sonnets at 4 a.m.

Thoughts of a poet working in West Michigan

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Michiko Kakutani on John Updike



From this morning's New York Times:

Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.

posted by greg rappleye at 9:08 AM

1 Comments:

Blogger The Weaver of Grass said...

John Updike was one of my favourite novelists - particularly the Rabbit series. I mourn his passing - he was certainly one of the greatest in the world.

1:22 PM  

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Name: greg rappleye
Location: Grand Haven, Michigan, United States

I am a writer who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. I have also published three chapbooks: Eros, Psyche and the Death of Narrative (Candle Creek Press, 2006), The Afterlight (WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2006), and The Divisible Field ( WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2008), and have completed a fourth manuscript, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds. I am working on a novel. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.

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Previous Posts

  • John Updike (1932-2009)
  • Blogroll, Please!
  • Gate
  • Draft of New Poem (Re-post)
  • Progress Notes, Redux
  • Progress Notes
  • Michael Theune at Hope College, Today!
  • Inauguration Day
  • Hannah, with Cat
  • The Gaze of Orpheus, Redux

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