Be with me, words, a little longer

It may be that I don’t know the first thing about poetry.

It may be that I’m rapidly bearing down on that age–the big three-five–that on its own magnifies the significance of mortality literature. [Worry not; post author seems to be making a joke. --Ed.]

Or, it may be that the folio of Updike poetry in the March 16 New Yorker truly is the treasure it seems on first read.

The sequence includes 10 poems, most of them written in November and December last year. For the biographically minded, they seem to span some wintertime spent in Tucson, some days in the hospital in Boston for pneumonia, and the discovery that his lung cancer was metastsizing.

More ardent Updike followers will be unsurprised at the naked honesty of these lines–his longing, his worry, his embarrassment, his nostalgia. For me, though, what the poet offers of himself is arresting and invigorating and a clarion call to the storytelling-inclined.

That’s not, I should underline, the consequence of mere revelation or confession. It isn’t details of a biopsy or tax return that send me scurrying to the Mac to start tapping away at a new story. Rather, it’s how Updike  scoops up the abundant, disorderly, imperfect fragments of life, and makes art. He is the sculptor who gathers his clay from the creekbank behind his home, the painter who adds pigment to his oils from the dust of his own front yard.

He acknowledges as much in one of the poems, “Peggy Lutz, Fred Muth,” a tribute that includes these lovely, instructive lines:

Dear friends of childhood, classmates, thank you
scant hundred of you, for providing a
sufficiency of human types: beauty,
bully, hanger-on, natural,
twin, and fatso–all a writer needs,
all there in Shillington, its trolley cars
and little factories, corn fields and trees,
leaf fires, snowflakes, pumpkins, valentines.

The humility, I think, is part of the brilliance, for it enables the art’s authenticity. Can you teach that? I suspect not–in Updike’s case, at least, humility seemed hardwired. Here’s Tobias Wolff’s recollection from January 30:

I didn’t know John Updike. We met just twice, briefly, but the first occasion has stayed with me. We were both up for an award which he eventually won, and before the ceremony the finalists had gathered for drinks in a home near the venue. Updike was by far the most senior of us, in every respect, and we were shy in his presence, and in our shyness we stood apart from him and talked nervously among ourselves. Then I heard him say to our hostess, “They hate me,” and I was so mortified at this misunderstanding, and so touched by his vulnerability, that I immediately joined him, and soon enough the others drifted over as well. He actually seemed relieved! Of course he could not have been kinder or more encouraging.

That award, I’m assuming, was the 2004 PEN/Faulkner. Updike was nominated for his The Early Stories, Wolff for Old School. I was there with Anne–not for the cocktail hour, obviously, but for the award presentation. And while I was consumed with my own issues, I did have enough of the Watcher in me to spend a few moments observing the other writers, and we peons, swirl around Updike. He was gracious, patient, good-humored, just what you’d want to be if you were in his shoes at that instant.

For the moment, at least, you’ll need a subscription if you want to read the folio online.  If you aren’t a subscriber, to whet your appetite enough to go out and buy the issue, here’s the second half of the first poem, “Spirit of ‘76″: