Did I Hear You Ask, "What Goes on behind the Scenes of a Government-Sponsored Literary Event for Young People"?

Incident 1

Well-dressed older woman peevishly washing her hands in a bathroom crowded with Poetry Out Loud contestants and their mothers:

WELL, IT WOULDN'T KILL THEM TO USE SOME RHYME EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE, WOULD IT?

[Buttons her coat to the neck and stalks out.]

Crowd of girls and women:

[A pause. Then a simultaneous roar of laughter.]

Soliloquy by Judge A, who was standing in line waiting to use said bathroom:

The students had just recited poems by, among others, Charles Lamb, Edward Thomas, Richard Wilbur, Countee Cullen, Edgar Allan Poe, John Donne, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Herman Melville, A. E. Stallings, Emily Bronte, and Dylan Thomas. Which is to say: THEY RHYMED, PEEVISH LADY.

Incident 2

Civil servant sitting at table busily tabulating the judges' scores:

Today I got a phone call from a legislator. He told me that there had better be rhyming poetry at this event because if it didn't rhyme, it wasn't poetry.

Judge B, rubbing his hands in anticipation:

Oooh, let me take a stab at guessing his political party!

Soliloquy by Judge A:

So was Peevish Lady working undercover? And what exactly was this legislator planning to do if there hadn't been any rhyming poetry? Expose the existence of state-sponsored fraudulent high school student recitations? ("They CLAIM it was poetry! But it was PROSE!") Might this be Maine's very own Mapplethorpe Incident?