Late, Late Lecture; John Ciardi: "What Good is a College?"

[clock tone, music begins] [music plays] [music cont.] [music cont.] [birds chirping with music] [Host]: The Late, Late Lecture [music cont.] [birds chirping] [music cont.]

[music cont.] [Host]: To end your or begin your day with timely talks on a variety of thoughts, tonight on The Late, Late Lecture listen to John Ciardi, the poetry editor of the Saturday Review and author of its column 'A Manner of Speaking', his subject is 'What Good is a College?' Here is John Ciardi, [John]: Well I think there's a ?inaudible? and you're asking a poet to tell you anything as serious as higher education but also a kind of hopeful frivolity I've- I get many times in the past that education is much too important to be left to deans [laughter] and that- there- there is a lot to be said to in favor of frivolity I, uh, I wish the, uh, the university would stop being so thoroughly straight-faced and eye-in faced and so deadly earnest. I'm afraid of most of the seriousness I meet. Most of the earnestness I meet, uh, I- there's this to be said for frivolity in any

case it's an evolved characteristic. Uh, our earnestness, our high seriousness we have in common with the higher apes [crowd 'Ooo'] [John]: you'll see but, but there's- there's no such thing as a frivolous ape, you have to be a man [laughter] you have to be a man to be frivolous and I- I sometimes think the one hope for civilization we have left is if we can manage to stay congenially trivial long enough. We may get civilized enough to take that bomb apart before we blow it up it's- it's a hope in any case, we're being squeezed, ya know, I like what Robert Frost said in his last book, uh, talking about Columbus. The form is called 'America is Hard to See' and he said, uh, that when he was young he would have thought of Columbus's as one who had given us some more than Moses' exodus. Then he added a terrible thought, uh, but a ?pritment? one but all he did was spread the room of our enacting out the doom of being in each other's way and so, put off the

fateful day when we should have to put our minds on how to crowd when we should have to put our mind on how to crowd and still be kind. Now that seems to me kind of kindness requires a kind of forgiving triviality if you will. Uh, triviality seriously conceived well Professor Thomas was mentioned- mentioned by children's poems, let me- let me start with what I hope is a parable of education. Uh, I found myself speaking to a lot of elementary classes, I think they're a marvelous audience for poetry there is- there's no better audience for poetry then say a bright 3rd grade class. They know everything about the poems, if the poems are right for them. Then now then the superintendent of schools dragoons me into talking to high school students and their miserable audience for poetry. I, uh, I don't know what's happened to them, but they've lost all that immediacy, all that joy, all that suppleness. Now I had a little poem that had some great fun with 3rd grade kids. They knew everything about it all

at once. You know, it's called 'The Stranger and the Pumpkin' and I knew right away what a stranger and a pumpkin is the high school kids say 'is that symbolism?' [audience laughs] ya know, the- the- the 3rd grade kids are much smarter in these terms know immediately what it is and what for, well the poem goes this way. The stranger and the pumpkin said there's no light inside your head. What a dullard you must be, without light how can you see? Don't you know that heads should shine from deep inside themselves like mine well don't stand there in a pout with that dark dome sticking out. Makes me sick to look at, go and get your candle lit. [crowd laughs] [John]: Yup. That's- that's part of the function of education it seems to me to get- to get the candle lit but there's somebody always blowing the candle out to quote a, uh, an old ballad, uh, do you know that one, the take me in your arms dear and blow the candle out and I, uh, [mixed crowd reaction] Richard Dyer-Bennet use to sing it.

The you- you ask a poet to talk about education you're gonna get some poetry. [crowd laughs] [John]: The, uh, what are colleges good for is to support poets. [crowd laughs] [John]: But, the kind of people that seems to be going on blowing out the candles are the downright and I want to read you a poem by William Carlos Williams that I think is a parable of this kind of downright. I speak to a number of schools of education and, uh, my last year at Rutgers I taught in the school of education for which I pray forgiveness [crowd laughs] [John]: but, uh, teachers always want to be told such things as the 12 aims of education. [crowd laughs] [John]: Or- or, uh, I say well what are the 7 meaning of life? Ya know? [crowd laughs and applauds] [John]: At what it is- what it is I see see it is the categorical mind it wants to put things in a box and if you can wrap it all up in 12 neat boxes to describe each and 2 sentences on the

final examination you're through, you're certificated after awhile you have tenure that's the good life. The, uh- uh, it's- it's never exploded by venturesome- venturesomeness it's never- it never involves taking a moral chance with idea it leaves out the whole concept of intellectual suppleness. Uh, well I think this poem has something to do with that. It wasn't written as a parable of education. It's- but it's a poem that I think keeps suggesting it's called 'The Artist' and the title is half humorous. Mr. T bare- headed in a soiled undershirt, his hair standing out on all sides, stood on his toes, heels together, arms gracefully for the moment curled above his head, then he whirled about, bounded into the air and with an ultra sharp perfectly achieved completed the figure. Uh, there's a little description, you see of- of impulse, the man had- had this

