So Scott Griffin recently announced his sponsorship of a new poetry competition for high school students across Canada (read the G&M article on it here ). Naturally enough, I'm in favour of it, particularly so because it emphasizes the performance of poetry and not simply the reading of it. When you are forced to think about how a poem (or any work of art) is communicating its meaning, you gain a better understanding of it ( Ruth Padel's meditation on a Bruegel painting illustrates this point well). Beyond that, thinking about how to speak a poem (or any piece of literature) in such a way that you can actually keep an audience interested forces you to see the beauty of a poem, or its lack. Despite what has been said in some critical/theoretical circles, there must be an inherent connection between beauty and art. Art cannot be anything (a mass-produced urinal comes to mind as a good example). The point of art is to force someone to reach out beyond themselves, so that the