Endpoint

 We used John Updike's poetry collect Midpoint this month for our call for submissions for our next issue. The title poem is Updike writing about what he viewed as the midpoint of his life. It is probably impossible to know when you are at the midpoint of your life, but we mark midpoints for times that are not hallway in time to any endpoint.

Updike also publish a collection called Endpoint and Other Poems at a time when he knew his life would be ending. This collection of poems are ones that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this. It is his final book. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009, at age 76. He had not smoked for 30 years when he died.

 Known as a novelist and short story writer, John Updike was always a poet. I like that much of his poetry celebrates the everyday. That is true in this collection, but his everyday also became addressing his own imminent mortality. The poems are more connected than those in Midpoint. He uses his last birthdays and his illness as ways to think about his life and all lives. 

This is particularly true in the opening sequence, “Endpoint.” He looks back on the boy that he was, on the family, the small town, the people, and the circumstances that fed his love of writing, and he finds endless delight and solace in “turning the oddities of life into words.”

The section grouped as “Other Poems” includes poems from the first years of his illness when, perhaps, he was more hopeful and unclear about his "endpoint." As described online, these poems range from "the fanciful (what would it be like to be a stolen Rembrandt painting? he muses) to the celebratory, capturing the flux of life." A section of sonnets inspired by travels to distant lands, and celebrating the idiosyncrasies of nature in his own backyard.

From a review in Booklist by Ray Olson
Perhaps especially on the strength of this final collection, Updike may eventually be seen as one of the few major novelists—Scott, Hardy, Meredith, maybe Melville—who are also important poets. His reputation is as a writer of light verse that rhymes, scans, and makes us laugh. Guilty as charged, but not always on all counts. The sequence that names this book consists of unrhymed—but only once, eccentrically scanning—sonnets and sonnet sequences that ruminate on Updike’s own past and present. Usually dated and spanning from Updike’s seventieth birthday in 2002 to the month, December 2008, before he died, these are personal but not egoistic poems. It seems as though Updike were aiming to record the end of the life of a successful enough American middle-class male, and in his novelist’s voice. He sees himself reminiscing, traveling, shopping, in the hospital, working (“A lightened life: last novel proofs Fed Exed—”), always as an intensely interesting and affecting character. There is light verse in the book’s later sections, and many more unrhymed sonnets as rich as those of “Endpoint.”

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