happy impulse one day, put his hands up over his head jumped up in the air and did a ballet figure. I hope you have many such days in your lives and I- I don't know what keeps you from suicide if you don't have one coming. Uh, alright that- that's the first statement in the poem. Then the second statement the poet's mother in a wheelchair, that symbolism, I don't know if that's a dirty word, uh, one man jumps up into the air on- on legs that can and another character in the drama is sitting in a wheelchair on legs that can't how it's symbolism or anything like there's a- a contrast in the dramatis persona of this idea. My mother taken by surprise where she sat in her in village chair, was left speechless bravo she cried at last and clapped her hands. The man's wife came from the kitchen. I love the way that scurries a little rat feature, you know, in that chamber [crowd laughter] The man's wife came from the kitchen "What goes on here?" she said but the show was over.

Well it seems to be somebody in education maybe the superintendent of schools or whoever it is- is forever walking in there saying "what goes on here?" I knew- you can't answer that question. Uh, suppose you've left your girl and it's a lovely night managers and you're just felling high and get to the street you jump up in the air, twirl around in the air, and come down full of joy and find you're facing a cop. [crowd laughs] Uh, it's the wrong context for that emotion there's- there's no way of discussing it he seems to want to, ah- uh- an explanation and at the same time he wants one, he makes it impossible to give it all you can do is get out of there and hope he doesn't follow you. Uh, and- and maybe get back to being yourself in some other context. Well I'm not entirely frivolous about this, only overwhelmingly, but not entirely. Uh, let- let me take a stab at saying some serious things that may be relevant in this. Uh, not- there's nothing new in this but it's- it's- it's a thought have to- has to enter, perhaps one of the questions

I'm asking here is why let the arts into the curriculum, uh what are you going to college for? I've had students come to college say they want to get a job make good money and that makes sense. You know you, uh, you wanna make 25,000 dollars a year. So you spend 4 years learning to imitate professors who make 8,000, uh, and this, uh, in any 3 years you might have to make that 25,000 you're looking for. Uh, I can't think of that as the best kind of economic training uh, I don't think it's for that. Uh, we used to have kids at Rutgers who refused to read say Hamlet, I said look- look I'm a pharmacist, you see, I'm gonna be a pharmacist what do you need that stuff for? Uh, and what- what- what do you say such a man. Actually you should send him home, uh- but the dean takes a dim view of that you're supposed to try to persuade them to something called the humanities, uh, and you making vague noises about the fact that look you want a degree from a liberal arts college, you know, when you finish getting it it's not going to say certified pill grinder, uh,

it's, uh, it's gonna be a degree that implies some exposure to a pot of human memory and he comes back with something that look you professors to take care of our kids and I'll take care of mine. Uh, well I knew that's where the discussion would end anyhow uh, but let's- let's get out of the way. Let's assume that someone comes to college, uh, for something he wants to call an education. Immediately I think if he starts thinking about it he's come up with- with 2 kinds of education. Uh, but I wonder how fine he goes along trying to put these 2 kinds together. There is a kind of course that can be taught with answers in the back of the book. I want to call up cor- course today ?inaudible? first part of the curriculum, uh, that's a course in- in mechanisms. Uh, elementary mathematics has taught in the high school for example has answers on the back of the book that's an answer course. Elementary physics is an answers course, elementary chemistry is an answers course.

But by the time you get into graduate work in any of these things you're out of answers. All you can- all you can teach is questions. Now one of the differences between the humanities and sciences, is that the humanities have to start with nothing but questions to begin with or practically nothing, but questions to begin with. Uh, I, uh, sometimes I go to conventions of teachers that high school physics is infinitely better top than high school English. For one basic reason, uh, that and I- I, um, I am not trying to insult high school teachers of physics, I am simply saying that it is not necessary for a high school teacher of physics to be a human being. Uh, it sometimes happens at a high school teacher of physics is a human being and that's fine. Uh, I took a course from such a man, uh, but the minimum requirement of his work simply required that he get us through certain fixed experiments and a machine could have done that for us, just follow the instructions or do it

yourself kit for elementary physics. Uh, what he had to add to it was a dimension of an imagination, he could connect this thing and that into an idea. He could show us relationships between things. That made him a good teacher, but that was not his minimum job requirement. Uh, it wasn't, uh, in order to get his job he did not have to prove that he had, uh, this- this ability to make, uh, mental connections, but a good high school teacher of English must begin by asking questions that can only be asked by a developed human being. Well we get into a problem there simply because we are building classrooms much faster than we can put good teaches into them, all over the country. Uh, we're gonna be stuck increasingly with this problem with how many- having imitation teaches in so many of our classrooms. I don't know the answer to that but I think it begins to define some part of the question and I'll take a chance and say that the real purpose of a

