Poetry and language

I'm still trying to find some poetry that'll help me take some time out, so when I heard John Updike reading his sonnet 'Jesus and Elvis' on today yesterday, I thought I'd try to trace it. Many writers have paid tributes to Updike's writing ability. Martin Amis is quoted: 'several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself "how would Updike have done it?"' There's a link on the right to the Today segment including the Updike reading.

Here's the sonnet:

Twenty years after the death, St. Paul
was sending the first of his epistles,
and bits of myth or faithful memory–
multitudes fed on scraps, the dead small girl
told "Talitha, cumi"–were self-assembling
as proto-Gospels. Twenty years since pills
and chiliburgers did another in,
they gather at Graceland, the simple believers,
the turnpike pilgrims from the sere Midwest,
mother and daughter bleached to look alike,
Marys and Lazaruses, you and me,
brains riddled with song, with hand-tinted visions
of a lovely young man, reckless and cool
as a lily. He lives. We live. He lives.

Another American who has resisted mangling the language. Nevile commented on some transatlantic solecisms on my entry about Globish. I'm not sure what Jesus and Elvis would sound like in Globish and I'm not going to try. I was always amused by the US use of Momentarily to mean soon rather than for a moment: they used to announce on the aircraft 'We shall be landing in Chicago momentarily'