Basque Oral Poetry Championship
Imagine selling 13,025 tickets for oral poetry. Imagine further an entire 6-7 hours of live performances broadcast on regional television as they happen, with excerpts, summaries, and expert commentary on national television. Imagine a one-day event – the final act in a multi-stage, four-year, Olympian drama of qualification and elimination – galvanizing ethnic, national identity to a degree unparalleled virtually anywhere in the world. Imagine the confluence of all of these phenomena and you have the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national championship of bertsolaritza, the improvised contest poetry from Basque oral tradition, which took place in Barakaldo, Spain, on December 18, 2005.
The rules for competitive bertsolaritza are at once straightforward and extremely demanding. An emcee reads a topic or prompt to the contestants, who then have a few seconds – usually less than a minute – to assemble an 8-12-line poem along the pattern of a prescribed verse-form that also involves a rhyme scheme. Melodies are chosen from among hundreds of traditional tunes. In other words, poets must fit their unique, never before realized ideas into a highly complex framework of rules and patterns, and they must accomplish all these tasks concurrently in extemporaneous performance. That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air all at once, so bertsolariak must be expert jugglers.