college education and I don't mean technical training now. But, I mean if a liberal arts education is to get us into contact with what the human race has been doing on this planet and what it ha- particularly, what it has been feeling. Uh, education gets tremendously funny nowadays I, uh, I had to call 'em just recently on some other things teachers are instructed to say and not to say. Uh, very seriously their toll for example don't say to a parent "Johnny is a dope" that is a negative expression. Use a more positive expression say "Johnny is working at his own level" [crowd laughs] [John]: I am not inventing that I'm quoting it. Uh, there's another one for high school- for uh, teachers in New York it said, uh, never refer to a slum area that's negative, rather say more positively older, more settled areas, more- more densely, older more

densely settled areas of the community. Uh, that- that gets around the terrible word slum, uh, and then it was- still within this jargon I think the jargon makers rock better than they knew. Because at one point it said never refer to an underprivileged child say rather a child whose experiences have been limited to his immediate environment [pause] and I think that sets out to be jack and ends up in wisdom. Uh, because that I think is what a liberal a- arts education does. Somebody said that E.E. Cummings at one point what about the world Mr. Cummings? He said "I live in so many which one?" Well you you can carry that too far too. Uh, the psychiatrists had terms for carrying it too far. Uh, but- but short of a wild withdrawal from reality how can you get to be a human being until you have contacted experiences and personalities and situations that you cannot take

on in your own life. Uh, I think this is- this is the value and the function of the arts. As Emily Dickinson says "There is no frigate like a book" it takes you out of yourself transport is the first thing. What it transports you into is emotional situations and this one defense I must make a poetry, it does not transport you into paraphrases. I have to pause from mild and really I'm venomous damnation on every teacher that said to me until good English sentences that make sense state the meaning of this poem. You know? Over and over again, I use- use to get that treatment it destroys it as experience. Uh, but you see you have to leave a certain suppleness, uh ?inaudible? to approach that experience or any number of fun poems in the English language poems, we would all agree are fine poems that we cannot restate and paraphrase. Sometimes not even approximately, I don't know what Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle means. I don't know what- what

Blake's Tiger, tiger Burning Bright "mean" put the word in quote. Uh, I don't know what Coleridge's Kubla Khan means. I don't want Walter de la Mare's The Listeners means in those in paraphrasable terms. For that matter, I don't know what Robert Frost Mending Wall means in paraphrasable terms, but it is an experience. Everyone who is read Kubla Khan and found himself involved in that experience has visited one of the places that is common to the English speaking imagination. Uh, maybe it's not a paraphrasable something, maybe it's like a visit to the Taj Mahal. And I don't know what a visit to the Taj Mahal means, but when you're there you're in the presence of something that had took a man to make and if you're not in too much of a hurry to put it into boxes, uh, you find yourself in the presence of something I'm- I'm tempted to call a human resonance. Uh, I don't as a say I don't know what it means, I don't know what Mozart

means. But a head full of Mozart is in better human condition than a head that's not full of Mozart and I don't know what function the liberal arts colleges have except to- to establish this resonance and to bring the child say out of his immediate environment into that conceptual neighborhood where you can meet the great imaginations or the great history of the race. Somewhere buried in all of our imagination there is the experience of Job sitting on the dung heap. Now you're not being told about that you have to relive it. Against the day perhaps when you wonder why the sky seems to have fallen in on you. You try out the emotions of the situation you're absorbed into it. Uh, where are you going to make in, uh, in your immediate environment any donty about there's not a one living on your block, uh, you see, you have to meet donty in a book and when you have met donty when you have- when you have

endured with him the, uh, partly it's a- it's a matter of enduring the change of imagination that he calls forth from you. When you have enter the structure of his imagination you have something new to measure by. Uh, let me put it this way. When I was a kid my uncle had a tremendous collection of Caruso recordings I wish I had them now they just disappeared I'd feel rich, uh, but these old scratchy off the phonic disks sometimes flat on one side usually flat on one side and we had one of these his masters boys horns that you cranked out and, uh, when it began to run down the voices start to [mimics sound] grind it up again to get out especially on rainy days I'd sit by The Owl playing Caruso, uh, you- you get certainly this is one of the great voices of all time. I think perhaps the 20th century has produced 3 voices and Caruso's is one Lauritz Melchior is another and Kirsten Flagstad's the third,

but, uh, just- just on Caruso there was a perfection to that singing that I find myself thinking over time and again, even in the scratchy recordings one part of it was sheer physical power. Uh, he seemed to be able to hit any, any height. Uh, he was always this is something the jazz man like to talk about. He'd keep- he would keep reaching for notes that weren't there and he'd he'd get them. You know, you'd- you'd reach up above the top of a horn and come down with the note you want. It was a thrill to see the ultimate range of this voice, uh, it was thrill to feel the breathe control, it seems he could hold a note for 18 minutes actually couldn't, but sometimes I use to try to hold my breath while he was singing I begin to get blue in the face, uh, he- he'd still be going on letting out tones. Well there was that physical magnificence to the singing, but there was something else. There was a musical intelligence that somehow had a great deal to do with how a man sings. Uh, I, uh, I tell myself years

