{"id":724,"date":"2009-02-12T01:17:30","date_gmt":"2009-02-12T08:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/?p=724"},"modified":"2009-02-12T01:17:30","modified_gmt":"2009-02-12T08:17:30","slug":"telephone-poles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/12\/telephone-poles\/","title":{"rendered":"Telephone Poles"},"content":{"rendered":"

I never read John Updike<\/a> until after he passed away and started to because numerous media outlets wrote lengthy tomes about his genius. “If I am a writer and a serious student of literature, I must read him” I thought.
\nOne thing consistently stood out in all the obits \/ reviews: he wrote flowing, lovely, dense descriptions based on the idea that a flower is simply beautiful and there need not be any hidden meaning present when describing its loveliness. Does one always need to read into things? A rose is a rose is a rose, right? Up until now, I only knew that he and I shared the same birthday and that his four most popular books had Rabbit in the title (always helpful during Jeopardy). As I’ve always struggled with attaching meaning to the super cute descriptions that I develop I thought, here’s an author for me!
\nThe New Yorker (where he got his start and which he contributed to steadily for his entire literary career) posted a number of his “Talk of the Town” pieces, poems and snippets of fiction and essays which really gave me a good introduction to his oeuvre.
\nWhen reading his material, one poem in particular (which originally appeared in the January 21, 1961 edition) really stood out. Therefore, I’ve posted it below for hopefully others to enjoy.
\nTelephone Poles<\/span>
\nThey have been with us a long time.
\nThey will outlast the elms.
\nOur eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
\nIn his search for game,
\nRun through them. They blend along small-town streets
\nLike a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
\nOur eyes, washing clean of belief,
\nLift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses, struts, nuts, insulators, and such
\nBarnacles as compose
\nThese weathered encrustations of electrical debris –
\nEach a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
\nCould stun us to stone.
\nYet they are ours. We made them.
\nSee here, where the cleats of linemen
\nHave roughed a second bark
\nOnto the bald trunk. And these spikes
\nHave been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
\nThe Nature of our construction is in every way
\nA better fit than the Nature it displaces.
\nWhat other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter
\n‘Unscrambled, is English? True, their thing share id negligible,
\nBut then again there is not that tragic autumnal
\nCasting-off of leaves to outface annually.
\nThese giants are more constant than evergreens
\nBy never being green.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I never read John Updike until after he passed away and started to because numerous media outlets wrote lengthy tomes about his genius. “If I am a writer and a serious student of literature, I must read him” I thought. One thing consistently stood out in all the obits \/ reviews: he wrote flowing, lovely, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[381,442],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-literature","tag-newyorker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.keymasterproductions.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}