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Voter Instructions:
- The countdown at the bottom of each pairing indicates how much time is left to vote.
- When voting closes, timer will disappear.
- Read both poems as many times as you like.
- Mark the poem you like best by clicking the circle next to its name.
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Things to Consider in Making a Choice:
- How well the poem incorporates the authlete’s assigned word.
- Technical elements: meter, rhyme, form, shape, and other poetic standards.
- Creativity: wordplay, imagery, unusual approach, etc.
- Subtle elements that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
- Your overall response: emotional reaction such as admiration, tears, laughter, terror, or some indefinable feeling.
Here are the poems:
6-upended
Chain Reaction
by Suz Blackaby
Peace and quiet is disrupted when our kitty on a whim
picks a quarrel with the golden and then runs away from him.
The old golden chases kitty but she takes evasive action,
and he tries to vault the sofa but the hardwood has no traction
so he can’t quite stick the landing in the way that he intended,
and the upshot, in a nutshell? An end table is upended,
which then sends a Chinese vase and fishbowl crashing to the ground!
(The vase we patched with superglue, the fish was never found.)
vs.
11-junto
Ben Hangin’ With His Junto
by Deborah Holt Williams
Ben Franklin was a printer, an inventor and a wit.
He loved discussing issues in a tavern where he’d sit
With eleven friends, his junto, to moralize and sip.
“A penny saved’s a penny earned!” Ben never left a tip.
Begun in 1727, they met each Friday night,
Until the tavern staff suggested Ben go fly a kite.
