UPDIKE AT REST: Our Best Novelist is Dead:

We've lost one of our greatest novelists, John Updike, who died of lung cancer at age 76. Norman Mailer, in a breezy dismissal of Updike's novel Rabbit Run, called Updike the sort of writer who was popular with the mass of readers who knew nothing about writing. Mailer's withering glare, though, was notably fueled with obvious envy (brilliant as he was, the late writer was always obsessed with his literary competition), and what the departed Updike leaves behind is one of the most impressive bodies of work a contemporary writer, American or otherwise, would want for a legacy. His Rabbit quartet of novels--Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest--is among the peerless accomplishments of 20th century fiction in it's chronicle of living through the confusion of the Viet Nam war, feminism, civil rights and the sexual revolution in the person of the series' titular character, Rabbit Angstrom. Not deep of thought but rich in resentment, Angstrom was an analog of American culture itself, a congested vein of self seeking that never recovered from the raw sensation of youthful vigor; Angstrom, like the country itself, resentfully fumbled about for years ruing the loss of vitality and trying to replace it with new things, the crabby possessiveness of the middle class. 

Updike had been criticized, as had Nabokov, for creating characters who weren't sufficiently heroic in their suffering or sympathetic to any degree, a charge I considered a dodge against the dicier matters of personality Updike was fascinated by and lovingly detailed with his poetically charged sentences. The seduction and allure of Updike's prose was the lush and bittersweet tone he could manage while following the curious circles of sense seeking his creations walked in--within any scene, whether a room, a church, a middle-class home decorated in conflicting schools of tackiness, there would be an order things established, material goods contrasted against modified and enhanced surroundings that would offer up a vivid sense of how intoxicating, self-convincing a character's thought process can be. Updike, though, didn't trust perfect scenarios or theories as to the meaning of life and was well aware of the human quirk that seems compelled to foul the nest with self-seeking. Comic, cruel, resonating with moments that are suddenly enlarged beyond the inane doings of his sweetly deluded antagonists, Updike was the voice of the problematic white straight male libido. Everything was sex drive--love, business, politics--and that realization alone is likely what gave Updike so much material to write books about, captured in an unequaled six decades of novels, short story collections, plays, and essay collections. John Updike was that rare talent who had the capacity of vary his approach to novel writing and still remain vital, alive--the ratio of how many of his novels worked aesthetically and worked structurally within his constant experimentation with form and voice is astounding. What is amazing, as well, is how vital his novels remained as he aged--Terrorist (dealing with the obvious issue), Seek My Face (a novelization of the life of Jackson Pollack), and Gertrude and Claudius (a prelude by Updike to Shakespeare's Hamlet) among others show a fictionist of endless curiosity about things topical, historical, outside his own famous niche of New England suburbs and small towns. Tom Wolfe accused him of being among those American novelists who've missed the vitality of real people, preferring instead the easier job of writing fanciful "writer" works, but that's the sort of comment that shows that Wolfe wouldn't let the facts ruin a chance to pour gasoline on a burning resentment. 

Updike, gain truth, took the pains to research a number of novel ideas and then imagine a world where the characters would live--his range of subject matter leaves one breathless. Joyce Carole Oates impresses us with her energy and her sheer productivity, but one doesn't escape the feeling that she's written the same story, with variations in tone and width, at least sixty to seventy times over in her three hundred plus volumes; Updike, a little slower yet still prolific with fifty books, left his comfort zone and applied the novelist's craft to those situations and people he felt had a story worth telling. So too comes his criticism and book reviews, which seemed to make remarks from any number of writers and subjects; his willingness to consider fiction an expandable craft made him one of the more trustworthy reviewers we've had the good luck to read over the years.

If a writer's task is, among others, to help us understand the actions that cause us to fall down and act badly despite our best intentions, Updike has performed a patriotic service. There should be some prize for that.

Robert Burns

Today is Robert Burn's birthday. Now I'll roll over and go back to sleep.



I suppose I should honor the good man, but I always thought his poems sounded unintentionally comic. It's bigoted of me, yes, but the untamed Scot accent makes me think of someone running the teeth of a comb over a live, loud microphone, or the sound of an electric razor purring unattended on wash basin. I am stuck with the Monty Python sketch, which you can see here:

Cell phoning in the city

The sad backatcharolls off the stiff lower lip
and scatters like
cigarette ash
before the sidewalk can claim it,

the yackety-yack
with the lack of tact
in timbre and pace
makes listening to this world
a disgrace to the language
we have
and the faces god gave us,

wide eyes and
pliant mouths
squinted and frowning
at people they cannot see,

nothing in the headlines
keeps my interest,
all that matters
is whether the daughter
of the woman in front of me
wore thong underwear to her sweet sixteen
or if took the key to the belt
her dad made her wear,

it's a great concern
to know how low the liquor bottles were
when she got home from vacation,

the day is gray,
flavorless like bricks,
a phone rings every half a minute,

the street is full of people
who don't see anything,


the air is full of words
angry as wasps,

saying things
only ghosts and angels understand
as they pass through the walls,

ascend to the heights.

Elitist Poetry

Just got off the phone with someone who decided to make their nominal inquiry as to how I was doing after a-long-time-no-see into a springboard to revisit some old resentments. Poetry came up in the course of a miserable (and loud) stumble down Memory Lane, art and practice she found effete. "You're a snob and you're an elitist and you never listened when I--" I was puzzled, of course, but that's what I get for having the same phone number for over a decade; folks can revisit you and either get square with you or start the wildfire once again. Anyway, I resented being called an elitist. But maybe that's not a bad thing (within limits, of course).

