[English] Updike, 'Endpoint'

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

John Updike's Last Poems

Three poems from Updike's 'Endpoint,' his final collection, read by The 
New York Times's Charles McGrath. (excellent free 'click to play audio')

 http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/


John Updike’s publisher recently asked me to read the audiobook version 
of 'Endpoint,' his last book of poems. 

This is a task that Updike, who was a superb reader of his own work, 
would have undertaken for himself had he lived, and I was apprehensive 
about stepping in for him. My only qualifications, if you can call them 
that, are that I knew Updike and that I used to read a lot to my kids. 

>From years of fidgeting and nodding off during poetry readings, though, I 
know just how hard it is to read verse well. 

Moreover, Updike wrote many of the poems in 'Endpoint' while literally on 
his deathbed. They’re heartbreakingly sad, and I wasn’t sure I could get 
through them without blubbing. 

In the end, I didn’t, quite, though the poem that undid me was 'Peggy 
Lutz, Fred Muth,' (sl, excellent for country school English) which is a 
thank-you note and a farewell to his hometown, Shillington, Pa., and his 
high-school classmates, who he says gave him all the world he needed to 
write about. 

What’s touching is the poem’s generosity, and its suggestion that maybe 
we find heaven at the beginning of our lives and not at the end. 

Updike himself arranged the contents of 'Endpoint.' The poems about 
mortality are followed by some earlier, occasional pieces, by a sequence 
of sonnets, and even by some light, comic verse. 

The book gets brighter and airier as it goes along, the way he surely 
intended. About halfway through I began to enjoy myself and to realize 
that I was hearing and understanding in the poems things I hadn’t even 
known were there. I know Updike’s poems pretty well, or I thought I did, 
but reading them aloud unlocked another, deeper music — the lovely sound 
effects in a poem about the end of a Vermont thunderstorm, for example:


 All goes soft –
 The rain unfurls in supple gusts, the leaves
 flash pale, then limply steep themselves in green.


When we read poetry to ourselves we try to hear it in our minds: we 
notice the vowels; we hear, or half-hear, the rhymes, the rhythm; we may 
even silently sound out some of the sibilants. 

But what my audiobook experience taught me is that kind of listening is 
like listening with a pillow over your head. To really hear poetry, you 
have to say it, feel the words in your mouth and listen to the feedback 
of your own voice. 

Even your breath, or when you snatch one, becomes a part of the 
performance. We’re not used to doing this. It’s a little embarrassing, in 
fact, to sit down alone and start declaiming poetry aloud. But it gets 
easier with practice; it’s just like singing to yourself ..


http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com 
Poems from 'Endpoint' courtesy of Random House Audio.

--

Cheers,
Stephen