Manthropology by Peter McAllister

Author:Peter McAllister
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2009-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

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Primetime poets

In the 1990s author Martin Amis published a witty and incisive short story, “Career Move,” that imagined a role reversal in which poets reaped fame and fortune while Hollywood screenwriters scrabbled to wring measly dollars from their action-filled, blockbuster scripts. It might astonish those struggling poets who smiled wryly at this conceit to learn that there is a place in the world where an ancient poetic art, still surviving, really is that popular: the Basque country of northern Spain.

In 2005 more than thirteen thousand ticket holders crammed into the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national poetry championship of the Basque people, in the city of Barakaldo.7 Another one hundred thousand watched the seven-hour event live on TV. The championship was the culmination of a grueling, four-year round of elimination contests, many almost as well attended. In the Basque art of Bertsolaritza, dueling poets are given a topic and twenty seconds in which to create an eight to twelve-line rhyming poem that fits both a specific meter and a melody chosen from a stock of three thousand traditional songs. It is a supreme feat of improvisation and gamesmanship—for contestants must also then battle one another directly, twisting their opponent’s words into a clever putdown that will win the crowd’s and judges’ applause. It is the deeply traditional nature of Bertsolaritza, whose origins can be traced back at least as far as the fifteenth century, and its role as a symbol of Basque nationalism, that accounts for its sell-out appeal.8

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