In Praise of the Ordinary

A few years ago, in advance of a talk and poetry reading I was asked to give, I submitted my title, “In Praise of the Ordinary.” Just days after doing so, we learned our 11-year old grandson Nick had failed a school eye exam. After further testing, we were all dumbfounded to learn he had a brain tumor and required immediate surgery.

You’d better believe that what I expected from his neurosurgeon was not ordinary. Indeed what I wanted was a surgeon of exceptional – of extraordinary – talent. Fortunately, that’s what we got. Nick’s surgery was a complete success and he has since fully recovered – a high school honors student who’s off to college next fall and aiming for medical school. That in itself a not so ordinary event.

Several days ago, Bob and I returned to the island for the holidays and though I wanted our flight to be routine and ordinary, I expected the pilot whose job it was to shuttle us safely on a blustery, plane-pitching winter’s day to be one of extraordinary skill.   

Back when I submitted “In Praise of the Ordinary,” I was not advocating for “ordinary poetry.” By its definition as an art form, poetry, if it’s to pass the sniff test, can never be ordinary,  neither facile in its sentiment nor unhoned in its craft. Poetry demands the poet pay keen attention to language, to language’s musicality, to getting, as the Romantic poet Coleridge wrote, “just the right words in the right order” – a poem’s right and only words. Or, as Edward Hirsch has written, “language compressed and raised to its highest power.” Language that needn’t be elevated speech but derive from common speech. Language that in its surface clarity doesn’t sacrifice meaning or complexity, or, with such clarity, fail to dig into the murky depths.

Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry is that which “makes my body so cold no fire can ever warm me” – maybe not exactly the kind of recommendation you’d want on a frigid winter morning on an island in Maine.

Back when I gave my talk and reading, I suppose I could’ve substituted mundane for ordinary. Or used quotitidian. Meaning the commonplace. And calling attention to the quotidian stuff of our daily lives – a worn wooden spoon familiar to a hand’s daily use, a fraying sign posted at town pier, an overheard bit of conversation at the island’s food store, or the usual encounters at the post office. Perhaps the raucous congress of crows at dawn, the play of light on an ebbing tide, or the drifting columns of sea smoke rising up from the Bay when the thermometer, for the first time this season, dipped into the low double digits. Each deserving, in spite of their seeming ordinariness, our close attention. Just as a pitcher of milk, a piece of fruit, a leek or onion demanded of the early Dutch masters their stunning still life renderings, the secular though surely sublime elevation of the ordinary extraordinarily wrought.

In these final days of 2011, I’ve been thinking again about the ordinary, and not necessarily as it relates to poetry. At least not directly. This morning, for example, I’ve been looking out to a landscape where again, after recent heavy rain, there is not a patch of snow beneath the spruce nor a bit of ice forming on the cove in what folks say hasn’t been – yet – an ordinary winter. Talking to a local fisherman this week, I was reminded the Maine shrimp season begins Monday and this year a record few boats are rigged to go out in a shorter-than-ever season because shrimp, threatened by overfishing, are declining in population, so unlike the ordinary catches of what seems like just yesterday. And then there are the alarming reports coming in from Cobscook Bay where scallops have long flourished in extraordinary number but are now fewer and of such small size, the fear is this area will be closed off to further fishing, too. And though there have been a few promising signs of its potential return, the only extraordinary observation yet to apply to Atlantic cod is its near demise that, largely and sadly, still persists.  In recent years, Maine’s lobster landings were by any measure extraordinary – a whopping 93 million pounds in 2010 including nearly 14 million pounds for this island alone – but that very number, even to some of the lobstermen most profiting from record hauls, is alarming when considering the virus outbreaks, shell disease or other calamities that are more likely to occur in a monoculture fishery of such density. Undoubtedly, any suggestion that a return to ordinary lobster landings numbers might cast less of a foreboding shadow on a fishery’s future is probably not what most lobstermen want to hear.

Today, we launch into a new year in which a contentious presidential campaign will alone make 2012 anything but ordinary. The unemployment rate is still, unacceptably, beyond ordinary, and who among us doesn’t know someone who’s lost a job and may still be without one, who’s had to give up home or health care and is now teetering at the brink? And for whom going into the new year may well mean wishing for a return to the ordinary. For the Before, that even with a job she may not have liked, in a home that wasn’t exactly where she wanted to live, now seems so, well, extraordinary.

And what is ordinary for the person newly diagnosed and in ill health or who has suffered loss in ways that any choice of words does little to define? In Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, one of the books I read this holiday break, Didion recalls toasting her daughter on her wedding day and who, just seven years later, after a cerebrovascular accident, multiple bleeds into her brain and numerous neurosurgeries offering short-lived hope, dies in one of a series of hospital ICUs. Didion refers back to that wedding toast, a time when she “counted happiness and health, love and luck and beautiful children as ordinary blessings.”

The ordinary can indeed be life-saving – the “ordinary guy” who risks his life pulling a stranger from a burning car or an icy, swollen river. Or, as we head into a new year of continuing economic uncertainty, how just finding a job – any job – would undoubtedly be extraordinary and possibly life-saving for many people. And for the seriously ill, a return to good health probably wouldn’t seem anything short of miraculous, a chance to return to your one and only ordinary life.

In another Christmas break read – Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending – the narrator declares that time holds and molds us. Not referring, he says, “to the theories about how time bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions.” Nothing, in other words, that extraordinary. “No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly…”

Is there, he asks, anything more plausible than a clock’s secondhand? Or, I might ask, anything more mundane or ordinary when, entering another new year, it ticks off our separate and unique moments that add up to and contain our individual lives, our one and only small pocket of time.

And in which, perhaps, nothing is ever truly ordinary.