Let’s R-U-M-B-L-E!!! : Sharp Jabs, Vicious Uppercuts and Stinging Hooks at the World Heavyweight Championship Poetry Bout

1. The Buildup. Bets are down. Brown paper bags have sprouted, Bible-Belt style, amid forests of 7-Up and Coke cans. The capacity crowd of more than 500, which has paid $15 for general admission tickets and $25 for ringside seats, has just settled down inside the remodeled Piggly Wiggly Super-Market when referee Peter Rabbit slinks into the middle of the ring. Long and lanky, wearing a fedora and a thrift-shop seersucker suit, Rabbit grabs a microphone as it descends into his hand.

“From Ramona’s dance hall in beautiful Taos, New Mexico,” Rabbit thunders, “the Poetry Capital of the World . . .” The crowd explodes into cheers. “ . . . the challenger Quincy Troupe versus the champion Simon Ortiz . . . for the Heavyweight Poetry Championship of the World!” The wise guys on the back patio at the Caffe Tazza have established Ortiz, who is from Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited place in North America, as the home state favorite at 7-5.

2. The Prize. A spotlight focuses on the Max M. Finstein Memorial Poetry Prize--a bronzed boxing glove atop a wooden pyramid--known simply as “The Max” and named in honor of the poet, communard and con man who died in 1980 when his pickup truck spun off the road in a snowstorm on his way to Los Angeles. Leaning against the trophy is a fist-sized silver belt buckle engraved with the words “The Max.” Beside it is a navy-blue baseball cap, the bill bordered with cut beads plotted and sewn by Cheyenne artist Joyce Starr. The crown says in white letters “World Heavyweight Champion Poet.”

3. The Rules. Two poets, last year’s champ and a challenger, selected by the World Poetry Bout Assn., compete in a 10-round bard-off.

In theory, scoring is based on the Illinois Boxing Commission’s 10-point must system. Each of the three judges, using entirely personal criteria, must award 10 points to the round’s winner; the loser usually gets nine unless there’s an intellectual knockdown. In practice, the judges simply designate the winner for each round.

Poets must employ the naked human voice only, except during the seventh round, when accompaniment is allowed. (Last year, in taking the championship from Ntozake Shange, who used a boombox tape to back her poem, Ortiz shuffled river stones against one another to frame the title piece of his collection, “Woven Stone.”)

The 10th round is extemporaneous. Each poet draws a slip of paper from a hat and has 30 seconds to create a poem based on the idea or phrase on the paper. (Bout vets still consider Victor Hernandez Cruz’s inspired 1989 improvisation on the word “mud” the finest 10th round in championship history.)

This year, for the first time, poems must remain within a five-minute limit. (Wags refer to this as the Anne Waldman rule.)

4. The Contestants. In the recesses of Ramona’s, handlers are giving the poets last-minute instructions. “It’s a great crowd,” Quincy’s wife, Margaret, exhorts. “Don’t hold anything back.” Ortiz huddles in the green room with two Indian poets, Lance Henson and Sherman Alexie, who read in a preliminary bout two nights before.

“And in the Red Corner . . .” Rabbit intones, gesturing to an empty stool on the right side of the ring. “He battles demons every day. He walks unknown trails and many follow. New Mexico can be very proud of S-i-i-m-on “-- he elongates the syllables, stretching them back like the rubber in a slingshot--” Or-t-i-i-z!! “ The slight, bespectacled Ortiz, dressed for work in sneakers and jeans, bounces down the aisle, carrying a folder full of poems. The audience rises to cheer. Ortiz’s sister, who has never heard him read, surprises him with a shout of “My brother!” and hugs him before he can reach the stage.

Son of a railroad worker and a distinguished potter, Ortiz has been the Acomas’ official “interpreter” to the outer world and a lieutenant governor of his pueblo, and is probably the greatest of all American Indian poets. The Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, an organization of indigenous writers, last year named him the winner of its second annual Lifetime Achievement award (novelist N. Scott Momaday won the first). In 1992, Ortiz wrote the narrative for the PBS documentary “Surviving Columbus.” His 14th collection, “After and Before the Lightning,” will be published this month.

A man of humility and strength, Ortiz is also, when alcohol engulfs him, a mean, scary, falling-down drunk, who knows the insides of VA hospitals all over the West. This contradiction is often at the center of his poems.