later that it took 2,000 years of spaghetti and olive oil to produce that particular tone. Uh, it's not come by- by accident, but no other tone has ever been achieved that was as- as good for singing Verdi, Verdi wrote for this tone Caruso came along and he had it. And then some years later and I'm not trying to assault the memory of the dead man, but I found myself listening to Mario Lanza that Mario Lanza had all of the physical strength of Caruso except not so subtle. Uh, he reminded me when I was first trying to play billiards an old man came around to me and said 'son you have a sledgehammer touch'. [crowd groans] [John]: Well, uh, the- the you don't hit that ball you stroke it and knowing the difference between a hitting it and stroking it I think is part of knowing what a man is as part of a liberal arts curriculum. If you- you interpret it for yourself, but I know that's part of the curriculum. Uh, but, uh he was bulled a song in a way, he over-muscled it and certainly he had a voice

but I'd find myself shaking my head remembering Caruso and I'd think a bull cannot sing like a man and I think it's a tremendously important to know the difference between a bull and a man and if the, uh- uh, if the liberal arts curriculum could do no more than that it would justify itself. You have to have heard the man sing before you know the difference. You have to entered the great imaginations before you know what a- what a- what a relatively insignificant imagination is. Uh, that's- that's certainly one part, but then there's another thing. You enter an experience and it's- it's the complexity of that experience I want to suggest I certainly cannot exhaust it, but I was talking about a vicarious experience essentially how you get into this sort of thing I once appeared at a panel at M.I.T. Uh, M.I.T. was trying to get a little humanities into the scientists. Uh, the process, uh, John Mason Brown were describing the educational axes

in Cambridge and he said M.I.T. is humanizing the scientists while Harvard goes on scieminizing the humanists. [All laugh] That- that there we were gathered a little society a serious thinkers with one of those frightful topics that are always being handed out this one was 'What is a great book?'. Well I have some strange engineering specifications to that. I think the answer is really quite simple a good book is one that carries us into a geography we need not add to physically and takes us through experiences we need not live on the clock. A great book the difference between a great book and a good book is simply one of the difference and dimension of that experience and the size of that geography. The great book gives us a larger world and a more thorough experience of, but we have to become something else and the essence of that really let's- let's begin in a sort of alphabetical sense the essence

of that is quite simple. Uh, you write non-fiction you write academic papers, paragraph by paragraph but that's not the way you write fiction you write fiction, scene by scene. As soon as you start playing with scenes you discover something about scene structure. The first thing you discover is that in- in any given scene there is one and only one character who serves as your mains of perception. You see, you may, uh, tell you may construct a scene relating a series of events as perceived by character A. You may then stop and run through that same series of events as perceived by character B, in another scene. You may then build a 3rd scene in which the same sequence of events is perceived by character C. Faulkner had had done this, uh, in his writing. Uh, you may then do a 4th scene as perceived by character D, but you realize that each time it's

a very different scene. I am saying that there is one and only one character within a scene affliction to whose inner workings you have access he is your means of perception and there's one very sound reason for that. He is the character you become for the duration of that scene he's the one with whom you identify by the process of empathy. Now empathy is not as usual a word as sympathy, but it's, uh, it's very close to it. Sympathy means feeling with, empathy means feeling into. Now it's- it's possible the some of you may think of empathy as a slightly fancy word but there's nothing fancy about the idea, when I was a kid I use to go to the movies on Saturday afternoon and there something like 3,000 young savages would empathize at the top of their lungs for hours. Uh, it's a basic human response, uh, I recall Tom Micks and all those other Frenches, ex-bushmen, all those great stars in the heavens.

I wasn't around in time for the first run of the Perils of Pauline, but there- there was a re-run of it back in the mid and late 20's and I can remember the passion with which we identified with Pauline in these various cliffhangers sequels, uh, ah- uh, always you know she'd be in trouble and we'd- we'd want to get out of it we were feeling the scene as she felt it. The villain came in we'd say lookout, you know, or, uh, she'd be frightened by something and run into a dank castle and, uh- uh looking back in terror she would back into a cobwebbed she would recoil from that lean against the wall in terror as an owl went 'hoo' and- and then a grate sliding door would open in the wall and a hairy arm would reach out and everybody would shout 'Lookout!' [crowd Oh's] [John]: nobody's ever said in this situation get her hairy arm [crowd laughs] you know. Well I'm- I'm gonna take that back Charles Adams made a career out of cheering for- [crowd and John laugh]

