Walks Like a Duck

The following arrived as part of an e-mail alerting teachers of the rules changes for this year's PSIA contests. (PSIA is basically UIL for private schools and homeschoolers.)

I present it here without comment, except to say that it makes one wonder why Aristotle even bothered.

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Please note these reminders and recent interpretive rulings regarding competition.
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POETRY DOCUMENTATION: Much time is now being spent at the state office assisting parents and coaches in documenting their students’ poems for the Poetry Contest. Please make finding appropriate documentation a research project for the contestant, who will benefit most from this experience. Although you want to be assured of appropriate documentation, you should have found something FIRST that you believe to be documentation before you call the state office. Time will become very critical as we draw closer to the district and state meets. Assist your students in finding works that are documentable.

Internet poems are documentable to the extent that information is found STATING that the work is a poem.

If you find your chosen work by title with the word “poem” after it in the Library of Congress listing, this page may serve as verification of the work’s classification as poetry. Print the page that has this information on it and bring it to contest.

Poems that have anonymous authors can be used, if the work can be specifically referred to in the source in which it is found (or other sources) as a poem.

The word “rhyming” or “rhyme” will not necessarily classify a work as poetry. Many children’s stories are written in rhyme or light rhyme; whereas, many poems are written in blank and free verse, which do not rhyme.