aims but dealing with their methods and treatment, Ciardi's criticism of the short stories that make up the bulk of the courses is often a formulation of the writer's own vague misgivings, and hardly ever clashes with the writer's own standards and opinions. Ciardi tries to steer his students down the middle road. Personal standards are indispensible; but on the other hand, the "purpose of writing is to be read" and prose must be communicative...
...Ciardi glumly admits that "practically no poet makes money." Publishers are in business for profit and poetry is carried as "a kind of charity which decks up" the rest of the material. American reading tastes, he claims, "depraved by Hollywood and the damned emphasis on reading speed," leave no room for poetry, he laments...
Born three decades ago in Boston, Ciardi spent his undergraduate years in Bates and Tufts, and then moved out to Michigan for his M. A. in English. There, in 1939, "I suddenly found myself very rich" when "Homeward to America," a book of verse, won the annual Hopwood prize and was accepted for publication...
Both young poets, Ciardi and Ellman will divide their time between creative writing and teaching of undergraduate students in composition. Ciardi's appointment to the rank of assistant professor was announced last week...