On Wednesday, while I was on the road, I learned, via my friend Gibson Fay-LeBlanc (Portland's poet laureate), that Allan Monga, the young man who won this year's Maine state Poetry Out Loud competition, had been disqualified from competing on the national level because of his immigration status. By the time I got home yesterday, both of Maine's major newspapers had posted articles about the situation. Allan and Portland Public Schools are suing the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation for civil rights violations.

The newspaper articles will give you the gist of the story, including information about Allan's and his school's good-faith efforts to make sure he was qualified before competing. Lawyers have taken this on as a pro bono case, so it seems to me that everyone is quite sure that they have grounds for this action.

Allan is a teenage refugee from Zambia. He is not in the country illegally. Moreover, he has been issued a social security number. He has worked steadily at clarifying his status, and any delays in final paperwork are the fault of the system.

As a judge at the competition, I feel strongly that Allan should be allowed to compete at the nationals. We were not aware of any immigration questions, but the powers-that-be allowed him to compete, and he won fair and square.

But wait, there's more: I discovered from the article in the Bangor Daily News that Allan learned that he would not be allowed to compete at the nationals during the state finals. This means that I, as a judge, was working under false pretenses and that the arts commission staff knew that our final decision was moot, even though we as judges did not.

I am irate about this.  No one at the arts commission has ever spoken to me about what really was going on. I had to find out about it from the newspaper.

On one level, this mess may seem tiny: a poetry-reciting contest; what could be more petty? Yet Allan's situation is emblematic of our nation's larger cowardice and its dismissal of the richness of our future. Likewise, these administrative deceptions put all of the participants into extraordinarily uncomfortable positions.

Here are some contacts, should you care to make your voice heard about this matter: the chairman of the NEA (chairman@arts.gov); the head of civil rights at the NEA (griffinm@arts.gov); a general contact for POL (mail@poetryoutloud.org); the Maine coordinator of POL (mainepolcoordinator@gmail.com).

And here's a link to one of Allan's recitations at the state finals. Clearly, he knows something about poetry's fire.