EDIT: Since visitors of Think Kid, Think! are having so much fun voting, I’m resurrecting this matchup to give people a chance to read two more poems (I’m not just a webmaster, I write poetry too!) and cast their vote for either The Flibbertigibbet by me or Fast Fasting by my alter-ego, Charles Mund. Enjoy!
[click image to view matchup in full screen in a new window.]
Here are the poems:
14-flibbertigibbet (Ed DeCaria)
The Flibbertigibbet
by Ed DeCaria
I admit I’m a bit of a flibbertigibbet:
I swallowed a frogleg and started to ribbet!
You wouldn’t
You couldn’t
You shouldn’t prohibit so silly and flighty and fun an exhibit.
vs.
3-crunch (Charles Mund)
Fast Fasting
by Charles Mund
My fast was a mental and physical crunch:
I’m proud I ate nothing* from breakfast ’til lunch.
*Except brunch.
VOTE NOW!

ORIGINAL POST:
Get ready for madness! This post is an example of what is to come during the Madness! 2012 kids’ poetry tournament, which begins with my unveiling of the brackets in a video post on Sunday night. Don’t miss it!
I welcome all feedback on the structure and content of this post (especially the poems!). Can you read the matchup? Do you understand what the poets are being asked to do? Does the poll work as you expect? Can you see the countdown? Please be honest with your feedback, because once this thing kicks off with 32 overlapping matchups between Monday and Tuesday, there will be no time for tweaking!
As a reminder, here is the challenge:
Each poet is assigned a single word based on their bracket seed, ranging from 1 (intuitive) to 16 (seemingly impossible). Poets have only 36 hours to complete their prompted poem. 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.
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