I recently (well, a couple of weeks ago) Updike’s book of poetry Verse. It is two books of poetry combined into one, most of which was written and published before he began his string of commercially successful novels.
One of the facets of Updike’s writing that I’ve always admired is his unflinching adherence to ugliness, and his belief that within ugliness, we can find beauty. These themes run through his Rabbit series, color his short stories, and add to his most common main character: an egotistical, sexually-driven man. Death, divorce, drug use, and despair; these are not pretty items but they are true items.
Yet in his poetry, Updike portrays a vastly different personality. These poems are, in a word, fun. Spanning from an alphabet of poems—one poem per letter, each for one item starting with said letter—to a touching poem written to his daughter, who, like him, was born in March. And yet the biting wit, the sly cleverness of Updike remains. It shows concisely and cleverly in the following poem:
Xyster
“An instrument for scraping bones”
Defines the knife.
The word is rarely used—but why?
What else is life?
Beyond playful—or cynical—witticisms, though, Updike shows a patience for the act of crafting poetry. In the poem, “Yardstick” he writes five lines, each split into three sections—and each section containing exactly twelve characters. Equate the characters to inches, of course, and the poem is five yardsticks stacked on one another.
Updike pulls from headlines, from funny turns of phrase he hears, and from antiquated sayings that appear comically poetic to a contemporary ear. It reads more like Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstine than Updike, but even at his most lighthearted, Updike shows the same mastery of the English language that enabled him to pen some of the best American novels I have ever read.
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