Poetry has been an elitist practice for decades, and the efforts to bring a larger audience into the fold and investigate the diversity of verse styles is a good thing, regardless of the misgivings of the abstruse few. I doubt books will vanish, nor that experimental and radical writing will cease; more likely, such forms will most likely gain readers because of efforts to get buyers to invest in Dorianne Laux or Frank O'Hara instead of Mitch Albom or Dwayne Dyer. It's likely that exposure to poetry and the creation of desire for it where none existed before would eventually get a larger audience for things that are edgier, more experimental, strangely political. The anti-poetics that flourished in the last century might gain an audience not composed of other wayfaring artistes and institutionalized revolutionaries who nod and chuckle at each botched and confounded pun and labored sarcasm. Contempt is fine when it's reserved for those who are perpetrating objectively loathsome agendas on their fellow citizens, such as rationales for social, economic and physical violence of any sort; justice is a quality that must be fought for every step of the way, and a honed contempt is a part of the mix of responses that would fuel you to oppose the tangible elements of evil. Poetry you don't like isn't a tangible evil, it's only a difference of taste, and tiresome derision on the level of blistering invective does not prepare one's community for A Perfect World; it cheapens discourse, rather, and makes the prospect of writing and participating in poetry essentially the same as inviting someone to have a free sock-in-the-jaw. Why would one lean into a left hook they see coming?

And why would an aspiring poet bother with taking up this essentially unprofitable art if there's no standard for conversation, criticism, disagreement? It shouldn't be strange to anyone why many of our best writers are forsaking poetry altogether, and even skipping novel writing and instead situating themselves in various nonfiction categories, areas, alas, where there are readership and the sort of feedback that appraises worth sans the desire to impale every perceived sinner against a vague notion of worth. Perhaps it would be an audience that might ask what it is Bernstein and a few of his friends are trying to do. Such an audience should be prepared to roll up their sleeves; not every verse is Billy Collins, transparent as acrylic. The words we use and the sounds we make to get across subtle blends of the sublime, inane, blessed and evil is strange enough to consider, and one is refreshed by having their memes and phonemes challenged by way of being made even odder. Language poetry is an honest project, I admit, and I've been taken with its peculiar power as a method, but there is a point where the personality has to surface undiluted with theory, which such a hypothetical readership would demand.

Oath of Office

Poet Frank Bidart writes about the odd and confounding ritual of issuing in a new President with "Inauguration Poem", a skimpy, momentarily evocative lyric that promises to deliver a moral but evaporates on the breeze instead. Just as well, really, since these slight stanzas are murmurings instead of exclamations, whispers rather than shouts. Bidart wants to write about the unnamed expectations come to be focused on the taking of the oath. With or without the new president's hand on the Bible, the varieties of disappointment will reign soon enough; even a god would have trouble solving every citizen's concern and dissolving each citizens unease with the empty sound that attends every step. There are no laws against loneliness. This is poem dwells on the idea that what we're actually dealing with as we witness an inauguration is ritual meant to stir ghosts; the past is present and constantly influencing the future, as the sage remarked, and Bidart attempts to isolate some elements of the allure that attracts the best and worst of us. It's a collective point where headstrong notions of putting things right which have strayed off course , grossly so, in the presence of a president who'll mount an assault on erring policies and social injustice, a public that desires a change in direction, the sociopaths, the malcontents, the would-be assassins who want to strike a blow against the organized brutality the state and the institutions have made his or her world.

Today, despite what is dead
staring out across America I see sinceLincoln gunmennursing fantasies of purity betrayed,dreaming to restorethe glories of their blood and state...

Expectation, hope, rage, rebellion, collective will--a noisy, bickering mess trying to sort itself out and praying for consensus as the new man takes an oath to do his best. Sometimes we make the right choice, history seems to smile and matters work themselves out in ways that amaze us and perhaps make us aware of a hesitant miracle taking place. Too soon, though, our basic interest, our native centers of concern, take credit for the good, we lay blame too easily outside our sphere, we destroy Eden once again with our will to have our way.

under the lustrous flooding moonthe White House is stillWhitman's White House, itsgorgeous frontfull of reality, full of illusion

There is always the chance to start over, though, this work in progress--this is a government as the boulder we roll up the hill, only to start over once it rolls down again. That seems the center essence of democracy quite despite what Presidents have to say about it--we are and will continue to clean up the mess we've made of things, to contend with the bad hands we've been dealt, the sorry slices of pie we've been served. It's not about the getting, it's about the doing, and the specters Bidart invokes at the margins serve to compel us to keep the wretched machine humming along.

The angst of the pruney faced

Some of us have declared that they don’t care about a writer’s theories on writing so long as the work, absent an explanation , comes up to the snuff one would like it to. I do care if a poet's work add up to the sum of their theories because it's a difference between talking a good game and playing one. Sometimes the theories are more interesting and evocative than the poets’ work as an artist; Pound seemed to me to have the instincts of a good talent scout. I'm grateful for his remarks to his fellows, but I wish reading his work wasn't a path I had to go through in order to find the better poets. His protégé, T.S.Eliot, though, had poetry that surpassed his theories, giving the lie to them, in fact. For all of his stated preferences for impersonality in the stanzas, Eliot’s verse couldn’t outrun his despair. There is something felt and hurt, even moving under the abstraction of the writing, and one comes away feeling that he had hoped the layers of abstruse allusion would render the pains still and not bothersome. I doubt he succeeded, and it’s poetry’s blessing he never cured himself of his disillusion. One is almost able to forgive the anti-Semitism that creeps through the work. Not quite, but almost.

Andrew Wyeth

chistina's world
for Andrew Wyeth

brown hills of grass
where she slept

until the light
slides under
the surface of things,

she rises
hungry
as a fish
patrolling a lake's still surface,

there is someplace to be,

in a chair
at a table
with a place setting
of one plate, one fork,

one empty glass.