What- what the point I want to make is that you could rewrite that- that series of events so that you'd be would be cheering for the hairy arm. There's a little bit of hair- hairy arm in all of us we can, uh, we- we- we can identify with this. Uh, there is this poor, orphaned hairy arm, uh, who, uh- who has, uh it- it has a witch's curse upon it and it has to spend all its time inside the masonry of this dank castle. It's in danger of getting TB and all these other things that, uh- it's really not a very happy existence, but- but he's dutiful, he does what he should do. But he walks back and forth through the masonry and- and little- he look through the chicks and every now and then he sees a blonde in a slightly torn dresses and he wants one [crowd laughs] we- we can, uh, we can, uh, identify with that and the, uh, but we- we watch him go about his duties he keeps all his sliding

doors nicely oiled just as- as every hairy arm should you see his, uh, so they won't squeak when he's sliding it open. He's watchful, he's, uh, he'd make a good member of the hairy arm rotary, he does, uh, he does all the things he should. He's a serious citizen in these terms, but every time he comes to the reward for his labors every time he opens that the- the blonde comes within range and he opens that sliding door and reaches out everybody in the world shouts 'Lookout!' you see, and he has to pull back and feel rejected again. Well we- we- we can identify with that and I think if you, uh, if you let the frivolous lead you a step higher, uh, but that's- that's some sort of parable we can become anything. As art Moses to it as the management of a good imagination leads us to it. Emerson use to say it is the not me in my friend delights me, it is the not me and my friend delights me and maybe we began by being delighted by the not me in the hairy

arm but then we realize something else. We realize that would seemed to be not me really is related very much to me and some part. uh, you read about a murderer, that doesn't mean you're going to kill anybody but you begin to understand some of your- your own aggressions and angers. Uh, the process is why not described as if it's a it's not is, you as if yourself in any number of situations. Ah, if you as if yourself into these situations under the guidance of a good artist, you're not only taking on experience but your taking on this experience with as good a guide as you can possibly find for it. You come out at the other end with a kind of information that I don't think can be systematized, oh yes it can be systematized. Don't take it back, the kind of information that say Oedipus had about human motives. Uh, Freud came along and invented a clinical

knowledge for the thing, but you have a feeling that when- when Sophocles is imagining himself into a human situation, uh, he has a nervous system called a bush of den rites, you know and that- what whispers inside this bush of den right makes real connections. He understands the whispering of the nervous system to itself and I think that's the gift of the good artists. Than the clinician comes along and gives us clinical language for what this man grasps feelingly and certainly I have nothing against a clinician it's just that it's a different vocabulary one must use. It's the difference between the vocabulary of experience that the arts and the vocabulary of description that the clinician gives us uh, both of these enter into the function of things but one must not obscure the other.

If anyone thinks I'm attacking the clinician he's wrong I'm just saying that for certain purposes you need one vocabulary and for other things other purposes you need the other vocabulary and it's important not to confuse the two. Over and over again, I- uh, I see that- that- that incipient confusion coming or put it another way [John coughs] no I wanna go there's- there's several steps further I wanna go with this. Let's we're talking about a poem, you are being carried into an experience, but what sort of experience is it? Robert Penn Warren once said at the national book awards poetry begins by giving form to an experience and it ends as the experience of a form. I don't entirely agree with what he says, I do in large part, but that way of saying it seems to suggest that you have the experience first and then give form to it and I'm a little distrustful of that way of putting it. It says

begins by giving form to an experience and ends as the experience of a form. But how about the fact that the act of giving form is the experience. That's the question to look into and I, uh, immediately I have to get something that Robert Frost said a few years back, 'I flew down to Florida to interview him for his 80- for his 85th birthday and he began to talk about how are poem comes into being. He said a poem is like starting a conversation, you were- you run onto a subject with which you begin to talk and you say something to it and that gives it a chance to say something to you which gives you a chance to say something back to it which gives him a chance to say something back to you and so forth. But he said you can't say until you've been said to. You see, you don't know where you're going is what he said. But- but you do know when you've missed and then the question rather pointed one.

How do you know when you have missed what you did not know you were aiming at? Now the answer to that I think has a great deal to do with the- with the experience of any art form, uh, and certainly that's back to the function of a liberal arts college there. The answer he gave it's the only possible one as I think of it is rhythm. If the poem loses its rhythm, goes dead on the page it's over, but if if it manages to survive itself to tuck its rhythm into itself, uh, look it, uh- look at the way William Carlos Williams in that poem I read you. Has uh, has his rhythm going away, uh, the completes itself comes back in on itself. [pages turning] Must be in this book I just read it out of [crowd laughs] [John]: I'll look in the index. [pages turning] t- just- just listen to the rhythm for a minute

