Being (fairly) ordinary

Some time ago I bought a copy of Good Poems, a selection by Garrison Keillor of mostly American poetry. (I set one of the poems to music for my last concert: Welcome Morning, by Anne Sexton.)

Keillor's selection tends to poetry that is more accessible rather than less, with some well-known material, but much that isn't. I discovered late last week while looking for a something called Wedding Poem for Schele and Phil that Keillor is associated with the daily Writer's Almanac, and that a host of similar poems are listed there.

Today's (13th Dec, 2009) is Suits by David Slavitt, and with its discussion of not wearing the best suit because the best occasion hasn't arisen yet, it reminded me of a piece I wrote a while ago (it originally appeared in the Star Midweeker back when I was writing a weekly column for that paper).

This piece, called Missing - Again, bewailed the fact that I had yet again missed out on the Queen's Birthday honours list (a thing that isn't likely to happen any time soon either!) Slavitt writes in a similar vein:

I have not been named
ambassador to Malta; I am not on the board
of any college or large corporation; I shall not
receive a major prize today and pose
for photographers.

Yup, that pretty much sums up my life too. No holidays in Bermuda hotels as a celebrity, no standing on the Town Hall steps in the Octagon before crowds of fans while wiping away unexpected tears, no regular commission for merely being who I am...and so forth. Some of us are just born to be (fairly) ordinary.

Concert tomorrow - background notes

Just been doing a run-through of all the pieces for the concert tomorrow - that is, everything I've got to play. It's a curious thing that at this stage of the game things that have never gone wrong before suddenly go wrong, added, of course, to the things that are already not quite going right. It's most disconcerting, but something you have to live with.

Yesterday I printed out the programmes (while cooking tea, incidentally), and got some background information on the various poets who wrote the texts for the songs we're doing. Some intriguing stuff came out of this. The poem by Anne Sexton - Welcome Morning - is a lovely piece with a great sense of refreshment and joy in the small ordinary things of the day. Yet Sexton was in and out of depression from her late twenties, attempted suicide more than once, and finally committed suicide in her mid-forties - after having tidied everything up for her publishers.

Helena Henderson (also known as Helena France, and sometimes as Paul Henderson!) was a New Zealand poet whose Catholic father was so opposed to her marrying a non-Catholic that he feigned suicide the night before the wedding! She went ahead with the wedding, however, and for the first three years of the marriage she and her husband lived on a yacht he'd built. It was moored in Lyttelton Harbour, and she used to row him to work every morning.

Ain't people's lives intriguing?