ROUND TWO: 5-volume vs. 4-zero

^{[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:

5-volume
For William Wordsworth, Upon the 1807 Publication of Poems in Two Volumes
by Not Quite Shakespeare

Not every volume can be a hit,
and I wonder if you wilted a bit
 
when Lord Byron said, “Sir, you cease to please,”
and critics said, “Man, did you edit these?”
 
Is that when you roamed lonely as a cloud,
when you stood on Westminster Bridge and vowed,
 
“My heart will leap up, the world will listen.
I’ll spit-shine these lines until they glisten.”

vs.

4-zero
We Need Books!
by Greg Pincus

Our entire school library’s empty. It’s bare.
It used to be full, but now look: nothing’s there.
 
We’ve got zero books. We’ve got zip, zilch, nil, none.
There’s nada. A goose egg. We’ve naught, nix, not one.
 
To help change our null set, please send something for us.
We sure miss our books – most of all our thesaurus.

VOTE NOW!

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GET OUT THE VOTE. The average pairing in Round 1 generated 154 votes. For Round 2, our goal is to DOUBLE the average vote total for all matchups compared to Round 1 … that’s 300+ votes! Use the share buttons below and mention the madness wherever you go so that these poems reach more kids!