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John Updike's gifts are so various that readers sometimes forget to count him as a poet. In the Preface to his Collected Poems he tells us that as a boy he wanted to be a cartoonist, and first found his way into print with light verse, which seemed "a kind of cartooning with words." He goes on to say, "The older I have grown, the less of it I have written, but 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." Hear hear! It's now been more than fifty years of Updike, in prose and poetry. Today's selection, "Dream Objects," was written in 1968.
Listen to John Updike reading 'Dream Objects'.
Excerpt from COLLECTED POEMS 1953-1993. Copyright © 1993 by John Updike. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to knopfwebmaster@randomhouse.com You received this issue because your email address is in Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to unsub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. Or if you received this poem as a forward and wish to subscribe, send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. |
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