“And in the Black Corner . . .” Rabbit growls, pointing to the stool at his left. “His line is long. He spits on capital letters. He’s gonna knock you out ! The challenger, Quincy ‘The Jazzman’ Troupe!!”

At 6 feet, 2 inches and 220 pounds, Troupe towers over Ortiz. A professor of American and Caribbean literature and creative writing at UC San Diego, winner of the 1980 American Book Award for Poetry for “Snake-back Solos” and the co-author of “Miles: The Autobiography,” one of the most inspiring books ever written about American music, Troupe strides down the aisle in a T-shirt imprinted with Miles Davis’ face, his dreads bouncing underneath a multicolored baseball cap with “music heals” scrawled across the bill. The applause is noticeably restrained.

5. Your Reporter--I own a pair of Maxes myself--the original version, designed by Linda Fleming, a solid bronze boxing glove on an industrial spring. One sits on top of the TV set. The other I use as a doorstop.

I won my first Max in 1984, when I blew Chicago poet Terry Jacobus out of the ring. To this day, he disputes the decision. Jacobus is not the only poet who swears he or she’s been robbed. The great Nuyorican poet Victor Hernandez Cruz still won’t accept that Anne Waldman, the doyenne of Boulder’s Naropa Institute, the Buddhist Notre Dame, defeated him in 1989. Andrei Codrescu, best known for his surreal mini-raps on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” has never admitted that Cruz outpointed him in 1987.

And I, of course, have never believed for a second that Codrescu beat me fair and square in 1986, spoiling my three-peat the year after I overwhelmed the subtle Zen country poet Joanne Kyger. The Transylvania-born Codrescu resorted to a battery of evil mind-games for the bout, arriving in a Batman sweat shirt he’d worn a day earlier into the bat-infested depths of the Carlsbad Caverns. Like any good poetic device, Codrescu’s shirt worked on more than one level. It reaffirmed his heritage, but he also knew that I would recognize the shirt as having once belonged to a mutual friend, a young poet named Jeffrey Miller who’d accidentally killed himself by wrapping his car around a redwood tree on the way back to his birthday party from a liquor store.

I’ve given poetry readings in the United States and Europe, in grade schools and colleges, in museums, theaters and bars, in front of thousands and in front of two, but nothing I’ve experienced is so naked, so pressure-filled, as a championship poetry fight. People listen so intently you can hear their minds whir. Late in the match against Codrescu, I fell apart. I knew I was down. Desperate for a knockout, I scrapped my game plan for a work that had wowed the judges the previous year. The fight was over. Codrescu knew it, I knew it and, worse, the judges knew it. In the first unanimous decision in championship history, I went down in flames.

6. The Promoters--Early on the morning of the fight, Peter Rabbit and his partner Anne MacNaughton field telephone calls at WPBA headquarters with the help of the organization’s new president, a smooth-talking Tarahumara Indian poet named Amalio (Mexican Bob) Madueno. Up a flight of metal stairs from Zeke’s Auto Supply, the office--barely a desk wide--is strewn with manuscripts, plastic foam cups and old fight posters. T-shirts celebrating past bouts hang across the only window. For the last 13 years, Rabbit and MacNaughton have been the driving force behind the WPBA and its predecessor, the Society of the Muse of the Southwest. They met in 1969 while living at Libre, a still-thriving commune in southern Colorado. Rabbit, who changed his name from Douthit many years ago, was a founder of Drop City, one of the first large-scale, geodesic-domes-out-of-rusty-car-parts ‘60s communes. The no-nonsense MacNaughton, like Rabbit, has been a poet for a long time.

“People don’t have any idea what kind of a tepee rig we’ve got going here,” she says wearily, hanging up the phone after sparring with one of the 19 print and electronic journalists accredited for the bout, by far the largest number ever. Since 1981, the championship has expanded from a restaurant-bar to the Taos Civic Auditorium to the Taos Convention Center to Ramona’s, the biggest indoor space in the area.

Nobody in the WPBA collective gets paid a salary to produce the World Heavyweight Bout, the culmination of the group’s annual Taos Poetry Circus, which this year includes eight days of workshops, readings and a daily, espresso-fueled, afternoon-long open session at the Caffe Tazza. The WPBA’s budget is $20,000, financed by grants from the county and local foundations and from ticket sales. Both the challenger and the champ take home about $1,000 and expenses, hardly a princely sum even by poetry standards.

