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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:
5-shenanigans
Girls’ Guide to Camp
by Not Quite Shakespeare
Shenanigans can be fun,
If you learn how it’s done:
Fill their shoes with shaving cream,
Douse their sheets while they dream.
Tie a rope across a path,
Loan “shampoo” for their bath.
Shake tent, send up flares of noise—
Don’ t forget: blame the boys!
vs.
12-synthetic
Broken XBox
by Linda Kulp
His words are apologetic
But I know they’re simply synthetic—
With fake tears in his eyes
My brother spews out lies
Hoping I’ll be sympathetic!
VOTE NOW!
5-shenanigans vs. 12-synthetic: Which Poem Did You Prefer?
- 5-shenanigans (Not Quite Shakespeare) (62%, 60 Votes)
- 12-synthetic (Linda Kulp) (38%, 37 Votes)
Total Voters: 97
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