Acoustics can be an art or a science. As a science, acoustics is the study of sound in all its dimensions. As an art, acoustics is the careful reflection of sound waves in a way that is distinct and pleasing to the ear.

When a room on an indoor space is acoustically correct, you can hear the music or the words with much enjoyment and comfort.

When the acoustics aren't working, then you get blasted by the sound track at the movies, or you find yourself straining to hear what the person at the microphone is saying.

The rotunda in the Montana State Capitol, an elegant arena for the visitor to take in the majesty of the "peoples' house," is not the ideal place to make a speech, or to listen to that speech. Some occasions work better than others. If soft barriers can be put in place, that helps with the acoustics. If you are sharing the rotunda with other activities, then you just have to make do.

Making do is one definition of poetry; making words do, the right words, and no more. Two weeks ago several notable poets gathered at the Capitol, and read their poems in the rotunda. I couldn't hear them. Their carefully crafted words fuzzed over, got wrapped in echo, and floated to the high ceiling like night moths startled into a daylight flight.

I really regretted not hearing our poet laureate, Sandra Alcosser. She is Montana's first poet laureate, and broke in that new honorary position with grace and character. Her tenure ends soon, and another poet will fill the role.

The poem I couldn't hear Alcosser read was the one I figured she would read, "What Makes the Grizzlies Dance." I like her "numinous meadows" where bears "bat snags of color against their ragged mouths." She asks, "have you ever wanted to waltz the hills like a beast?" Of course we would, Sandra. Aren't we each a beast, seeking a feast, doing the least while our appetite's appeased?

Other Montana poets this Montana newcomer would have enjoyed hearing are plentiful, and some yet unknown to me. I do know of Paul Zarzyski in Great Falls, the veteran rodeoer and casually labeled cowboy poet whose work is not confined to the category of cowboy poetry. Cowboy poetry too often entices the ranchette owners and former white collar workers, whose love of horses and weather has tricked them into thinking that a little rhymin' will go a long way. Git along, little doggerel.

Zarzyski transcends all that, as in "Carnivore," where he writes, "how we kill to eat, and eat/ to kill again, and how we love,/ between the seasons we set aside for killing,/ to see the living/ go on living? We owe our prey some grace,/ some contemplation of their lives/ here with us."

We all miss Jim Welch. I like to think he read in the rotunda some time, or in the chambers of the House or Senate. I enjoyed a supper table with him in Phoenix several years ago, when he was a guest author at the Arizona Book Festival. It was a Cuban restaurant, lively and loud, and I ordered fried bananas for fun, and we weighed the merits of plantains drizzled with honey. Jim later wrote in my old copy of "Winter in the Blood" that "It's been good to play around." He was a serious man, and with his too-soon passing, I'm happy to have brought a little humor.

When I taught Native American literature, I always used his lamentably instructive poem "The Man from Washington," which should be memorized by everyone involved in the Indian Education for All project. Look it up in Jim's book "Riding the Earthboy 40." It's too powerful to break off pieces for you. You have to take the whole thing, all at once. Take two readings, then write your curriculum.

Another Indian poet I would like to hear read in an acoustically friendly rotunda is Mandy Smoker. I wish I hadn't written "another Indian poet," for like the best of cowboy poetry, the truths resident in Indian poetry aren't constrained by tribal affiliation or subculture values. Her poem "Crosscurrent," is unrelenting it is recall of the reservation, the rez, where some kind of life is waiting down the next lonely road. "Can You Feel the Native American In Me," is a tragicomic prose poem that bounces from hip-hop to sweat lodges. The real rez, where basketball and bingo compete with the old ways.

It is not strictly poetry, but the novel "Perma Red," by Debra Magpie Earling, is infused with a magical realism that is conveyed by that which conveys the best poetry -- sentiment grounded in wonderful possibility.

Then there is Richard Hugo, dead now, difficult to believe, for a quarter-century, and still with us somehow, drinking in his Montana bars, driving his Montana back roads, celebrating darkly his Montana places. Hugo in the rotunda, I fancy (for I have not heard his voice) would supersede the acoustics, and bellow his aching words with no regard for decorum. I could have heard him read "Montana Ranch Abandoned," where "nothing, tree or mountain, weakens wind coming for the throat"; where "that stove without a grate can't warm the ghost."

Whoever is Montana's next poet laureate, I implore you, if the acoustics aren't right, take it outside. Montanans can tolerate an iambic shout and holler.