Behind the Meter: Judging the regionals of a nationwide high school poetry competition.

Being a judge might be considered an honor because it's a testament of faith in a person's discernment. But also, I think, because it's hard to do: to stand in judgement of a person's culpability in a crime or their talent in singing (both of which can be sometimes the same thing).

None of that stopped me from saying yes to Dana Goforth when she asked me to be one of several judges for the 6th annual Poetry Out Loud Monterey County regional competition. I had judged a film festival once. Plus, covering the arts in Monterey County for the past eight years has afforded me some perspective. Of course I would do it, I told her.

The contest comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, structured like a spelling bee, as a countermeasure to the disappearance of classical and contemporary poetry (as opposed, one can suppose, to hip-hop and pop lyrics) in the school curriculums of young people. That trend is evidenced in their 2002 report Reading at Risk.

The competition, 10 years old this year, had been in existence for two years on the national level before local poet Garland Thompson brought the concept to the attention of the Arts Council for Monterey County, which then began sponsoring the local school and regional level. They assigned Dana Goforth to coordinate the schools, teachers, prizes, rules and judging.

The other judges they chose were Diana Garcia, an American Book Award-winning poet, co-editor of Fire and Ink: An Anthology of Social Action Writing, and CSUMB creative writing professor; Vicki Weaver, also a poet whose work has appeared in Monterey Poetry Review and Breath: A Journal of Transcendence; Jaqui Hope, the Arts Council for Monterey County's Director of Arts and Education, served as prompter in case the kids forgot lines; and Lynn Diebold, president of the Arts Council board of directors, served as accuracy judge.

Garcia, Weaver and I were showered with information and materials. There were sample evaluation sheets, grading on a 1-6 scale qualities such as physical presence, dramatic appropriateness, level of difficulty. Not objective criteria, but this is why they paid us the big bucks—a $15 gift card for Starbucks (a kind gesture). There were emails and links to websites and suggestions to watch online video of past champions ("we don't use the word winner," the instructions suggested).

We got a 36-page professionally produced teacher's guide with companion DVD of past performances, and a poster with pictures of poets Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Hass, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Frost, Jimmy Santiago Baca and others under a quote from Emily Dickinson: "A word is dead, went it is said/ Some say/ I say it just begins to live/ That day." Amen.

Dana Goforth held a judges meeting one sunny afternoon at the Starbucks at Del Monte Center that Weaver and I attended (Garcia couldn't make it, but she had judged the nationals in DC previously, so she pretty much had it down). At that meeting Goforth explained, further, the rules of judging and gave us more background: Monterey County kids have won the state competition, and gone on to the nationals in DC, three times in the four years since 2010. This needed our full attention.

The regionals were at Millennium Charter School in Salinas the afternoon of Feb. 7, in the school's TV studio with its student operating cameras to tape the proceedings, before an audience of friends and family, backdropped by a classy blue curtain. Millennium Charter principal Peter Gray introduced the first batch of kids to recite poems, school-level runners up including Jeffrey Alvarez of Gonzales High, Sylevstre Naranjo of Millennium, Mohammad Awan of P.G. High, Natara Denga of Santa Catalina and Morgan Sweeney of York.

The students were to choose from a giant list of poems to read, from days of antiquity to the here and now, thereby exposing them to a great deal of great poets, including Emily Bronte, Tess Gallagher, Ambrose Bierce, Suji Kwock Kim, Dana Gioia, Robinson Jeffers (though competitors are not likely to score high points for "level of difficulty" with him) and many, many more.  

And here, the video of the entire event, parts of which are interspersed with snippets of musical interludes by talented sisters trumpeter Akili and pianist Ayana Bradley.

Alicia Hernandez (Gonzalez High) used "little hand gestures" to physically articulate her first poem, "Hunger for Something Else" by Chase Twichell. Lyla Warren (Millennium Charter School) presented a strong presence on "The Art Room" by Shara McCullum. Maggie Lindenthal-Cox (Pacific Grove High) was sensitive and emotional in her first reading, "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Sharmaine Sun's (Santa Catalina) first poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats is a near epic number that she indulges in slowly over the anachronistic language. Maddie Jewell (York School) recites "Snowflake" by William Baer with a playful smile and engaging glances as if she were tracking the falling snowflake of the poem.

The scoring happened relatively fast, and once the results were tabulated a first runner up emerged: Maggie Lindenthal-Cox of P.G. High, a school that has won a few of the recent state competitions and sent students to the nationals in DC.

And the champion of the 6th annual Monterey County iteration of Poetry Out Loud, the high school student going on to compete on the state level against other school districts and counties—three-time regional competitor Sharmaine Sun.

She competes this coming Sunday and Monday, March 15 and 16. Check back here on the Twitter feed or at @WalterRyce next week for an update on how she does up there.