Verse

Updike's verse offers a breezy read, but like Lewis Carroll or maybe Pynchon, there seems something thoughtful behind the lunacy and manic wordplay. The characteristic personality of these verses is play, but with a sincerity that belies any sense of frivolity or throw-away farce. I've been revisiting Monty Python's Flying Circus of late, and I recognise a similar stance of commentary on the human condition there as in Updike's poems --though Python are much more absurdist.

I'd love to have a few couplets memorised (like his description of an umbrella), but that never works for me. Instead, I should just pick this up from time to time: poems are short and immediately rewarding.

It’s a little paperback book published by Fawcett (1965), called simply Verse cost me 75¢. As best I remember, it may have been the first volume of poetry I ever owned on my own. It brought together two previous collections by John Updike, he Carpentered Hen and Telephone Poles.

How many times I’ve read selections from this little volume aloud to my classes. How many times, in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve chuckled over pages where the book fell open automatically. Back in those days, when the New Criticism was at its height and heady with demands for complexity, this work would indeed have been considered “verse,” not serious poetry. Most of it is humorous, or at least playful.

Just a few quotations as examples:

He show more begins “A Cheerful Alphabet of Pleasant Objects”

Apple

Since Time began, such alphabets begin
With Apple, source of Knowledge and of Sin.
My child, take heart: the fruit that undid Man
Brought out as well the best in Paul Cézanne.

Many of his verses take off from a brief newspaper item. “Youth’s Progress” plays with an announcement that a young man had been elected “Greek god: for an interfraternity ball":

Just turned nineteen, a nicely molded lad,
I said goodbye to Sis and Mother; Dad
Drove me to Wisconsin and set me loose.
At twenty-one, I was elected Zeus.

Igor Stravinsky is quoted as saying, “I despise mountains, they don’t tell me anything.” “Mountain Impasse” concludes

The hill is still before Stravinsky.
The skies in silence glisten.
At last, a rumble, then the mountain:
“Igor, you never listen.”

But Updike, the versifier, occasionally does get serious. There is perhaps his most famous and most frequently anthologized poem, “Ex-Basketball Player.” (It would certainly go in my anthology of the poetry of a lifetime!) There is his version of Horace’s Ode III.ii (“Let the boy, timber-tough from vigorous soldiering, / learn to endure lack amicably”). There’s a tribute to George Washington (“merely Caesar”) and a reflection on “Seagulls” and the moment when he sees a flight of birds in October as “The Great Scarf of Birds.” And, near the end of the collection, there are those carefully structured “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

But generally Updike’s verse is light. Fun to browse in, this little book will fit right inside your hip pocket. Enjoy! show less

stamp inside front cover