P3 @ Parkville

I don't get to many of Corinna's Poetry for Personal Power events, but I made it out to Parkville for her Park University event.

I'd never been on the Park University campus. What a beautiful little school.

Parkville is closer into town than I realized, too. It seems so remote, like a Midwest micro-Aspen, and I know some people spend crazy money to live there and commute into the city.

But I've known people to commute from Hillsdale Lake, too, and that's crazy miles every day.

If I hadn't needed my car the next day, I could have ridden my bike from work in Waldo and made it (barely).

The poet who won last year didn't, and I overheard Corinna explain to him that she's hosted events where a poet who won at one school on Monday shows up the next night at a different school, does the same poem, and doesn't even place.

The poet wasn't much older than I was when I had a similar experience as an aspiring jazz guitarist. I went to State Jazz Band my junior year, only about a year after getting into jazz in a real way. It was a great experience and also quite the ego boost.

The audition tape I sent in my senior year was, I thought at the time, light years ahead of what I could do the year before. And I didn't get in.

Later that year, I had the chance to hear the guitarist who ousted me from what I thought was my due. He was quite good, but I didn't think he was better than me. Being that I had an emotional investment in the notion that I would make a living as a jazz guitarist—something about as likely as making a living as a poet—the thought that I had been bested by another for best high school jazz guitarist in Kansas was too horrifying to consider.

If you're not the best in Kansas, what are your chances of recording an album at the Village Vanguard?

In hindsight, my audition tape was probably pretentious crap filled with gimmicky sounding lines inspired more by music theory and too much time practicing scales than anything resembling artistic expression.

Which isn't to cast aspersions on the young poet. To be like my so-called jazz guitar playing got to be at one point, he would have to read pages from the dictionary loudly into the mic.