HAINES -- Mayor Bruce Botelho is reason enough for the capital to stay in Juneau. He should be declared Mayor for Life. I'm half kidding, since I don't know a thing about the man's politics, except that he stays out of the headlines and the punch lines. I am a fan based solely on the welcome speech he gave Monday at the 2009 Poetry Out Loud Statewide Finals held at the old armory that is now the Juneau Arts and Culture Center.
I assumed he would recognize the sponsors of this nationwide poetry recitation contest for high school students -- the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Alaska State Writing Consortium and the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council -- and then mumble something about poetry being a good thing and "God Bless Alaska's schools, our teachers and students" and that would be that.
Instead, Bothelo spoke about what he called "one of the most provocative novels of the 20th century," Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." That's the one written way back in 1953 about a grim futuristic world where everyone watches TV instead of reading and listens to tiny personal radios plugged directly into the ear. Imagine that.
Anyway, the government wants all books burned (451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which paper burns). A fireman, which Bothelo noted is one of the most noble of vocations, is in charge of burning them. To make a long story short, the mayor skipped to the end, when the firemen decides he doesn't want to burn books anymore and joins a group of wanderers in the hinterlands reciting great works of literature from memory in order to preserve them.
Then, the well-read mayor looked right at the seven finalists: Juneau's Tyee Dunlap, Homer's Elias Garvey, Igiugug's April Hoestetter, Delta Junction's Justina Lipscomb, Eagle River's Marti Maley, Cordova's Emma Roemhildt and Sitka's Caitlin Woolsey, seated on folding chairs in that drafty old hall, and said "You are the carriers of our literary heritage and we all salute you for that."
The Taku wind rumbling up Gastineau Channel against the walls added dramatic punctuation, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one that put my hands on my heart and sighed.
Then the students wowed us. One by one they stepped onstage, leaned into the microphone and recited from memory poems from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" to Billy Collins' "Litany." We understood the gibberish of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," saw the decay of an old silver-mining town in Richard Hugo's "Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg" and laughed when the winner, Woolsey, recited Gregory Djanikian's "Mrs. Caldera's House of Things."
It made me want to read more poetry. It also made me want to memorize at least one really good poem and say: "Listen to this."
The only bad part of the event was that it was being judged, and I was one of the judges.
Another judge sitting next to me did not appear to share my angst. The president of the University of Alaska, Mark Hamilton has run UA for 10 years, and before that he was a modern major general. And I don't mean in "The Pirates of Penzance." He brokered a peace agreement in El Salvador and negotiated with Somali warlords. And he can recite poetry, including his own. No kidding. He also zipped right through each score sheet. I agonized over mine.
The next morning I was still fretting about the semifinalist who cried when she didn't win and the boy who was terrific until nerves gripped his brain so tight he forgot what he was saying and had to start again, and how all of them were so brave and earnest I wished they'd all won. I was silently cursing the idea that poems, or any art for that matter, should be judged when it hit me.
Bothelo was right. This whole thing was like the revenge of the fireman in "Fahrenheit 451." The Poetry Out Loud contest is such a big deal, with $50,000 in scholarships awarded each year, that high school students across the country turn off the TV, close the laptop, unplug the iPod and actually memorize good poems.
As the emcee, Dan Henry, my friend from Haines, said even the students who didn't advance beyond their school competitions are big winners. All of them memorized poems that they will remember for the rest of their lives. Dan also had some good news for the guys. Women love a man who can recite poetry, he said. "You'll always get a date."
And perhaps some day, one of these students will know just the right verse to quote in breaking the ice with rebellious warlords, greeting out-of-town guests or maybe even toasting their parents' 40th wedding anniversary.
What's not to love about that?
Heather Lende lives, writes and hopes to memorize a good poem in Haines.
HEATHER LENDE
AROUND ALASKA