Poetry Friday: November, by John Updike

Today, I am thankful for a multitude of blessings, including our books. Children's books, picture books, books of poetry, books of all kinds ... And I'm thankful for this poem from one of our books: A Child's Calendar, by John Updike.



November 
 by John Updike

The stripped and shapely
  Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
  Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
  As hard as stone.
The year is old,
   The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
  Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
   Loveliness---


Read the rest of the poem here.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Becky's Book Reviews.

Rabbit Angstrom and Cosmo Castorini

The other day, I was working out and watching Charlie Rose (at 5:30 a.m. one can watch either Charlie Rose or "How to Get Rich Buying Real Estate for Seventeen Cents and Reselling It for Millions." I chose Charlie Rose.)

Charlie was showing some of his many interviews with the recently deceased John Updike from years past. In more than one interview, Updike owned up to the fact that the specter of death had haunted him since he was young. It was constantly hanging over him, he said in one of the interviews.

And then, I thought about the way that Updike constantly, obsessively wrote about adultery, and about men chasing women as if their lives depended on it. (When I read an Updike book, I often pictured myself taking his wife out to lunch, patting her hand sympathetically and saying, "I'm so sorry, dear ....") And suddenly, out of the blue, I could hear Olympia Dukakis asking John Mahoney, in Moonstruck, "Why do men chase women?" and I heard her answering her own question with, "I think it's because they fear death."

And, I thought, "All Rabbit Angstrom really had to do was ask an Italian housewife about the central dilemma of his life and she could have fixed everything for him."

And I'll bet a terrific dinner would have followed.

Poetry Friday: Updike, style vs. content, and glory days

John Updike died this week.



Love his work or or hate it (and I've done both, depending on the book), he was an incredible craftsman. Listen to this, from the above NYT obituary:

He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.

Here he is in “A Sense of Shelter,” an early short story:

“Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”

The article continues:

The detail of his writing was so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction: those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that it was more style than content.

Oh, but sometimes his style was enough.

Which actually goes against the grain, in general, of what I believe about art and what makes art worthwhile. It has to have content, meaning. Some inherent value that is more than just beauty on display.

But, oh ... sometimes his style was enough.

Both as a poet and as a novelist, Updike wrote about the glory days of the high school athlete, and of that athlete's later life. Rabbit Angstrom is one of the saddest characters in all of American fiction.

And, Rabbit seems to have had first stirrings in "Flick" -- here's a snippet of Ex Basketball Player, a poem written in 1954:

Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.

He was good: in fact, the best. In ’46

He bucketed three hundred ninety points,

A county record still. The ball loved Flick.

I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty

In one home game. His hands were like wild birds


Read the rest of it here.

And read more about it here, in this short interview, Inside Game, at the Poetry Foundation, in which Updike calls poetry, "the exercise of language at its highest pitch."

Oh, yes. Sometimes his style was enough.

Call me weak.

Poetry Friday is being hosted today at Adventures in Daily Living.

Poetry Friday: John Updike

Seven Stanzas at Easter 
by John Updike

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.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart

(Read the rest here, and thanks again, Atticus, for the idea.)

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at Booktalking.

Poetry Friday: A Murmuration of Starlings, and Mary Oliver, and Updike

This is a murmuration of starlings. 

I need say nothing about it. 

Just watch. 

This is from Mary Oliver's "Starlings in Winter":

... Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

(Read the whole poem here.)

~~~~~~~

And this is from John Updike's "The Great Scarf of Birds":

...And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.

Long had it been since my heart
had been lifted as it was by the lifting of that great
scarf.

(See the whole poem here, in The New Yorker archives.)

~~~~~

And, simply because I love them, here's a list of collective names for animal groups.

I like to make up new ones, too. Let's see ...

A collective name for poets? I suggest a pentameter of poets.

For bloggers ... hmmm. I think I'll call us a blather of bloggers.

For readers, a rondeau of readers.

Other ideas?

~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at Teaching Authors.

~~~~~

Updated to note:
The above link to The New Yorker shows a different version of the poem -- an earlier one, I assume. The version with the final stanza I included can be found in Updike's Collected Poems, 1953-1993.

~~~~~

Updated again to add Tanita Davis's link to this Youtube video of Elbow performing Starlings.

The Trumpet of the Swan: A New Book Club is Born

In a fun coincidence, it turned out that all three of us Catholic homeschooling moms were doing The Trumpet of the Swan as a read-aloud.  One of the moms suggested a tea party for the  five children ages nine and under who had been the beneficiaries of the  reading.

So, that's what we did.

The menu included:

• Watercress sandwiches (with lettuce ably standing in for watercress) 
• Slates (chocolate graham crackers on which Hostess Mom had written the children's names in frosting) 
• Chalk (string cheese) 
• Trumpets (Bugles)
• Medals (miniature rice cakes)
• Money bags (fashioned from tissue paper) filled with coins (chocolate, of course) 
• Swan nests (no-bake cookies with peanut M&Ms nestled in for the eggs) 

I just now asked Ramona if we had anything else at the party and she said, "We had juice boxes. But that's not symbolic of anything." 

Right. 

So, Hostess Mom asked the children a number of most excellent questions about the book. They answered in a most excellently cute manner (between bites) and a gastronomically, literarily good time was had by all. 

I highly recommend all of the following: E.B. White, reading aloud, my friends, and whimsical foodstuff.

Side notes: 

You can read John Updike's take on the book here. (Though I must point out, dear NYT, that Sam Beaver is an 11-year old boy, not 1.) 

You can listen to an excerpt of the book, read by E.B. White, here. 

A couple of Poetry Friday gems

Books I'll be looking for:

My Letter to the World and Other Poems (thanks to Elizabeth at Fuse #8 for reminding me to get this one on my wish list.)







A Child's Calendar by John Updike, with thanks to Janet at Across the Page.