ROUND ONE: 1-whine vs. 16-psychoanalysis

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The Poets’ Challenge: Each poet is assigned a single word based on their bracket seed, ranging from 1 (intuitive) to 16 (seemingly impossible). Poets must write a kid-appropriate poem using the prompted word in under 36 hours. Once both final poems have been received, they will be pasted into the body of this post, and then the reader poll will be open for voting.

Voter Instructions: Read each poem as many times as you’d like. Then use the poll to express your preference. Votes are counted in real time and cannot be changed once entered. As a guideline for voting, consider the criteria on which the contestants on the cooking show “Chopped” are evaluated: presentation, taste, and creativity. Translated roughly into poetry terms, presentation might include technical aspects such as meter, rhyme, form/shape, etc.; taste might be the net effect — did the poem move you to laugh, cry, think, kill, etc.; and creativity might include the poet’s approach toward a certain subject, image evocation, clever wordplay, etc.

“This is awesome, where can I find more?”: All results and scheduled matchups, including a glance at the round-by-round writing windows and voting windows, are visible from the Live Scoreboard page. In addition, results will be tweeted from @edecaria as they become final.

Here are the poems:

1-whine
Screeching Keesha
by Natalie F.

Screeching Keesha Klein
had a window-splitting whine
that sent shivers through the bones
of the entire chorus line.

Her director said, “Miss Klein,
if I really must opine,
something quieter might suit you
like interior design.”

vs.

16-psychoanalysis
“Welcome,” said the Freud-ish man
by Peter Patrick Langella
 
I looked at the couch
I wanted to scream
Why were my parents so savage and mean?

Psychoanalysis?
More like paralysis!
I’d rather be with Gramma at her weekly dialysis

VOTE NOW!

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