Rabbit got the idea of holding a championship in 1981 after reading about the popularity of the “poetry slams” that Al Simmons had been staging in Chicago lofts and nightclubs. Those slugfests began after poet Jim Desmond signaled his displeasure with a Jerome Sala reading by going after Sala with a chair. Soon after that, they persuaded Simmons, a genial, smooth-domed poet, to come up with a forum where they could duke it out with words. Simmons did, and sold tickets to the event. He was thrilled when Rabbit asked permission to produce a similar bout in New Mexico.

Rabbit, a born impresario and indefatigable idealist, had long sought to move poetry out into the world. “The older I get, the more that I think about it,” he says, “my primary concern is community.”

7. The Judges--In scoring, the WPBA championship differs crucially from the slams, which have spread beyond Chicago to bars nationwide and will be featured in the Los Angeles stop of Lollapalooza. Slams, based on the notion that poetry can--and should--be judged by Everyman, usually employ judges chosen at random from the bar audience. Consequently, slammers tend to read directly to the pit, angling for bravura, one-punch knockouts. Slams often seem less like poetry events than like stand-up comedy. Or stand-up tragedy.

In contrast, WPBA judges must be residents of Taos and have no “erotic or commercial” interest in the bout’s outcome. Their names are never disclosed. This year’s judges are a photographer who takes pictures of minor league baseball, a sculptor who lives at the Taos pueblo and a secretary at the printing company that produces the program for the bout.

8. In Training--On the Sunday before the June 11 bout, Troupe wound up a series of tuneup readings with a performance, accompanied by trombonist George Lewis, at the Central Library in Downtown Los Angeles. As Lewis unlimbered his trombone and his Apple PowerBook (which had been programmed to synthesize sounds), Troupe talked about what he was doing to prepare. “Reading with musicians helps make me better able to phrase,” he explained. “It helps me think about the words and how I can read them and manipulate the rhythms. I’ve been running up and down a mountain of words. I’m going to beat Ortiz up.”

Most poets come to the bout with the same strategy: read your best nine poems, build to a climax the way you would in a regular reading, scatter your subject matter across the vast poetic landscape. But last year against Ntozake Shange, Ortiz fashioned a fresh approach. He elaborated on a theme--how a man holds on to what is his own--with one poem commenting on and reinforcing another. At first, Ortiz seemed monochromatic against the flamboyant, theatrical Shange, but as the rounds went by, Shange wilted under Ortiz’s moral onslaught. Her poems--which had seemed so sexy, confident and wise the previous year, when she’d defeated Waldman--began to lose their swagger. Midway through the fight, one of her black mesh stockings ripped. Under the hot lights, her lipstick began to smear like blood.

Because of its open embrace of competition, the event has made some poets uncomfortable. Waldman had to be coaxed for several years before she agreed to participate; the same with Ortiz. Over the years, masters like Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and Amiri Baraka have observed the championship and even read in non-competitive prelims, but have refused to step into the ring.

“I think competition is always there in so-called polite literary society,” says Troupe. “I just think Peter Rabbit’s been dealing with it out front. People compete for grants and for publishers. People are loath to say it, but that’s how it is. One time I read with Ginsberg, and I went on first. He came up to me at intermission and said, ‘What are you trying to do, burn down an old man?’ Then he took it to a whole higher level .”

The champ is much more ambivalent. “Competition is something poetry can do without,” Ortiz insists, driving north toward Taos two days before his title defense. Still, he admits, the same two poets reading one after another probably wouldn’t attract a bout-sized crowd. “The attention the championship gives to poetry is very important,” he agrees. “But poetry as individualism is a waste of time.” Ortiz stares out the window at the junipers and pinyon, at the sere landscape of New Mexico that’s so much like his own work--a plain surface only hinting at the richness beneath. “I think the real winner should always be the people and the people’s voice.”

Right before the bout I tell Troupe what Ortiz said. He’s right, the challenger agrees, “but by God, one guy wins and another guy loses.” He then admits that he spread gooba dust around Ortiz’s stool.

9. Into the Ring--Rabbit calls Ortiz and Troupe into the middle of the ring, then flips a coin. For the second year in a row, Ortiz loses the toss and has to read first.

The ring girl, Laurien Cook, in stiletto heels and a tight black gown, parades across the stage holding up a sign that announces “Round One.” The ring girl’s role is actually important: to clear the audience’s palate between rounds, like crackers at a wine tasting. I scan the faces of the crowd. They’re all types and ages: rich women in turquoise squash-blossom necklaces; poor folks in dusty sandals; grizzled hippies and nursing mothers; college students with notebooks poised; Pueblo Indians with their hair in braids; snowbirds looking like they just stepped out of their Winnebagos, and a sprinkling of kids.

