ROUND ONE: 3-knack vs. 14-decaffeinated

^{[click image to view matchup in full screen in a new window.]}

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:

3-knack
Natural Talent
by Laura Salas

Sky has a knack for
pounding out rain
Ground has a knack for
receiving

Spring has a knack for
bursting out blooms
Seed has a knack for
believing

by Laura Purdie Salas, all rights reserved

vs.

14-decaffeinated
YA Vampire Novella
by Heidi Mordhorst
 
Bec LeCru rose at sundown as normal.
He dressed in black, as usual—formal.
He stopped at the all-night Starbucks for coffee.
He ordered espresso with two shots of toffee.
The barista’s mistake: serving decaffeinated.
Bec fell asleep with his face on the table;
Dawn found him dead, sadly decoffinated.

VOTE NOW!

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