King's poetry gong a royal reminder of our city's failing

Barnacles encrusted on the hull of this column will know of its crusade for the creation of a position of Canberra City Poet. Every self-respecting city in the UK and in the USA has its own appointed laureate. This federal capital city's want of such an essential person is a continuing source of civic shame.

A like-minded Canberra friend, noting the breaking news of the awarding of the King's Gold Medal for Poetry, seethes "Shame on you Andrew Barr".

"The new King has found the time to honour a poet even though he, the King, has barely had time to admire his crown jewels. Meanwhile, Andrew Barr has been king of Canberra since 2014 and hasn't given so much as a shiny milk bottle top to a Canberra poet!"

I share my friend's indignation and add that medal-winner Selima Hill is a fine advertisement for living, approachable, tell-it-like-it-is poets of the kinds we might have when/if ever we have federal capital City Poets. Her subject matters include "difficult" issues of ordinary people's difficulty-pocked lives.

One of her best-known poems, the wistful Please Can I Have A Man, is a woman's quasi-feminist meditation on the kind of man she'd like (but suspects may not exist). Her expectations are modest - for example he must wear corduroy, tolerate her rabbits and be considerate about sex and so must never be "piling himself stubbornly on top of me/like a duvet stuffed with library books and shopping-bags..."

Mischievously, perhaps treasonably, one wonders if Camilla the Queen Consort is a fan of Selima Hill's poetry (with the heartfelt feminist poem Please Can I Have A Man striking a particular chord with her, the tragically unfulfilled Camilla) and so has been influential in the awarding of the medal to Ms Hill? I think we should be told.

Dashing young tennis players at events like the current Australian Open prepare for their matches by listening to inspirational music, often even arriving at their match court with their beautiful young heads still decorated by over-ear headphones.

Early last Sunday morning and driving to the tennis courts for my dawn game, I was given an insight into the world of the youngsters' use of perform-enhancing music.

"Researchers at Brunel University in London studied tennis players' use of music as a pre-performance strategy," Tennishead magazine has reported, "and found that players who listened to fast, loud music had faster reaction times and more positive emotional states."

Two-time Australian Open winner Victoria Azarenka listens to music as she strides purposefully on to the court.

"Music helps me focus," she has testified.

"It pumps you up, gets your feet moving, gets you kind of excited. I get in the zone."

READ MORE: IAN WARDEN

On Sunday mornings ABC Classic radio always follows the 7am news with something by J.S. Bach. Last Sunday's offering as I drove to tennis was the Satan-shirtfronting, soul-tingling aria "Verstumme, Hollenheer!"

In English this translates as something like "Be silent, host of hell!" or "Shuddupa you face, Beelzebub!"

The bustlingly triumphant aria from Bach's church cantata BWV 5 is sung by a manly bass and he shares the aria's sparkling limelight with a virtuoso trumpeter, as if Bach knew a braying trumpet was just what was needed to drown out the wicked gibberings of the Evil One (Scott Morrison's name for him).

The aria's positive bustle was designed to spiritually pump up the churchgoers who thrilled to it, to put them in the divine zone.

The aria's six stimulating minutes enriched my drive into the federal capital city and to my exclusive inner-city tennis club. By the time I began hitting balls I was still spiritually pumped up by the aria. In the zone, thanks to it, I played with a Rafa-like muscularity and flair.

My humiliated opponent was suspicious of my unusually good form. He hinted at some perhaps illegal performance-enhancing substance (over and beyond my legal bananas and turquoise-coloured energy drink).

Little did he know (and I didn't tell him, for among manly, sport-playing Australians to declare a passionate love of the arts is to be thought pretentious and a wanker) that I had been performance-enhancingly pumped up on this Canberra Sunday morning in 2023 by an aria from a Bach cantata first performed, in a Leipzig church, on the morning of October 15, 1724.

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