We’re now just four days away from the start of March Madness Poetry 2013!
Continuing my one-a-day posting of my Top Ten favorite poems from #MMPoetry 2012 … today we explore our unmentionables with Tiffany Strelitz Haber prompted by her 11-seed word “nether” in the second round:
11-nether
BOTTOMS UP!
by Tiffany Strelitz Haber
In Wackytown where up is down and night is bright as day
Santa Claus comes twice a year and drives a backwards sleigh.
It travels in reverse – a curse! But Santa’s got it made.
He’s got a secret weapon in his great reindeer brigade.
Rudy Booty leads the pack, attacking through the snow …
and sticks his tushy out, you see
his nether regions glow!
This poem captured 50% of the vote in its matchup. Did I say 50%? I meant 49.6%, as Tiffany actually LOST with what I felt was the laugh-out-loud poem of the tournament. Nether was a brutal word, and upon reflection probably incorrectly seeded due to its connotation. So when I saw what Tiffany was able to do with it — design her entire poem around her prompt word, make it kid-friendly by giving it a completely new context (because the nether regions of animals seem far less taboo than those of humans!), and use the word itself in her punchline, I was floored. By the time I got to that punchline, the scene became so visually clear that the line itself might as well have been typeset in red bold 40-point font.
So how did she lose? As her fate would have it, she was up against the eventual #MMPoetry 2012 champion Stephen W. Cahill, who himself wrote a(nother) funny saga that outpaced Tiffany’s poem by exactly three votes out of almost 400 total. (So sorry, Stephen, if it was up to me — and thank goodness it is not! — we would have had a different #MMPoetry champion last year!)
Click here to see this poem as it originally appeared in #MMPoetry 2012.
