Endpoint

 We used John Updike's poetry collection  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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Prompt: Midpoints

This past week, I was thinking about midpoints because July 1 was the midpoint of this year. That thought sent me to my bookshelf for a copy of John Updike's Midpoint and Other Poems. Updike published this book of poetry in 1969. “Midpoint” is the long poem that opens the book. Updike says that it was written “to take inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year – a midpoint.”

This may be the midpoint of the calendar year, but it is a lot harder to pick out the midpoint of your life. In fact, Updike was close, but he was a few years too early. Born in 1932, he was 35 when he wrote the poem and 37 when he was putting together the book, but he lived to 2009 and was almost 77.

Updike doesn't get as much attention for his poetry as he does for his prose, but I like a lot of his poetry. His humorous verse (not easier to write than serious stuff) and his more serious poetry often remind me of his poetic prose.

"Midpoint" (the poem) is ambitious and long (43 pages). He uses the meters of Dante, Spenser, Pope, Whitman, and Pound. He even uses some arrangements on the page that are more like concrete poetry. “Midpoint” has five "cantos" (sections, as in Dante), and each canto begins with an “argument” that sets forth the poet’s own summary of that section. (more about the book here)

For submissions this month, look more to the concept of Updike's poem and book than to the poem itself. Write about life midpoints. They are moments of transition, reflection, or redirection that often mark significant psychological or chronological turning points. They may not actually be the chronological halfway point in a life or set of experiences. For example, when children become independent, parents may be prompted to shift from active parenting to self-rediscovery. The term midpoint suggests a central marker, but in life it’s more symbolic than mathematical. It might occur early or late, depending on a person's experiences, choices, or circumstances. A pivotal moment—like a major insight, loss, or turning point—can feel like a “middle,” even if it’s not halfway through chronologically. In literature, the midpoint often refers to a narrative shift rather than a time-based measure. Life follows similar rhythms. 

 

John Updike (1932-2009) was a highly acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, poet, and essayist. He is best known for his detailed portrayals of American middle-class life, particularly in his "Rabbit" series of novels, which follow the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom through various social and personal upheavals. Updike was a prolific writer, publishing over 20 novels, numerous short story collections, poetry, and essays. He was also a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and received numerous other accolades for his work. He attended Harvard University, where he was editor of The Harvard Lampoon and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1954. He also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford.

John Updike’s poetry is witty, observant, and grounded in the everyday. Known for its formal precision and playful language, his work often explores suburban life, aging, and sensuality. Though more famous as a novelist, Updike’s verse reveals a sharp eye for detail and a sly sense of humor rooted in tradition.

Updike also published Endpoint (2009), a collection of poems that he wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died. It is his final book. Besides his individual poetry collections, Updike has a Selected Poems and Collected Poems 1953-1993.

 

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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December, Outdoors

John Updike's poetry is often overlooked in favor of his novels and short stories. It is often noted that his fiction is "poetic" and rich in its use of language. But the poems don't get much attention.

Updike wrote some witty, light verse and liked to play with words and language in his poetry. But he also wrote a good number of solid poems.

I like this one which was posted on the writersalmanac.publicradio.org site this month.

holding the dunes, originally uploaded by Ken Ronkowitz.

December, Outdoors

Clouds like fish shedding scales are stretched
thin above Salem. The calm cold sea
accepts the sun as an equal, a match:
the horizon a truce, the air all still.
Sun, but no shadows somehow, the trees
ideally deleafed, a contemplative gray
that ushers into the woods (in summer
crammed with undergrowth) sheer space.

How fortunate it is to move about
without impediment, Nature having
no case to make, no special weather to plead,
unlike some storm-obsessed old symphonist.
The day is piano; I see buds so subtle
they know, though fat, that this is no time to bloom.

by John Updike, from Endpoint and Other Poems

The Rainbow at the Edge of the Shadow of the Egg

From an interview at neh.gov, John Updike talks about his early ambition to be a visual artist.

"I don’t know at what age I began to look at the comic strips, the funnies so-called. I think my first coherent artistic ambition was to become a cartoonist. It was also the era in which the early Disney films were coming out—the animated shorts plus Snow White. Snow White came out, I think, in 1937, when I was five.

Anyway, all this imagery—these bouncy creatures, irrepressible little animations without any of the Depression worries that filled my household—all this seemed to offer real escape from my life into a better world.

My mother—she was another only child, raised on a farm—had artistic ambitions, literary ones. The local public schools offered art instruction in those days; there was no question of art not being one of the subjects you were taught. Depression or not, school budgets kept it in the curriculum. Not like now.

In addition to that, we happened to live across the street from the only artist in Shillington, a man called Clint Shilling; he was descended from the Shilling who created the town. At my mother’s request, Clint gave me some lessons when I was about eleven or twelve. All this was instructive.

It was instructive to try to look at something in terms of line and color. I remember one lesson—and I’ve written about this, and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already put in print—where Clint put an egg in the sun on a piece of white paper and said to paint what I was seeing.

What he could see was a little rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg, which I couldn’t see until he pointed it out. That art lesson has stuck with me maybe more than any I’ve had since. The rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg. You can find it in a poem of mine called "Midpoint."

Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike

Endpoint and Other Poems
 by John Updike

"A stunning collection of poems that John Updike wrote during the last seven years of his life and put together only weeks before he died for this, his final book.

The opening sequence, “Endpoint,” is made up of a series of connected poems written on the occasions of his recent birthdays and culminates in his confrontation with his final illness. 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.”

“Other 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 follows, some inspired by travels to distant lands, others celebrating the idiosyncrasies of nature in his own backyard.

For John Updike, the writing of poetry was always a special joy, and this final collection is an eloquent and moving testament to the life of this extraordinary writer."

via Amazon

John Updike 1932-2009

March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

John Updike died today. He was 76.

I could write a lot about him. I have read almost all of his books. I bought and read every one of his novels. He was one of only a few writers that I would buy the new novel at its release without looking at a review and just read it.

My wife was also an Updike reader, so his novels were frequently a birthday gift for one of us.

I never got to teach any of his novels. I did regularly teach some of his poems and one of his early short stories, "A&P," that was in an anthology I used. It was a good adolescent tale of a boy who works in a supermarket who creates a moral dilemma for himself when the store's owner confronts three bikini-clad teenage girls who appear at his checkout station.

It's a simple story about a kid who takes a stand for something he believes is right and receives no praise or recognition for it.

My favorite works by him are his short stories.

I also like Updike's poetry which never received much attention. His most anthologized poem is probably "Ex-Basketball Player" but it's not really the best representation of his poetry or what he has written in the half century since it was published.

We used an Updike poem back in January 2006 as a writing prompt.

It was the poem "Dog's Death" from his Collected Poems 1953-1993.

I mentioned on the site that it's not sentimental, or comforting, or funny and wise. It's about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, and that desire (thankfully) many of us seem to have (as in "A&P") to do the "right thing." I also see it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" which you can read at this NPR site which is part of a series called "The End of Life: Exploring Death in America."

I met him twice at readings. The first time, I was a new college grad and carried the original paperback edition of his story collection Pigeon Feathers to get signed. He asked me how I had come to own it, since I was too young to have bought it new.

I told him that I bought it in a used book store and showed him a note that was inside the book when I bought it. The note was scribbled on back of an airport receipt for the book's purchase. "call. pick up boxes," it said. There was also a paycheck stub. "There's the start of a story," Updike said. I replied that I actually had written a story from that idea. He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. "I'd like to see it," he said.

I mailed him the story and a week later received a postcard reply typed on a manual typewriter. It's as close to having something in The New Yorker as I have ever come.

It saddens me that John Updike never received the Nobel Prize in Literature during his lifetime. What a lifetime body of work - more than twenty-five novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, non-fiction including art criticism, literary criticism, children's books, and hundreds of stories, reviews, and poems in The New Yorker where he first was accepted in 1954.

"Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise."
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Books by John Updike

John Updike's "Dog's Death"

This month we considered the poem "Dog's Death" from John Updike's Collected Poems 1953-1993 (Knopf) as the model but I didn't originally mean to have everyone submit poems about dogs or other pets or even exclusively poems about death.

I mentioned on the site that it's not a sentimental poem. I wouldn't give it to a friend on the occasion of their pet's death as consolation. It's not about a funny and wise pet like Mark Doty's "Golden Retrievals".

It's certainly about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, this desire many of us seem to have (thank goodness) to do the "right thing".

I personally look at it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death - "Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her / Nevertheless she sank".

Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" (also in his Collected Poems) which begins like this:

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected..."

You can read the entire poem at this National Public Radio site which is part of a series called "The End of Life: Exploring Death in America" that they did. There are other readings there which I think you will find interesting, not only for this prompt but for yourself.

About Updike - Ernest Hilbert in a review of Updike's Americana: and other poems says:

"John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature. While maintaining a highly literary elan and readership, he has managed to avoid the obscurity and ostentation associated with "highbrow" authors...

As a poet, Updike is thought of primarily as a practitioner of Light Verse, a term bestowed as often to insult as to categorize a poet, catching up in its loose netting a variety of brightly-colored fish: verse de société, parody, epitaph, clerihew, occasional verse, anything unconcerned with love, beauty, death, formal experimentalism, the stuff (or stuffing as is often the case) of serious poetry (even the designation "verse" is meant to be a bit contemptuous, the yield of poetaster rather than poet). Wit, cleverness, and breezy elegance define the genre, and in these métiers Updike is gifted, to be sure, but he has never been limited to such.

Amid his Nashian poems of the past four decades, there were innumerable moments of incredible grace and depth. For instance, his poem 'Dog's Death', though rarely anthologized, is recognized as that unusual thing, a genuinely sad poem. It brinks at every turn the slope of sentimentality that drops down into the chasm of maudlin corniness, but it manages to hold its footing... It is perhaps one of the rare times that a reader might apply the description "sentimental" without intending harm to poem or poet. "

I like Updike's lighter verse too. Here's a small sample:

Sunday Rain

The window screen
is trying to do
its crossword puzzle
but appears to know
only vertical words.

which reminds me of something that Richard Brautigan might have written.

So, this month's prompt is asking for you to put form to any of the themes mentioned above, and to follow its rather wide road without driving into the dark woods you are passing through.