[Jerome Betts]

Nice one, Roger. You'd have got my vote anyway.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks, everyone! It's a win-win situation. If I advance to the next round, I get the glory, but if I don't, I get to not have to write another poem using a weird word in 36 hours.

[Charlie Southerland]

I voted for you. You typically write great children's verse. This one was no exception.

Good luck, from a Calvinist.
charlie.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks, Charlie.

I won the first round. In addition to the popular vote, the "authlete" vote (i.e., the vote of my fellow competitors) went my way 35-11, and the student vote went my way 15 classrooms to 5.

I get my new word at 1 pm today and have to turn in my poem by midnight tomorrow. This could definitely be a problem for me, since I have a lot of things scheduled between now and then that will keep me from having much time to work on my new poem. So there's my excuse, in advance, for losing. (And if I don't lose Round 2, it looks like I'm likely to face very stiff competition in Round 3, the fellow who finished second in the competition last year).

[Roger Slater]

New round is up, and I could use your vote. Just click in the "public vote" box beneath the poems, then click "Vote." Two clicks and you're done.

My word was "nascent," and my opponent's word was "bailiwick." I went for a "serious" poem, she went for laughs. I'm a bit annoyed that my opponent's poem is 14 lines long (not a sonnet) even though the line limit for the round is supposed to be 8 lines max. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for not following the rule, oddly enough.

[Michael Cantor]

I voted for you, Roger, but it took some floundering. You don't have a link to the new competition, either in the initial announcement or in the update, and I had to hunt around to find it. I can understand that you're being a good guy and not starting a new thread for every round, but suggest that (a) you update the initial post so that the new competition and the new link are right at the top, and (b) indicate them again in your update. And if you get past this round (and you're presently leading), this Slater fan has no problems with either a new thread for each round, or working with a Mod to change the title of the existing thread every time you enter a new round.

Here's the new link: http://www.thinkkidthink.com/10-nasc...-15-bailiwick/

Also - if your opponent broke the rules (and it seems to me she did - you can't really regard those two-line stanzas as one very long line), can't you file a complaint? Can a voter file a complaint in the interests of fair play? (If we don't raise our voices now, the next thing you'll see is limitations being removed from public elections, so that wealthy individuals and corporations can "buy" their representatives.)

[Michael Juster]

I am confident of Roger in this round, but--sadly--he is toast when he is up against Kentucky.

[Roger Slater]

Thanks, Michael. Very careless of me to forget the link.

There's no doubt my opponent broke the rules, and I did complain to the fellow who runs the contest, Ed DeCaria, and learned that he pretty much doesn't intend to do anything about it.* I think he's afraid of appearing too harsh by disqualifying the poem, and all he could offer was that some potential voters will theoretically decide not to vote for that poem because it doesn't meet the requirements of the contest. That's lame, of course, especially since Carissa advanced to this round after winning in Round 1 with another poem that also went over the line limit. There were 64 poets in Round 1, and she's the only one who went over the limit.

I'm particularly annoyed because I really wanted my own poem to be ten lines, with another couplet just before the last one, and I spent a fair amount of effort trying to deal with the line limitation. In fact, my first draft had been quatrains, not couplets, and I went to couplets only because of the line limitation, and I made other choices that also related to length.

I guess it doesn't really matter, but still.

* Edited in to say that I just found that Ed has changed the formatting of Carissa's poem, adjusting the line breaks so the poem now takes up just eight lines. I don't know whether he consulted her or not. But this seems like a pretty major change to make after over 100 votes had already been cast. It's hard to know whether the voting has been affected or how.

[Nausheen Eusuf]

Hey Roger, I just voted for you. Even if they don't disqualify the other person for going over the limit, at the very least they should have a penalty (such as losing a certain percentage of her votes). Anyway, hope you still win!

Nausheen

[Michael Cantor]

Roger - I just clicked on the link you provided, and it doesn't work. This one does (or at least it did for me.) http://www.thinkkidthink.com/10-nasc...-15-bailiwick/