Sunday, July 27, 2025, 6:48AM | 
MENU
Advertisement

'Endpoint' by John Updike

'Endpoint' by John Updike

Reflections on mortality, in verse

Starting on his 70th birthday in 2002, John Updike wrote a poem for the occasion. He missed his final birthday -- March 18, 2008 -- by a month. Dated April 14, "A Lightened Life" reveals the writer's awareness of his mortality.

He can't open the gas tank door on his car or remember an action on his computer to add an accent mark to "fin-de-siecle, one of my favorite words.

   
"ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS"

By John Updike
Knopt ($25)

Advertisement
   

"What's up? What's left of me?" he wonders.

Very little time, as it turned out. Updike died Jan. 27, living only a few months after he was diagnosed with lung cancer. A writer to the end, he continued to work on his verse from his bed in a Massachusetts hospital. His family permitted his longtime editor, Knopf, to collect it in this slim volume, along with those birthday poems and others written in the latter part of his life.

"Endpoint" is a distillation of Updike's enormous output, starting in 1958 with the poetry collection "The Carpentered Hen." The acute, almost obsessive sense of detail that distinguished his fiction as well as a particular stoicism, which he attributed to his Lutheran upbringing in Pennsylvania's Berks County are here in miniature.

He come to terms with the gravity of his health with the reaction of a man learning his car needs a new tire:

Advertisement

A wake-up call? It seems that death has found

the portals it will enter by: my lungs,

pathetic oblong ghosts, one paler than

the other on the doctor's viewing screen.

The poem, "Oblong Ghosts," quickly turns from the devastating news to the writer's satisfaction with the presidential election, comparing his feeling to "Christmas Day in Shillington," his childhood home.

A month before Updike died, he reports on the results of a biopsy:

"Days later, the results came casually through:/ the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis."

Few writers in recent memory have written so clinically and accepting of their closeness to death, yet there is a quiet undertone of poignancy to Updike's resignation.

He yearns for his life as a child, the son of a school teacher and a would-be writer with grandparents nearby.

"Perhaps / we meet our heaven at the start and not / the end of life," he wonders, then concludes:

I had to move

to beautiful New England -- its triple

deckers, whited churches, unplowed streets --

to learn how drear and deadly life can be.

These "Endpoint" poems make up a small portion of a rather motley collection of Updike's poetry, a pursuit that readers and critics often undervalued. In many of these works can be found a stunning phrase, a combination of words creating a striking image in what otherwise are banal observations, as in "Colonoscopy" or a sonnet about the contents of Helen of Troy's bowels.

His nature poetry has echoes of the best of Robert Frost, while his brief moments of personal insight sting with their terrible honesty:

I drank up women's tears and spat

them out

as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.

Finally, the author of more than 50 books and hundreds of reviews and essays, wonders, with his Pennsylvanian's sense of modesty, about his own impact on the world of his writing, something he called "a bloodless universe of inked imaginings":

A life poured into words -- apparent waste

intended to preserve the thing consumed.

For who, in that unthinkable future

when I am dead, will read?

This is the kind of death a dedicated writer fears the most -- obscurity and neglect. I will wager that it's not the fate that awaits the writing of John Updike.

"ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS"

By John Updike

Knopf ($23)

First Published: May 10, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

RELATED
Comments Disabled For This Story
Partners
Advertisement
A huge Canadian flag carried by a crowd in Montreal in 1995, before a referendum on Quecec’s independence. Dennis Jett suggests Pennsylvania do the same in reverse.
1
opinion
Dennis Jett: Pennsylvania should become part of Canada
New cornerback Jalen Ramsey (5) gets into position prior to a play during practice on the first day of Steelers Training Camp at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe Thursday, July 24, 2025.
2
sports
Steelers training camp observations: Jalen Ramsey-led defense comes out 'aggressive and angry'
There is a large covered porch at the front of the house at 115 Forest Hills Road in Forest Hills.
3
life
Buying Here: Forest Hills home in its own 'mini-forest' listed for $425,000
Several houses are shown along N. Dallas Avenue near Penn Avenue in Point Breeze with “For Sale” signs in the front yard, Friday, March 21, 2025.
4
business
A cooling market and patient buyers are causing many Pittsburgh home sellers to cut their prices
Pittsburgh Pirates starting pitcher Mitch Keller throws during the first inning of a baseball game against the Kansas City Royals, Tuesday, July 8, 2025, in Kansas City, Mo.
5
sports
Off The Bat: Mitch Keller's Pirates tenure wasn't supposed to go like this
Advertisement
LATEST ae
Advertisement
TOP
Email a Story