The inaugural Project Verse competitors are:
Andrew Clark-Kennedy
Jennifer Werner
Robert Walker
Nabina Das
Emily Van Duyne
Micah Ling
Kristen McHenry
Niina Pollari
Emari DiGiorgio
Martin Ott
Competitors: Project Verse begins on June 8, 2009. Expect an email by midnight tomorrow with all the juicy details.
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3 comments:
What fun.
First salvo below. Best of luck, competitors!
Martin Ott
LAST POET STANDING
What’s more real than a battle royale
among poets to determine who can
reverse the mysterious and profound?
The cast began on cordial terms
when the renga snaked through them,
raining tail-feathers of eaglets.
The departures were epic at least.
The protest poet could not be
contained by a Petrarchan sonnet.
The limerick bit the new formalist
where the sun shone, but rarely,
whose ex-wife proclaimed, “Yeah
Verily.” The guest judges eulogized
each contestant and the recipe poem
boiled the freshness from the beat,
whose voice drove them all to libations
after the video cameras stopped rolling.
The five fingers of an elegiac quatrain
punched the snot out of a mystic poet,
who swore her stanzas came from dreams,
and she could not understand the French.
The judges sent her packing with an epitaph:
“Here sat the dreaming eye, when it blinked
was ever so blind, departure too kind.”
The canto catastrophe was self-explanatory.
And there were surprises: the university
professor with haikus about his balls;
the ezine editor won the madrigal
with a comic rap about the castaway
objects forming the nest of a dodo bird.
In the end, the audience won, of course,
or so proclaimed the advertisement
in a sophomoric iambic pentameter.
The last poet standing accepted the prize
kneeling on a chair just to be contrary.
Is it so absurd to believe that America
would not gathering round the square
to drink in the pleasure of its poets
failing, falling, feeling, full of fierce?
I enjoyed your poem, Martin! I'm looking forward to the contest! Best to everyone. --Kristen
So exciting, Dustin! Props to you for all this art-in-organizing!
Peace, man.
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