Poetry Out-Loud Finals

A jazz combo played short standards during the period between each contestant. Scott Simon’s face was too far away for me to think of him as anything but a voice as he read the names of the young people coming on stage to perform. He was witty, as completely giddy about the proceedings as he does when he is interviewing someone who is supposed to be funny on the radio. It is charming, even if not always funny. The Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University somewhere in the middle of DC is packed to the brim with parents, relatives and a large contingent of supporters for the performers from Maryland, Virginia, and DC. They are noisy, enthusiastic. It is the kind of atmosphere that the really enthusiastic planners and boosters of the event will describe as being like any high school basketball game. That would be an exaggeration, but one can understand hyperbole—after all, the subject is a poetry recital contest during which high school aged kids, most of them with clear aspirations to be actors, recite poems by often dead people and some living poetic geniuses.

Dana Gioia’s voice is uncannily gruff but pitched at the level of a voice-over on a sure-fire hit block buster adventure movie. Gioia is the chairman of the NEA and he is the big booster for the event. At dinner he is gregarious and consummate at eating up awkward silences with very superficial small talk that is good enough to make us laugh. We are grateful for his enthusiasm—he believes in the program. John Barr is not a tall man, but he smiles a lot and he too is a booster—he glows with the same enthusiasm that most of the organizers have. Of course it is hard not to smile. These young people are really into the contest, and this too is understandable. At stake is twenty thousand dollars in scholarship money, and I know none of these young people is going to say, “I really don’t plan to go to college, it is just not my thing right now…” No, these are high achieving young people and they all plan to make use of the twenty-thousand first prize of the ten thousand second prize or the five thousand third prize of scholarship money. They should be giddy, the ones who are on the stage now competing. They are the top twelve, they have been winnowed down from fifty-one state winners, they are already winners (it is something people keep saying) and the crowd is stoked. And there are celebrities in the house. At least one celebrity is in the house, anyway. The tall and surprisingly lean Garrison Keillor is in the house. He is a judge. I am a judge. Indeed, I am grateful to him for being a judge because his presence makes my traveling to DC to judge this competition a wonderful legitimacy for my family who all like to listen to his Prairie Home Companion. I have not told this to him as yet. We have talked about the “islands” (I hate that), and about the “South”. His view of both is disappointingly familiar and predictable, but he is brilliant at turning even the most ordinary observation into a sketch from the Prairie Home Companion. “Somewhere in Antigua or Barbados, I am walking on a street and I realize I am the only white man there, and I feel no tension, no disquiet. Yes, they must have experienced slavery, too, but it is quite different…” And I am waiting for all of this to become part of a Lake Woebegone monologue, but it actually becomes a conversation and I am both aware that I am talking to Garrison Keillor about race and remembering that his show has not had a hip-hop act on it as far as I can tell and I am tempted to say, “You know Mos Def is really cool, very articulate,” when he says something about not understanding some of the hip-hop talk in a moment of cultural inter-dialogue. Of course I don’t say any of this because I am a fan and the ride from the lovely dinner to the auditorium is a short one and we are here to judge a contest and we are not alone. There are other judges including the brilliant poet Marilyn Chin and the past winner of the contest, a sharp witted but pleasant young man, Jackson Hille. Keillor wants us to have a little discussion between contestants and about the contestants, but the rules won’t allow this. I know this. I have judged the state finals in South Carolina. I already know that filling in the slots along with the other judges is like playing the pools—the “football pools”—you pass the sheets in and the scores are tabulated and then you find out who is winning and who is not. Despite being a judge, you are just as surprised by the results as anyone else is.
