Revelling In Skill Poem by gershon hepner

Propensity for reveling in skill
may interfere with making clear as crystal
ideas you shoot, intending they will kill
dissent, for too much skill may jam the pistol.

Clive James reviews “Endpoint” a posthumous collection of John Updike’s poems (“Final Act: for his farewell, John Updike chooses poems written in the last years of his life, NYT, May 3,2009) :

John Updike was always so careful not to make high claims for himself as a poet that he gave his more owlish critics the opportunity to say he wasn’t a poet at all. They should have looked harder. Most of the poems he ever published in book form counted as light verse, but his light verse was dauntingly accomplished. Very few recognized poets could handle the formal element that well, and occasionally there was a serious poem with all the linguistic vigor of the prose that had made his novels compulsory reading….In a single poem, he did enough to prove that he not only had the whole tradition of English-language poetry in his head, he had the means to add to it. “Bird Caught in My Deer Netting” deliberately and justifiably echoes Frost in its title, and in its body we can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Crowe Ransom and — well, everyone, really, Jack Benny included.
How many starved hours of struggle resumed
in fits of life’s irritation did it take
to seal and sew shut the berry-bright eyes
and untie the tiny wild knot of a heart?
I cannot know, discovering this wad
of junco-fluff, weightless and wordless
in its corner of netting deer cannot chew through
nor gravity-defying bird bones break.
It’s a wonderful poem, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. He wrote very few like it, and usually, even on the comparatively rare occasions when he tried to give it every¬thing, he was led toward frivolity by his fatal propensity for reveling in skill. But his very last book, a book of poems, proves that he always had what it took.

5/3/09