Mr. T, bare headed, in a soiled undershirt, his hair standing out on all sides, stood on his toes, heels together. arms gracefully for the moment curled above his head, then he whirled about bounded into the air and with an on tra sha, perfectly achieved completed the figure. See the way that tucks the tail back into the cat, uh, the- the rhythm just- just concludes, it comes to rest. All great rhythms do that, they come pausing places they go on again, uh, I- I- I- I would even venture to say that this is perhaps one of the greatest rhythms in, uh, in English literic poetry. The first answer of Dunn's anniversary, uh, look at the way that rhythm goes and resolves itself. All kings and all their favorites, all glories of honors, beauties, which the sun itself that makes time as they pass is

older by a year now than it was when now and I, first one another saw all other things to their destruction draw only our love has no decay, this no tomorrow hath no yesterday running it never runs from us away but truly keeps his first- last, everlasting day. You see how that day that- that- that bag just consumes in and resolve that rhythm into itself that's so much a function of the speaking of an art form and I won- I wonder how much of that is- is- is really absorbed in the curriculum or put it this way. Why do art forms change? Why it is that 20th century music does not sound very much like 19th century music? I can't answer that completely, but it has something to do with educating a man to live in his world. Uh, I think of Brahms for example just- just has to take, uh,

a fairly standard figure. By the time you get to the end of a symphonic piece by Brahms you have something like a 5 minute parade of final cords. You know light infantry, heavy infantry and then the tanks come in [crowd laughs] [John]: They, uh- they, uh uh, what would have been 19th century tanks. Thump, thump and then thump thump thump thump, thump thump and finally you come down with a full orchestral tonic, zoom, you eat it all up. Uh, it, uh, it all comes to rest in- in that- that great summarizing chord. Now I suggest to you that before a man can write that kind of music he has to be pretty sure what universe is living in. He has to be a man of essentially simplified conviction. Now if that's what you're going for that you're kind of music. Uh, no 20th century mus- musicians, composers have not managed to be able to feel that certain if they wrote music that came to that thumping that conclusion that

feel it they were cheating somehow so they go in for- for dying falls. They slip on the bottom of the music they- they evade that final affirmation, uh, they go in for a tonalities. They resolve on this discords sometimes the music is just chopped off. I'm talking about something like the rhythm of an age now. Now, why do we have discontinuities in music in this way. Because the poets have a conspiracy or because the uh, musicians have a conspiracy? No, I think this is the effort of honest man to seek forms that are meaningful to their earnest emotions. But you can't fake a certainty you don't feel it would be dishonest and the last thing on earth any artist has a reason for being is dishonest. Uh, if you're a banker you can try to steal but if you're a poet what is the worth stealing? Uh, you, uh, you- you, you have to do the- the- the thing honestly or there's no- no purpose in doing it at all. Uh, no

obviously we can see some of the reasons for that and as we begin to see the reasons we understand something about ourselves, uh, Wordsworth was certainly not a bad poet except, most of the time, but, uh- uh, but some of the time he was a superb that's what counts. You don't mind the fact that maybe 60% of it 70% you can argue some say half, I say 90% [crowd laughs] uh, but. uh- if the 10% that counts that counts. Uh, ta- take- take he was a man of talent, as an honest serious, sensitive, and talented man. It was possible for him to have certain convictions that an honest, serious, sensitive, and talented man can not come by at least that readily nowadays. For example, uh man of words worth time, who was a farmer let us say could look back 30 generations and be pretty sure that that's what his grandfather 30 generations removed was doing. That he was living his life as all

his ancestors have lived it and that would give them a sense that all his children would live about the same sort of life and it left them with a sense that he understood the continuity of human experience. Uh, he knew the lives of his father's he thought he knew the lives of his children. He could go back to the scenes of his childhood many Europeans still are born and die in the same room in which their fathers were born and died and so on, on the way. Well that's a sense of continuity how about the man who can't go home again because home is under the cloverleafs and the overpasses or because it's now a shopping center or- or the feels that we are joined in childhood have become parking lots or roads- sewage disposal plants or- or whatever keeps happening the world too fast for any of us to remember. Uh, how about the fact of our physical discontinuity uh, I was the east coast 5 days ago in New Orleans, 4 days ago in Dallas, 3 days ago in San Diego yesterday. Uh,

Lamb Palo Alto, uh I found myself walking out of a hotel and now I have to think now hold on a minute what city is this? Uh, it's a- it's- it's that kind of, uh, discontinuity, uh- things keep happening to us that rapidly we can't get rid of the thought for example that maybe that damn bomb is gonna go off. Uh, we had a cover at the Saturday Review of it filled me with, uh- trying the thrill of apprehension because it seems so central and right and irreputable, uh, it was issue dedicated to the bomb and it's said mankind has never been guilty- has never been capable of any folly it did not commit. That's a dark thought. Mankind has never capable of any folly it did not commit. It has the ring of truth to it you know and I hope it's wrong. Uh, because we got some supreme follies to worry about coming up. But now if- if you have that thrill of apprehension when you're- when you're in that situation how

can you write the fully resolved tonic classical music. You've got to find forms that are equal to this sense of dis-junction, to this sense of discord, to the shattering of continuities and yet are trying to be honest the man's image of himself and what are you doing in college if you're not coming to get an image of yourself. Uh, it comes down really do a thing that so many people say to me why don't you write poetry from me? You might put it another way why don't you teach humanities 1 for me, uh, I don't know. I sometimes, I, uh, not a good enough risk as I look you over, eh uh- ah, uh, I'd rather gamble on Dante. If I could write a poem that I can imagine it maybe good enough for Dante not to object to, I'll- I'll, uh, place my ticket at that window rather than at yours. But, put it another way. We- we get confused, uh, and I'm all for it, you know? I hear a great deal about the courage of his convictions. I wanna say a great deal in favor of the courage of