For over an hour we watch these twelve contestants walk slowly into a simple white pool of light surrounding a microphone on a stand. They pause for a while, collect their thoughts and then begin, with the title, and then the poem. They speak the poems with restraint, as if they have been told that going over the top won’t sell well, but they are still aware of the performance in the moment—they angle their bodies, raise hands, create cracks in their voices, suggest tears. The poems range from the ditty-like moral fable “The Spider and the Fly” to Yusef Komounyakaa’s quite striking poem “Facing It” about the Vietnam Memorial. A popular poem is “beauty” by Tony Hoagland. It is a quaint piece void nuance and with a quiet simplicity that can come off as ordinary. The performers seem totally sincere about this idea of age and sickness taking away beauty that is defined as a high school quality. Another two choose Wilfred Owen’s politically charged protest poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est” and I keep wondering which of the two performers is correct: one says “dulche” and the other says “dulke”, but both capture the harrowing nature of the piece—one of them intoning the poem in a voice edged with a 1940’s pseudo British broadcast voice, as if the performer is trying to invoke the spirit of Orson Wells. He is “actorly”, pacing himself slowly, and it is no surprise that his bio says he wants to have a career on Broadway. Some sing, some raise their arms and one performs “Preludes” by Eliot with a strangely surreal interpretation that seems to have nothing to do with meaning but that is about the sound of the poem, the music of the poem, the shape of the poem—her arms move, her body moves, and her voice rises into sharp tones, the settles into more fluid undulations—it is a sonic treat, and it has the quality of a piece that seems almost satirical—a kind of spoof—but only almost, there is something so sincere about the performance that we believe it. And a tall black boy performance with a slow, measured voice, Robert Hayden’s “Frederick Douglass” taking us with skill from the ordinary into the sermonic, the elevated oratory of a grand speech. And we circle the numbers: “Level of Difficulty”, “Appropriateness of Dramatization”, “Presence”, “Projection” and so on.
The winners do not surprise me. Well, they do. But they do because they are my top three as well. The winner is my choice. She is consistent, beautifully articulate and her rendering of Anne Sexton’s at times melodramatic poem about a woman giving her child up for adoption is so delicately nuanced, so beautifully felt and filled with wonderfully fitting texturing that we are enthralled. She makes an okay poem quite a powerful monologue. She is Amanda Fernandez, the DC contestant, dimpled, deep brown skin, head covered in a black scarf, and her voice rich with feeling and strikingly capable of evoking even the slightest nuance. She is good. Very good. And I am glad she has won because of how strong she is on the stage. The runner’s up are also strong. A lanky black boy from Indiana, Brandon Emanuel Wellington, is the first runner up. He is happy to be there. He hugs every one of the contestants as their names are called like a politician, and he exudes a confidence that could be construed as cockiness. But we are too far away to know what is happening. He is hugging. He hugs the third place winner, Alana Rivera from Arlington, Virginia, who is also a gifted performer but may have chosen badly for her final piece—a more formal piece. It feels like a grand occasion. One imagines the world is enthused and will want to know who the winner is all the next day. But the rest of the world may not really care. And this moment of winning, of taking pictures, of getting free tickets to anywhere (one assumes) from Southwest Airlines is the height of it. Still, there were over a hundred thousand contestants from 1,000 schools nationwide competing in the contest. This is no small thing, it seems when you look at the numbers. But at the state level, the program is just getting started.
I think it needs an injection of something. Perhaps a People’s Choice winner, perhaps a state finals that involves all the district of school winners so that families will come out to watch and the noise of the shouting and cheering will demand attention. Dana Gioia says there will be more money next year and everyone is saying very uplifting things like, “It touches my heart just to see young people reciting poems like that.” And I wonder if folks are just impressed that the kids can remember the poems. That is the greatness of the feat—memorizing so many poems. Scott Simon assures the kids that they will be enriched by these poems as they grow older, they will recall them and be grateful for having learnt them. I am not so convinced by this. Nor am I convinced that this is always the best way to restore poetry to its place of value and dignity in America. Gioia thinks so. He thinks that there is a lot of bad poetry out there and this way the great poetry will be in the mouths of young people. The canon is getting a boost, here, and this is important the argument goes. I like the honesty of this approach. Gioia, of course, can say that he has achieved something significant already: 100,000 kids have each learnt at least one “important’ American poem by heart. These are 100,000 more kids than would have done so without the contest. If we believe that poetry is good for us, then we must rejoice at this business.
For my part, I am happy about it all. I have finally told Garrison Keillor that my family—all of my family—are fans of his show and he makes some slant comment about it that is gracious and yet distant. He is a likeable man in his pink sneakers and his sensible suit and red tie. I shake hands with a beaming John Barr and I think of his essay about saving American poetry and how much of it I agree with and how I disagree with, and I keep thinking that he is a happy man, which is always nice to see in poets. I stand with the rest of the judges for a photo on the stage, and then I leave the auditorium to make it into a studio across town for a late night interview.
I keep thinking about how much money is going into this contest. I keep thinking that I have to find some way to help the NEA and the Poetry Foundation to understand that with just a fraction of this money, the noble work that the SC Poetry Initiative is doing in South Carolina will offer a model for a way to really celebrate and promote poetry at the grass roots level across the country. I realize that I have not done a good job of schmoozing, and I have spent far too much time discussing race with Garrison Keillor.