What's That Being Served In The First-Class Dining Saloon?

Why, it's poetry, of course!

In retrospect, it was brave for Elk Grove High School senior Kristi Avila to quote Marianne Moore to the hundred and some odd poetry appreciators gathered before her in the Secretary of State Building auditorium last Saturday. Avila had chosen to recite Moore’s poem “Poetry,” which takes stock of the medium and its social usefulness, and counsels not to “discriminate against ‘business documents and / school-books’: all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction / however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry.”

Considering the occasion--the state finals of Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest for high schoolers supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council--one couldn’t help but figure them’s fightin’ words.

...A natural, and apparently practiced, performer, Avila delivered the goods. One of the preliminary judges confided before the contest began that Avila’s reading of Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937” had made him so emotional it nearly distracted him from monitoring her accuracy (which, fortunately, also was good.)

She won’t be advancing to the national finals in Washington, D.C., on April 30 (that’ll be Santa Rosa’s Karen Hong), but, for distinguishing herself from an afternoon’s worth of what Moore would call “high-sounding interpretations,” Avila took the runner-up prize. That’s $100 for her and $200 for her school to stock up on poetry books (or perhaps a single science book).