Imagine selling 13,025 tickets for oral poetry. Imagine further an entire 6-7 hours of live performances broadcast on regional television as they happen, with excerpts, summaries, and expert commentary on national television. Imagine a one-day event--the final act in a multistage, four-year, Olympian drama of qualification and elimination--galvanizing ethnic, national identity to a degree unparalleled virtually anywhere in the world. Imagine the confluence of all of these phenomena and you have the Bertsolari Txapelketa,1 the national championship of bertsolaritza, the improvised contest poetry from Basque oral tradition, which took place in Barakaldo, Spain, on December 18th, 2005.