Where Credit Is Due

How much practice does it take to dribble a basketball behind your back, feint to the right, and then leap to the left in heavy traffic, knocking down two points while drawing a foul?

Lots and lots of practice.

How much practice does it take to memorize perfectly a 50-line poem, to understand everything about it, and then to speak it clearly, with vocal emphasis, and just the right gestures? How about three such poems?

Lots and lots of practice.

Our talented high school basketball players deserve every bit of the recognition they get from the fans in the bleachers at every game, and from seeing their names in the newspaper the next week.

Those who excel at academic pursuits, though they may deserve it just as much, don't have the same opportunity for recognition.

That's why this week's "Poetry Out Loud" competition in Randolph, bringing together students from three area schools, made for such a refreshing evening. This is a new national recitation contest created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. It wasn't quite the same as a gym-full of packed bleachers Tuesday evening, but here were 50 friends and fans applauding vigorously as the students (all but one of them girls) stood in a spotlight on an empty stage and recited poems from memory. Moving poems. Funny poems. Children's poems. Sophisticated poems. LONG poems.

Five of the students were from Randolph Union High School, and this group swept all of the awards and two of them, tenth graders Rachael Dube and Zoe Gaby-Smith, won the right to go on to the next level of competition. In sports, this kind of team performance would suggest a top-notch coach at work, and it's no different in poetry: English teacher Tina O'Donnell inspired some 15 students enough to memorize two poems each for an in-school competition and obviously worked the final five hard to prepare them for Thursday night as all of them performed beautifully.

Just like any good coach, she called the team together before the performance for a pep-talk. She exhorted the girls to give everyone in the crowd "RUHS sophomore girl Poetry Out Loud envy," she disclosed.

It was a great pay-off. There's something beautiful in watching a full-court, full-speed dash on a breakaway play leading to a perfectly-executed, twisting backhand lay-up. But there's something beautiful, also, to hear a teenager brought up in the snow-white hills of Vermont, Rachael Dube, say and sing with delight and perfect understanding the words of a black poet from Cleveland and Harlem, Langston Hughes, in his "The Weary Blues," breaking into a blues riff herself as she read, evoking the splendor and pain of a world very different from her own.

The audience included, not only family and friends, but school Supt. Brent Kay. Kay knows something about high level athletics (rugby), and it's noteworthy and gratifying that he appreciates and encourages poetry as well.