Last year, as he snarled out his pre-fight hype, Rabbit got so wound up, his false teeth fell out. Without missing a beat, he grabbed them up, waved them above his head and whipped the audience into a frenzy. Would he do it again? “All right,” Rabbit bellows, his choppers firmly in place, “Let’s R-U-M-B-L-E!! “

10. The Match--Ortiz comes out all business, firing from his new collection. “ Picture a man going from place to place in this country now called America ,” he reads, pinpointing himself in a shifting landscape, simultaneously spreading the news and on the run, fighting to keep soul and culture alive in the face of long odds.

Troupe steps up, blasting a poem about the liberation of Nelson Mandela, calling out the big spiritual guns, voodoo priests and deities like Elegba, the god of the crossroads. As he chants “go there spirit . . . Wa-Doo, ah-oom, “ his earring glitters and shakes. I give the first round to Troupe.

The champion’s got to know he’s in a battle.

When Ortiz comes out for Round Two, he hangs his purple baseball hat on a ring post to reclaim the turf. “ Seed ,” says Ortiz, pressing together his index finger and thumb to indicate an invisible kernel. “ He looked at the tiny seed for a long time .” The poem is about a man, sitting in the middle of a college campus, battling for his own sanity. “ When he decided to give up poetry, it was 1 o’clock in the afternoon .”

Two members of the press mumble to each other sotto voce , and a spectator shushes them.

“ He did not want to be swayed by the lilt of a bird somewhere .” Ortiz continues. “ . . . and he did not want to know . . . the seed that stood before his eyes as a tiny monument . . . of new life, the beginning that would flower by his seeing.”

The audience explodes in applause. Next to me, a guy snaps his fingers in beatnik delight.

Troupe comes back with “My Poems Have Holes Sewn into Them,” but Ortiz has established the pace and tone, slowing things down the way the Knicks did in the Eastern Conference playoffs, forcing Troupe to play his game. If Ortiz keeps this up, focusing his poet’s eyes on the essential, he’s going to make the challenger look frantic, his words so much static in the void. Round Two to Ortiz.

The ring girl tickles Troupe under the chin with her feather boa when she crosses the stage for Round Three. Ortiz goes into his folder for another new poem, “Busted Boy,” written after he moved to Tucson last January. “ I’m new in Tucson, but I’m not a stranger to this scene/ waiting for the bus, I don’t look around for plain clothes. I know they’re waiting there in this America, they’re here./ Waiting for busted boys, busted lives .”

Troupe rolls out a similar theme, “Skulls Along the River,” which starts “ up from new orleans on river boats . . . .”

At its best, the World Heavyweight Poetry Championship is a duet, a call-and-response, with themes weaving in and out of both poets’ work that allow the audience to see the world from many different sides. Troupe leans into the microphone to whisper, “ We suffer because we must/ there is no other way to find beauty/ there is no other way to find love/ we suffer because we must/ there is no other way home/ to find the memory.”

A whoop from the back of the room: “You got him on the ropes, Simon!”

I mark my score card 2-1 for Ortiz, as he steps to the lectern with “Some Past Poems I’ve Written,” a new piece about Missoula, Mont. “ Where are the Indians in this crummy town? “ he begins. “ My temptation is to go up to the nearest white man/ and say ‘Where are all the Indians in your crummy town? ‘ “

Quincy Troupe’s verse is descended from preaching, from jazz and blues. Not only is it about music--subjects include Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington--it is music. Troupe grew up in St. Louis around musicians; his brother was a drummer, and jazzmen like Arthur Blythe and Lester Bowie were family friends. “I think the language of poetry should be uplifting,” he told me at the Downtown library. “I think of the written poem as a script to be performed.”

Round Four belongs to Troupe’s “River Town Packin House Blues”: “big tom was a black nigga man/ cold & black/ eye say, big tom was a black nigga man/ black steel flesh/ standin like a gladiator / soaked in animal blood . . .”

Troupe’s fingers are high above his head, wriggling with electric energy. His dreads sweep like wild-horse tails when he corkscrews his body, bends his knees and stomps out choruses in rhythms as complicated as any in hip-hop. The voice in the back of the room spoke too soon. Now it’s 2-2: two fine poets at the top of their form spiraling higher and higher.

