ROUND ONE: 2-buttered vs. 15-dismemberment

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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:

2-buttered
No Thank You, Mr. Brown
by Melinda Harvey

The weather warmed, the snow melted, the sap in maples guttered.
And in his little sugar shack, old Mr. Brown, he puttered.
With pots and tubes, a hot wood stove, the old shanty sure was cluttered.
The sweet sap filled a dozen pots.  With heat, their lids sure sputtered.
A little boy looked all about.  He saw the syrup and shuddered.
The crowd inside the sugar shack was shocked at what he uttered!
None for me, thanks Mr. B, but, I like my pancakes buttered.

vs.

15-dismemberment
Polly, the Pirate’s Peg-Leg Parrot
by JOY Acey

Polly, the Pirate’s Peg-Leg Parrot
ticked and lisped when ever she’d speak.
“Come on crew-T!” she did yell, clicking with her T’s
from the crack in her whacked beak.
“Dismember-T-Mate-T, dismember-T-Mate-T,”
she did call at me.
Dismemberment is what she meant–
This pirate of the sea.

VOTE NOW!

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