Introducing the party guests... Pictured is my date, better known as my husband, James. He (along with John Updike's sports related poetry) is my inspiration for today. James is the character in my poem who is speaking in blue. Read more about John Updike below. They should be fun guests for our Poetry Bash of the Centuries! :)

James and I have been avid Alaska Nanook Hockey fans (that is the UAF college hockey team) for many years and as of this season, have adopted the NHL St. Louis Blues as our team. (Fortunately, the colors for the Blues are also blue and gold! One of our former Nanook hockey players is enjoying a stellar rookie season as a defenseman for the Blues. They are currently in the playoffs! Goooo Blues!) In the summer we love to go camping and fishing. We love living in Alaska!


John Updike (1932 - 2009) (excerpts from poemhunter.com)

Updike is one of only three authors (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once. He published more than twenty novels and more than a dozen short story collections, as well as poetry, art criticism, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems appeared in The New Yorker, starting in 1954. He also wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books.

His work has attracted a significant amount of critical attention and praise, and he is widely considered to be one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of "a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that extravagantly describes the physical world, while remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the mundane its beautiful due."

The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring - Poem by John Updike

When winter's glaze is lifted from the greens,
And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing,
Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens
In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.

This year, he vows, his head will steady be,
His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal;
And so they are, until upon the tee
Befall the old contortions of the real.

So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from
Hibernal months of television sports,
Perfects his serve and feels his knees become
Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.

Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss,
Which shall be high, so that the racket face
Shall at a certain angle sweep across
The floated sphere with gutty strings- an ace!

The mind's eye sees it all until upon
The courts of life the faulty way we played
In other summers rolls back with the sun.
Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.

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