one's confusions because I've seen intellectual backsliders. I've had them in class, some of my colleagues have been intellectual backsliders. I sometimes wonder am I being guilty of it, uh, in these terms. Let's say a man by patience and concern and sensitivity raises a question of a certain complexity just for- per, uh, purposes of one saw it. Now let's say this question exists on the scale of complexity we could call 100 and the question you have raised is over complexity of 93 on this scale. Now you stare at the awesome complexity of this question you can't take all the confusions involved in it. So, you- you pull back on the scale and you give an answer to it on the scale of say 41 that's cheating that's intellectual cheating you, uh you downgrade the question in order to come to a certainty, uh, that's that kind of student I really get disgusted with I don't mind the dumb ones you can flunk them

?inaudible? Uh, but when- when the- when their bright enough to see the complexity and then get afraid of it. Now that's- that's- that's sad somehow you wish there were a little more intellectually valiant and ready to go for it instead of sliding back into those categories of the semi literate, uh, what, uh, ?merial rook eyes? are called the armored and concluded mind. Uh, I, uh, I go to visit my in-laws in Missouri now and then and their marvelous people their honest, their sincere and their ill-read, uh, their pious, uh, they uh- uh, you can depend on their word they work hard, but they just have more answers to their lives then they have questions [crowd laughs] and I don't know how to live this life. I don't know how to live without more questions then their answers to and I think this is the difference between the humanely educated person and- and the concluded person. It's a never ending process, but if you got your lives all

answered. Why bother take the examinations and go for grades? Uh, this, uh, there's- that's not the way I'm going, but put it in another way. Again in my, uh, I always have to keep plugging for my trade, uh, there is a po- poet, people say what about the audience for poetry? They seem to assume that there's only one audience. I'd like to suggest the presence of 2. 1 I want to call the horizontal audience, that consists of everybody alive right now or, uh, maybe input in terms of decades everybody alive in that decade. Uh when I was at the University of Michigan Eddie Guest was America's leading poets because he had 2 Cadillacs, uh, this was often mentioned to me by, uh, people around Michigan and he had a great house at Gross Pointe this proved substantial. So now, I'm trying to build up a brokerage account so that I can, uh,

I- I can reply I am not doing very well, but it's a dream, uh, the uh- well I suppose I once had a professor seriously, uh, at least been labeled one was paid as such. Who suggested to me that well maybe he would- he dared say that at least a 1,000 divorces a year were reported in the Detroit area because people read- read Eddie Guest of breakfast table and I wanted ?inaudible? maybe the function of uh, of uh- poetry is to, uh, to incite to divorce rather than to prevent it [crowd groans]. Uh, I don't- I don't know what this- this good purpose has served. Decency is not the measure, I see oh 100s of poems every week at the Saturday Review at all the miserably bad ones are incredibly decent. Uh, I- I'm ready to conclude that more poems die of decency than of any other one thing you could put your finger you know? They're all- they're all in favor of god and justice in the universe and of kindness to mothers and of kindness to children,

kindness to wives, uh, wiser of every kindness to husbands, uh, all these things I'd vote for, but I wish they'd stop talking about them and get- get down to more basic things. It isn't decency that counts in this, yet I suppose that is in terms of a horizontal audience you took a poll and that seems to be what advertising people do. If you took a poll in Detroit in say 1940 on our whether more people read Eddie Guest than Red Keats. I have no doubt that Eddie Guest would've won in 1940, but now I want to think of another kind of vertic- vertical audience, the audience through time. Where is the audience for Homer? You see how many years it goes back? If we don't blow [clears throat] blow ourselves to pieces, uh, some parts of that audience are a 1,000- 2,000, 5,000 years short of being born. They continue vertically all the way through, every generation adds to that audience. And I find myself

thinking that grave- when the art is great. More people participate in it, over the- over this period of time than than any 1 horizontal audience can produce. That if you took that poll in Detroit between Eddie Guest and John Keats not in 1940, but let's say on judgment day, assuming that Detroit can make it judgment if you, uh [crowd laughs] if you go through the town you have some doubts. But can you doubt that more people would have been enriched and responded to the art of Keats than to the doctoral of Eddie Guest. Eddie Guest would've disappeared. You see what I am describing I think has something to do with what I want to call the experience of the human race on this planet. That experience is stored in that vertical audience and we're right back to the business of the underprivileged child as the one whose experiences a limited to his immediate environment. He, uh, what we're trying to do in

