how Chet Baker led me to ruin

Caught up with my voice teacher today; she has me doing "My Funny Valentine", an old Rodgers & Hart song best known for the Chet Baker cover version. It's not badly suited for my voice, although it's an interesting task- my throat keeps trying to follow Baker's interpretation, which works wonderfully if you're in a recording studio with a microphone picking up every softsoftsoft note, and less so, if you're singing without a mike, in a small room. Nerving myself for projection which sounds almost operatic to my Baker-schooled ear; the whole process of breaking down a vocal score (breathe here; project here; shape the vowels more clearly at the end of the word) for maximum vocal results is still somehow alien to me. (Odd realization: I often cough on higher notes; suspect this is because my own voice sounds awkward to me at the best of times, and never more so than when I'm pushing my chest voice just past the range I feel secure in, rather than easing into falsetto.) And now, am browsing Ebay for old Elfquest volumes, and preparing for a friend's poetry award. An interesting day..

Ferlinghetti, ladyjaida, and the PSA awards

Just came back from the 93rd annual awards ceremony of the Poetry Society for America; got to see ladyjaida stand and be acknowledged as the winner of the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award, given to the best previously unpublished poem written by an American high school student in grades 9-12, for her work Discourses (linked by permission).

Then, a part of the event I hadn't heard of in advance: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, being awarded with the 2003 Frost Medal, and reading his What is Poetry? A Non-Lecture. A Rough Draft of an Ars Poetica.

...and I wish I knew what to say about that. Heartening beyond measure to see this aged, vital man read his work, so full of the manifold currents of life, optimistic even as it acknowledged life's darkness ("Now that the new dark age of the Caligula is upon us, poetry must save the world from itself..."), and ending with a series of admonitions/instructions to young poets which I only wish I had been able to copy down. Found myself scribbling on the program on the way back to work (yay, supervisors who are fans of the Beats- are any other Beats still alive? Corso, perhaps?), simply because the words sang so strongly within me:

( Poetry of mine. Couldn't be work-safer. )

...and then Ferlinghetti was done, and we stood to applaud, and began to leave, shaking our heads at one another that we had heard such language, leaving it behind, carrying it with us in our hearts.
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