ROUND ONE: 3-temptation vs. 14-befuddling

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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:

3-temptation
The Leafy Sea Dragon
by Pam Courtney

Is his watch an aimless contemplation?
Or does this suspended animation
give plankton, shrimp and other crustacean
a cause to believe they’re no temptation?

So the leafy sea dragon sucks vegetation.
And in their moment of hesitation
the plankton, shrimp, and other crustacean
fall prey to Leafy’s manipulation.

vs.

14-befuddling
Befuddling
by Marianne Nielsen

There once was a young boy named Fred.
He knew the meaning of each word he read.
Befuddling his teacher
This boy was a creature
Who should be the teacher instead.

VOTE NOW!

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