Packaging of flux

In the Preface to his Collected Poems, 1953-1993, John Updike explains the structure of his book, which contains sections for "light verse" and "poems" and defines the function of poetry for him.

As A Boy I wanted to be a cartoonist. Light verse (and the verse that came my way was generally light) seemed a kind of cartooning with words, and through light verse I first found my way into print. The older I have grown, the less of it I have written, but the idea of verse, of poetry, has always, during forty years spent working primarily in prose, stood at my elbow, as a standing invitation to the highest kind of verbal exercise-the most satisfying, the most archaic, the most elusive of critical control. In hotel rooms and airplanes, on beaches and Sundays, at junctures of personal happiness or its opposite, poetry has comforted me with its hope of permanence, its packaging of flux.

In making this collection, I wanted to distinguish my poems from my light verse. My principle of segregation has been that a poem derives from the real (the given, the substantial) world and light verse from the man-made world of information— books, newspapers, words, signs. If a set of lines brought back to me something I actually saw or felt, it was not light verse. If it took its spark from language and stylized signifiers, it was. A number of entries wavered back and forth across the border; the distinction becomes a subjective one of tone. You will find in the light category a game of solitaire, a pair of glasses, and a shaving mirror that were all real to me. Artificial in essence, light verse usually employs the artifices of rhyme and strict form, but not always. Nor are rhyming poems always light; those reporting from specific places ("Azores," "Antigua") seemed to me earnest enough, in delivering up a piece of our planet, to be considered poems.... 

Every set of lines herein gave me the excited sensation of being a maker, a poietes.