For Round Five, the ring girl changes into long purple gloves

Ortiz’s voice, of course, is also trained. He remembers his mother and father singing “Catholic Church-type music” as well as Pueblo songs, and long before he started writing, Ortiz sang country and western. “Sand Creek, Colorado Territory 1864,” Ortiz announces quietly, invoking the U.S. Army’s devastating attack on the Cheyenne. “Acoma Pueblo, 1599,” he continues, marking the date of the Spanish onslaught against Ortiz’s own people. “My Lai, Vietnam, 1968,” he says, pausing before he launches into an improvised chant: “ My Lai/ Oh why why?/ We know why,/ why you died/ Now we know why/ why you die . . .”

The words are repeated in dozens of combinations, as his keening voice probes the connections between the massacres. Cigarette smoke has engulfed the room. People fan themselves in the heat. “ Sand Creek, you live on . . .” sings Ortiz, guiding his poem to a close, as a little kid yells out, “Thank you.”

Troupe’s Round Five poem, “Las Cruces, New Mexico,” which invokes Geronimo and “ the high, great mesas, flat as vegas gaming tables ,” echoes Ortiz.

At the break, I have it three rounds to two, Ortiz. While Tom Tom Club and John Coltrane boom over the sound system, I ricochet around the room with my periodista tie flapping over my shoulder, surveying the audience. I compare notes with a friend, Jack Collom, a fine poet out of Boulder, and his daughter, Sierra. Jack says he has Troupe a bit in front. Sierra is giving it to Ortiz. I talk to at least 20 other fans. It’s a tossup.

“Sometimes I think that I’ve never been sure whether I’m a poet,” Ortiz had said on the way into Taos, “I don’t understand what poetry is. Poems are all story to me. Poems should give a sense of a mythic dimension to reality, even when writing about everyday things.”

I think about this when Ortiz kicks off Round Six with “Histories, Places, Indians: Just Like Always.” In the poem, Ortiz wanders down a street in New York, looking for a place to have lunch after serving on a panel at the annual colloquium of the Modern Language Assn., one of academia’s most brutal meat markets, when he sees an elderly Indian leaning against a wall in Times Square, carrying a sign “Need Money to Get Back Home to Window Rock, Navajo Nation.”

“ I approach him, say ‘Yaahteh,’ holding out my hand, smiling.

The 42nd Street traffic up and down the street is ceaseless.

He looks at me, shakes his head, and ignores my hand. “

The Indians in the room--there are more than I’ve ever seen at a bout--nod their heads in recognition when Ortiz reads. For the first time, I realize what Troupe is up against. This is Indian country.

In his half of Round Six, Troupe weighs in with his quietest and most personal work of the evening, “Poem For My Father.” Quincy Trouppe Sr., who died in 1993, was one of the best catchers ever to play in the Negro Leagues as well as the game’s unofficial historian. “ father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout/ with you . . . . “ To the poet (who dropped a “p” from his last name), his father and his father’s teammates were the harbingers of a new world:

” . . . the miraculous truth sluicing through

steeped & disguised in the blues

confluencing, like the point at the cross

when a fastball hides itself up in a slider, curve

breaking down & away in a wicked, sly grin

curved & posed as an ass-scratching uncle tom, who

like old satchel paige delivering his famed hesitation pitch

before coming back with a hard, high, fast one . . . “

I’ve got it even at the end of six.

In Round Seven, the poets usually go for the big work, the sweeping statement--love and death--that can blow an audience away. Instead, Ortiz staggers. With “Not Knowing And Knowing,” another poem/story in which the poet, surrounded by tourists, has to find his way beyond dismay to beauty, he appears to be repeating himself. I wonder if Ortiz has anything left.

I have a good idea where Troupe will go in Round Seven. I saw him electrify the crowd in L.A. with the same verse at the beginning of the week, and he has set it up perfectly with Round Six. And sure enough, it comes--”A Poem For ‘Magic’ ”:

“ take the sucker to the hoop, “magic” johnson,

recreate reverse hoodoo gems off the spin,

deal alley-oop-dunk-a-thon-magician passes

now, double-pump, scissor, vamp through space

hang in place & put it all up in the sucker’s face, “magic” johnson, & deal the roundball, like the juju man that you am . . .”

