![]() ![]() When news came of Ciardi's death the other day, I thought of all the time, pain and eyestrain he has saved me all these years. Give the writer the deserved rejection slip - the one an editor should have sent earlier - and go on to the next. Read a writer's essay, poem, story or column until the first clich,e. What to do? The writing of Ciardi, who was then an English professor in another school and in his first years as poetry editor of Saturday Review, suggested a method for cutting back. ![]() For classes, I had a required reading list as long as an arm and an appetite for the unrequired almost beyond control. My discovery came in the late 1950s, when I was an English major in college, with a minor in golfing, where I read greens more than books. His writing had grace, but, better, it had altitude, flying over trite language like an eagle clearing a summit of dead trees. John Ciardi was the first author about whom I said: here's someone who writes without clich,es. ![]()
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