(occasioned by reading an essay in the Oxford Companion to John Updike, a review of Robert Frost's notebooks in Weekly Standard Oct. 2006, and an editorial by John Barr, president of the Poetry Foundation, in Poetry magazine, Sept. 2006)
Funny how an editorial castigating contemporary poets appears in the issue of POETRY that most annoyed me by page after page of obscure, pedantic, and coarse lines. John Barr's editorial in POETRY tells poets to live life first, and write about what they see, because (echoing Dana Gioia's Can Poetry Matter?) it's becoming insular stuff, poets writing for poets.
Robert Frost, in quotatations from his notebooks, reviewed in Weekly Standard, compares poems to jokes -- the insight that got me hooked a few years ago. Poems should do something. He adds that sincere feelings are not enough: the presentation must be made "queer" and messed around a bit for the reader to "get" them. Whatever, he's after a connection with the reader.
I turned from reading those articles to a collection of essays about John Updike, whose work I've read now for over twenty years. Updike's style builds on reporting what he sees, and second, on letting the seen world reflect faith.
I'm reminded of an exhibition of paintings by Vermeer that I travelled to New York to see. Updike idolizes Vermeer, and I'd read of the old Dutch master in Updike's Just Looking. Yet I was disappointed by the exhibit, "Vermeer and his Contemporaries." It was all slice of life, with some contrast and realistic depictions of streets scenes, interiors, daily lives in 17th century Holland. It took me a couple of rooms to realize that I was looking at work of his contemporaries, not of him. I saw one that looked familiar, and thought, "Here, at last, is the real thing." That, too, disappointed up close. Then I saw that this, also, was not Vermeer's, though it resembled one that he had painted.
In peripheral vision, I glimpsed the first Vermeer in the exhibit, and chills started at the back of my neck. I approached.
What was the difference? Style, subject matter, and true-to-life drawing -- these were all the same. But Vermeer's paintings seemed to glow from the inside. I felt there that I was seeing not just a slice of life, but that it was reaching out to me.
At Updike's best, he makes me see and feel places in realistic detail, but these places glow, and resonate still, though it may have been twenty years since I read about them. He himself writes of the mythological resonance of places he knew as a child; his writing has given those places to me.
1 comment:
There is a new novel about Vermeer’s early years as an apprentice called FAITH.
In April of 1653, Joannis Vermeer married Catharina Bolnes. He was twenty and she just twenty-one. The marriage had been opposed for numerous reasons: He was still an apprentice; He had no money; He came from a social class which was beneath hers and he was not a Catholic. Still, their marriage endured until his untimely death at the age of forty-three. FAITH is the story of three winter months before his marriage, the most important months of his life. It was a time when his ideas about art, technique and 'reality' were being formed, ideas that would be developed and reflected in all his later work. FAITH is also a love story, a 'probable' love story since nothing is known about the artist's life during this period. The people and events around him in this story are real. There is nothing in this book that could not have happened. Most of it must have.
Available at Lulu.com
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