This Bard Has Flown
Though it might be blasphemy to say, John Updike's writing is easier to
digest, and probably just plain better in verse form. In prose, his
writing is so dense you sometimes lose track of what's going on as you
pause to marvel at the way he strings words together to form impossibly
beautiful, textured sentences. With poetry, his style is leaner, each
word carrying more of its share of the intended thought. His utterly
brilliant facility of language is still on display but he must employ an
economy that is not in effect in his prose.
With Americana, his sixth poetry collection and the first issued
since the omnibus Collected Poems 1953-1993, Updike shows that he still
has a nearly unequaled talent for finding the poetic possibilities of
the everyday, the fanciful, and the mundane. The book's 62 poems are
divided into four loosely thematic sections: America and travel; his life,
birthdays and illness; foreign travel and Europe; and daily life and
furniture.
The first section is the most humorous, the most reminiscent of his
early light verse penned for The New Yorker. In "The Overhead Rack," for
instance, he draws numerous laughs from 32 lines about the
democratizing effects of airline luggage restrictions. Over the course of a dozen
or so poems he finds new and interesting metaphors for travel, airplanes
and hotel rooms. These follow the first of three longer poems that
appear in the collection, "Americana," subtitled "Poem Begun on Thursday,
Oct. 14, 1993, at O'Hare Airport, Terminal 3, around Six O'Clock P.M.,"
a self-referential slice of life inspired by a wait at the airport.
Outside the world of travel he turns his eye toward America's cities.
That eye is still sharp: after 50 years of observation Updike notes how
New York City's high rises dominate the landscape, buildings "whose
sheets of windows rise like thirsty thunder."
The second section finds Updike ruminating on his own advancing age.
The 69-year-old is obviously quite taken with the approaching appellation
"old man," marveling in a handful of poems at his hands and their
ailments and scars, "two open pages of a detestable yet gripping book." What
is perhaps the best piece in the book is found here, the magnificent
"In the Cemetery High Above Shillington." As Updike passes among the
gravestones, reading names that will be familiar to long-time readers —
Tothero, for instance, the name of Rabbit's basketball coach in "Rabbit,
Run," is one — he muses on the 50 years that have passed since he was a
boy riding a bicycle among the same markers. It reads like a book's
worth of short stories in one poem. "In rented car, on idle impulse,
briefly home if 'home' is understood as where one was as a child, I glide
into this long forgotten space," he writes. Elsewhere he is able to make
a medical diagnosis sound positively poetic in "Ocular Hypertension":
"Wow! I liked the swanky sound, the hint of jazz, the rainbow edginess:
malais of high-class orbs."
Whether it stems from the collective logorrhea of the first two
sections or from the fact that the topics of foreign travel and furniture are
not as fertile as American travel and the author's life, the book seems
to lose steam over its second half.
Still, he pulls out a long poem in the final section that is simply
beautiful in its use of language, one of the long pieces that act as moral
and figurative focal points for the book. The autobiographical "Song to
Myself" is a lengthy meditation, a cynical greeting card from Updike to
Updike:
My mind mocks itself as I strive to pray,
to squeeze from a dried-up creed
enough anaesthetizing balm
to enroll me among sleep's tranced citizenry,
who know no void nor common sense.
Reading Updike's poetry, one empathizes with Nicholson Baker, the
author who so eloquently recounted in his book U and I how Updike seems to
have already been to places where lesser writers eventually look. Just
this evening, taking a respite from reading Americana and Collected
Poems, I was taken by the staggering number of fireflies sparking
across the lawns of Iowa City like tiny bursts of electricity. Filing the
image away for later use, I returned to Updike, to Collected Poems and
the poem "Iowa," to be exact. There I found Updike's own remembrance of
a similar scene: "those fireflies — this winter holds them in it like a
jar." I'm not sure where he was in Iowa to see such a sight in winter,
but the image was perfect, better than anything I could have conceived
from similar inspiration.
To read Americana is to experience this feeling page after page.
Updike's writing and vocabulary place him in rarified air with few peers.
In verse, that talent and intellect are featured in what is perhaps
their best arena, a place where his razor sharp wit, keen observational
eye, and precise writing shine the brightest.
