DAH duh DAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!
Here's how it works: every few days or so I'm going to post a pair of poems for your patient perusal. There's a survey link at the bottom of the post that simply asks which poem you enjoy more (if you'd like you can explain why).
You don't need to give your name, correctly decipher jiggled-up characters or do anything but click buttons. It does take you to a page letting you sign up to do your own surveys, just ignore it.
And remember: Your answers determine what I'm sending out to professors and eventually including in my applications. That's right, I'm crowd-sourcing this bad mama-jama.
I'm beginning with a pool of 16 poems. The PoemBowl is a double-elimination competition, thus hopefully correcting for differences in style and content which might cause certain worthy poems to otherwise get knocked out. The top 10 will be included, so it's more important that a poem stay in the running as long as possible than for it to be Number 1.
I'll begin with a sonnet head-to-head, one recent and one a few years older, one Elizabethan and one Petrarchan. Let's see how this crazy thing works!
At night the garden curls into a ball,
crustacean lost inside the flowered leaves.
Scavengers crawl through its roots to fall
upon her carapace, where rodents grieve.
What knowledge does the mouse have of the owl?
Perhaps the taste of fear, the cautious scent
is all the prey can have. The hunter’s scowl
gives rise to wisdom lost on innocence.
And in the final view the predator
possesses all the knowledge of his catch
except that hidden lesson caught mice learn:
surrender without pity or reproach.
Two hearts throb slowly, warm and self-aware
but ignorant of loves the other bears.
I've read that God owes no-one anything.
Existence, heaven, noisy all-night sex
are things we don't deserve to have. At best
a man is just a cockroach, scuttling.
And that will just not do, as we all know;
the ship that our God runs is very tight.
We carry our diseases through the night
and morning brings a foot to grind us slow.
But can this line of reason still hold true?
He built the kitchen, bred this insect race
and masters' obligations to their pets
don't end when animals then turn on you.
We make him who he is and thus we face
the thought: he owes himself this massive debt.
Thanks to my ingenious brother Nate, I'm instituting my first-ever poetry championship, pitting poems against each other in fierce competition. You, lovely reader(s?), get to decide what makes it to the final cut and what's consigned to the dustbin of history. Or at least the Trash bin of my iMac. Really, this is about as close as I'm ever going to get to running a fantasy sports league and I've had to consult Google and Wikipedia extensively to get this far.
Here's how it works: every few days or so I'm going to post a pair of poems for your patient perusal. There's a survey link at the bottom of the post that simply asks which poem you enjoy more (if you'd like you can explain why).
You don't need to give your name, correctly decipher jiggled-up characters or do anything but click buttons. It does take you to a page letting you sign up to do your own surveys, just ignore it.
And remember: Your answers determine what I'm sending out to professors and eventually including in my applications. That's right, I'm crowd-sourcing this bad mama-jama.
I'm beginning with a pool of 16 poems. The PoemBowl is a double-elimination competition, thus hopefully correcting for differences in style and content which might cause certain worthy poems to otherwise get knocked out. The top 10 will be included, so it's more important that a poem stay in the running as long as possible than for it to be Number 1.
I'll begin with a sonnet head-to-head, one recent and one a few years older, one Elizabethan and one Petrarchan. Let's see how this crazy thing works!
Animals After the Fall
Matt Quarterman
At night the garden curls into a ball,
crustacean lost inside the flowered leaves.
Scavengers crawl through its roots to fall
upon her carapace, where rodents grieve.
What knowledge does the mouse have of the owl?
Perhaps the taste of fear, the cautious scent
is all the prey can have. The hunter’s scowl
gives rise to wisdom lost on innocence.
And in the final view the predator
possesses all the knowledge of his catch
except that hidden lesson caught mice learn:
surrender without pity or reproach.
Two hearts throb slowly, warm and self-aware
but ignorant of loves the other bears.
Good and Perfect Gifts
Matt Quarterman
I've read that God owes no-one anything.
Existence, heaven, noisy all-night sex
are things we don't deserve to have. At best
a man is just a cockroach, scuttling.
And that will just not do, as we all know;
the ship that our God runs is very tight.
We carry our diseases through the night
and morning brings a foot to grind us slow.
But can this line of reason still hold true?
He built the kitchen, bred this insect race
and masters' obligations to their pets
don't end when animals then turn on you.
We make him who he is and thus we face
the thought: he owes himself this massive debt.
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