'The Highest Kind of Verbal Exercise'

John Updike published “Kenneths” in the July 5, 1958 issue of The New Yorker and collected it in his second book of poems, Telephone Poles (1963): 

“Rexroth and Patchen and Fearing—their mothers

Perhaps could distinguish their sons from the others,

But I am unable. My inner eye pictures

A three-bodied sun-lover issuing strictures,

Berating ‘Tom’ Eliot, translating tanka,

Imbibing espresso and sneering at Sanka—

Six arms, thirty fingers, all writing abundantly

What pops into heads each named Kenneth, redundantly.”

 

My brother is a Kenneth, named after our mother’s oldest brother. That’s what caught my eye in Updike’s Collected Poems 1953-1993 (Knopf, 1993). He includes it in that volume’s “Light Verse” section, and the putdown is delicious. Three mediocre American poets made fun of by a writer only twenty-six years old, who hadn’t yet published any of his fifty books. As poets, the trio embodied various degrees of countercultural hipness but couldn’t write an interesting line. Updike tells us in his “Preface”:

 

“As a boy I wanted to be a cartoonist. Light verse (and the verse that came my way was generally light) seemed a kind of cartooning in words, and through light verse I first found my way into print. . . . the idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise—the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux.”

 

I grew up reading Updike, starting with the short-story collection Pigeon Feathers (1962), and read most of his books as they were published. Today, three parts of his sprawling body of work still interest me: the verse, light and otherwise; a dozen or more of his short stories, especially the early work, in particular “The Happiest I’ve Been” (The Same Door, 1959); and his reviews. After decades I still remember things he wrote about Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Green. The novels no longer mean much to me. I was surprised and saddened by his death in 2009 at age seventy-six, but it inspired a reevaluation of his work. At the time I wrote:

   

“Ballots to decide the question whether Updike’s books are ‘the work of a true poet’ are available on the shelves on your public library.”