ROUND ONE: 6-chafe vs. 11-whacked

^{[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:

6-chafe
Icebergs
by Marina Sim

In one freezing ocean two icebergs collide.

They tackle each other with icy-cold pride.
They chafe and they grind. Their edges get cracked.
They need an ice-breaker – no joke, just a fact.
The sunshine warms up the two icy-cold grumps.

It melts them together, with no cracks or bumps.
The icebergs can float as one, with no frown:
No giant waves will flip them upside down.

vs.

11-whacked
BIRTHDAY PARTY — CHECKLIST
by Mary Lee Hahn

Children — driven
Presents — given

Cake — gobbled
Apples — bobbled

Donkey tail — tacked
Piñata — whacked

Games — played
Mom’s nerves — frayed

VOTE NOW!

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