education is to move the student, not out of his horizontal audience but think of them as 2 structures, you see one this and one that way. He has to be a man of his times ideally, but we want to move him into that vertical stripe that puts him into touch with the past. And there's one excellent reason for that aside from the fact that he's being humanize by acquiring some sense of this human experience of this planet. Some people say who are the good poets of the future? Well I can't name them all, but I know who some of the great poets of the 25th century will be. Among them will be: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, uh, and then they'll be the good poets 25th century and of the 30th century and of the 35th. Uh, the only way of knowing that is to have seen them in the past that tells us something the past is our only way of looking at the future when we- when we learn to understand and isn't that the measure of- of moving it from one end to the other. But I don't think that can be

done categorically. I think it has to be done in terms not of outlines and syllabuses it has to be done in terms of experiences. And I think there's very much within the college that tends to work against that kind of experience. I see a lot of work being done with reading speed and I'm all for it, in a sense. I wish I could read factual prose more rapidly, but reading speed courses I want to submit a good only with when you're absorbing material about which you're not required to have any feeling. Uh, I- I would- an ideal thing would be to be able to glance at a logarithm table and have read it in 15 seconds I'd love to do that be able to do that sort of thing you know. Uh, just- just glance at the market quotations like that have them- uh, have them bang, uh, or uh- read a whole series of data and have it [pause]. Fine, but all I'd do is pick up the facts don't have to feel anything about them, but you can't do that with music. Ya

know the best conductor is not the man who gets the orchestra through the score in the shortest elapsed time. [crowd laughs] If that was so you could go to symphony with a stopwatch in your hand, you see and the critics could write the next morning Bernstein clip 6 seconds off Munch's record for Relica, you know, the uh, no that's that's- that's- that's not the measure, uh, it's- it's not that categorical efficiency the good conductor is the man who gets the orchestra through the music in the most involved way. The way most responsive to the notation of the music. That is with the most human feeling and it's feeling I'm talking about, it's experience I'm talking about, not fact. Uh, there any number of ways of going it fact, but there's only one last thing I want to tell you if you bare with it I appeared on a panel some time ago with a revered colleague, the dean of the school of engineering and again while these terrible panels the title of which was 'Creative Thinking' he got up and gave us 5 steps to

creative thinking and at first I was getting all ready for a fight then I realized all we had was a semantic confusion, I could let it pass. But, here- here are the 5 steps he gave us at least as roughly as nearly as I can say them: 1. Define the limits of your problem. 2. Undertake the qualitative analysis. 3. Perform the quantitative mathematics required by your qualitative analysis. 4. Very prudent step, check your mathematics. [crowd laughs] 5. Find the mechanical implementation of your mathematical solution. Now see my only quarrel this a very respectable process, my only quarrel with it is that is not creative thinking. It's another entirely respectable process called problem solving and I'm all for it. You drive across the Bay Bridge, you know, you, uh, get out in the middle you like to feel it it has been problem solved. The, uh, it's- it's-

it's- it's your nexus in a sense and I- I don't sneer at the people who're going around problem solving this sort of thing. All I want to say in relation to educating oneself to be a human being is that can you do any of the cardinal things of your lives, cardinal in its root sense, you know. Card is Latin for hinge any of the turning point things of your lives can it do any of those things in terms of these 5 steps. See you can't get born that way, well that's not your problem, uh, you, uh- you can't can't die that way, you can't beget a child that way, you can't get married that way, or maybe I should put it in the other order you can't get married that way, you can't beget a child that way, seems a little more decent, uh, but the uh, well certainly you can't go pick out a girl and define her limits and, uh- and do something qualitative about it and then something quantitative and mathematical which you then check and find a mechanical- find a mechanical implementation [crowd laughs]

I- I confess that now- now and then I have run into a couple that would seem to give off that aura, but it- but it was it was not the most enriching human experience I've had, let me- let me put it that way. Well I'm- I'm uh happy that I managed to stay frivolous to the end, but I hope you'll take some part of frivolity seriously. Uh, I don't want to come to any thumping tonic conclusions, uh, the process it seems to me is not one of acquiring information, the social prestige, but of pushing at these questions I can't answer them all I can do is confuse them, uh, but isn't it what- what to what good is a college it- it exists to make people more human, uh that's not what a trade school does and I don't know any way of doing that more immediately than through the arts. Well you can't let a poet go without reading a poem, but I've run over so I'm only gonna read you 4 lines, will let, uh, let me settle for that. It's a way of saying goodnight if I can

find it, uh, it also proves that I'm not against the scientists- sciences because I took the geology course once [crowd laughs] Passed it too. This is called 'Good night' an oyster that went to bed x million years ago, tucked itself into a sand-bottom yawned, so to speak, and woke a mile high in the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. If I am not here for breakfast, geologize at will [crowd laughs] Thank you Gardner. [applause] [Host]: You've been listening to the Late, Late Lecture with John Ciardi, poetry editor of the Saturday Review and author of the column A Manner of Speaking. His topic was "What Good is a College', every night this week Monday through Friday it's John Ciardi on the Late, Late Lecture [clock ticking] [outro music plays]

[Host]: and thus Riverside Radio WRVR concludes

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