A poem is a movie, a line of images in words. A poem can make a long ago experience oven fresh. If you were a teen sixty years ago, John Updike’s 141-word poem about Frankie Laine might do it for you:
Frankie Laine (1913-2007)
The Stephens’ Sweet Shop, 1949.
Bald Walt at work, “butterflying” hot dogs -
splitting them lengthwise for the griddle
and serving them up in hamburger buns -
while Boo, his smiling, slightly anxious wife
(a rigid perm and excess, too-bright lipstick),
provides to teen-aged guzzlers at the counter
and in an opium den of wooden booths
their sugary poisons, milkshakes thick as tar
and Coca-Cola conjured from syrup and fizz.
A smog of smoke. A jingle at the back
of pinball being deftly played. And through
the clamourous and hormone-laden haze
your slick voice, nasal yet operatic, sliced
and soared, assuring us of finding our
desire, at our old rendezvous. Today
I read you died, at ninety-three. Your voice
was oil, and we the water it spread on,
forming a rainbow film - our futures as
we felt them, dreamily, back there and then.
Raises no fond feelings in you? It’s your young age. To teens raised on SpongeBob SquarePants, if Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob’s creator, dies at ninety, and a similar poem appears, that poem will release fond feelings in them, we’d bet.
To listen to Frankie Laine singing “That’s My Desire,” click here. For a brief biography of John Updike, click here. For a brief biography of Frankie Laine, click here. For a brief biography of Stephen Hillenburg, click here.
We reprinted “Frankie Laine (1913-2007)” from The New York Review of Books, May 31, 2007. It is now included in Endpoint and Other Poems, by John Updike, 2009; to preview the book, click here.
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