The poem embodies perfectly Troupe’s sanctified, come-home-to-Jesus style, and the crowd goes wild. On my card, he’s moved into the lead, 4-3. Ortiz needs a big poem here, and he gets it beautifully, with a quiet lyric, written recently at Rosebud, South Dakota, among the Sioux, which concludes:

” . . . It’s this we perceive at the edge

of this rainy dawn, the water trembling

and gentling off the roof. It’s this prayer

which insists we notice and cannot avoid.

It’s Tuesday morning rain right now.

It could be California, Pacific Ocean clouds

like horses flying over the coastal hills,

across desert valleys, over the mountains

toward the Lakota prairie

It could be,

but right now, it’s here, a Lakota Prayer-rain. “

Troupe responds with his own fine lyric, “Collage,” and though the round is close, I give it to Ortiz, 4-4.

But just when he’s ready to put Troupe away, Ortiz chooses to sing another song. This one is about a man who is hauled up before a judge and given a chance to make a statement. “ Yes, you honor Judge . . . You have no honor, Judge .” Ortiz’s deep voice is starting to fray. He’s beginning to trip over his own words.

Troupe roars back with “Avalanche,” the title poem from his next book:

“ and i want this poem to kneel down itself before healing

want it to be magic there beneath the crucifixion of light

want it to be praise song, juju rooted

want it to be mojo hand raised up to powers of flight “

As Troupe acknowledges loud applause, the blond 4-year-old next to me turns to his mother and says “He’s my favorite.” At the end of nine, it’s Troupe 5-4

Round 10, the extemporaneous round, separates the men poets from the boy poets, the women from the girls. In 1992, Anne Waldman, not a strong improviser, lost her title to Ntozake Shange in the 10th, when she croaked out a brief, panicked improvisation and abruptly sat down. The ring girl strips down to a G-string and a glittering halter as the poets strip to pure inspiration.

Rabbit brings out a small Santa Clara Pueblo bowl, and Ortiz reaches in. Rabbit takes the folded paper and reads it out loud--”black hat.” A nervous titter runs through the crowd. Ortiz begins almost without hesitation, pronouncing each word deliberately: “ ‘Don’t forget to take your black hat,’ she said, before he left. He turned to ask foolishly what she meant. “ Ortiz proceeds to take us through the provenance of the hat, the history of the relationship, and an exploration of the emotions symbolized. “As he reached for the black hat, she let it drop to the floor.”

Any borderline psychotic can string together a bunch of words from which a listener could possibly make sense; in the poetry world, that’s known as “turning on the poetry machine.” But Ortiz has gone much further, shaping an emotionally complicated story about the ashes of a love affair--from two words, on the spot. The crowd gives him a standing ovation.

Troupe comes back strong. Working off “sharkskin suit”--” the man in the sharkskin suit reached into his pocket and pulled out a 10 “--he creates a Stagolee tale: a hustler offers a woman $10 to go off with him, and she turns him down. The hoodoo syllables glitter like the silver “Q.T.” of his earring, but the piece doesn’t reveal that “sense of a mythic dimension to reality” that Ortiz had talked about in the car. Not even Troupe thinks he won the round.

I’ve got the fight dead even. As the lights go up, Rabbit collects the judges’ cards and tabulates the scores. The crowd goes silent the instant he re-enters the ring. “Judge Number One scores it 6-4 Ortiz.” The champ’s supporters cheer nervously. “Judge Number Two calls it 7-3 for Troupe.” Troupe’s fans whoop in reply. “Judge Number Three,” with a look of disbelief, Rabbit clears his throat, “Judge Number Three scores it 10-0, Quincy Troupe! The winner and the new Heavyweight Champion of the World is Quincy Troupe!!”

City Councilman Bobby Duran leaps onstage to present the trophy as the press swirls around the two contestants. “I’ve read with Ginsberg,” Troupe, looking dazed and exhilarated, says to the reporters, “I’ve read with Baraka, but I’ve never been as nervous as I was tonight.”

I’m in shock. I can’t believe a judge would give Troupe all 10 rounds. I collar Ortiz. “Do you believe the people were the winner tonight?” I shout over the din. “Yes, I do,” he replies. Frantically, I chase after Rabbit to complain about the scoring, but he’s already in the center of the ring with an ecstatic grin as Ortiz and Troupe embrace. They join hands, then lift them above their heads. I look around Ramona’s. Wild debates have sprung up in every corner of the room. People are alive with poetry.