You can read and vote in all 16 matches right here:

View Matches

But you gotta read fast, because voting ends Tuesday 5/14 at 7pm Eastern.

Enjoy the madness!

-Ed

p.s. We are still seeking/accepting MORE TEACHERS & THEIR STUDENTS to officially register and vote as student groups. Know a teacher? Please share this link with them: https://madnesspoetry.com/register … thanks!

View Matches

Voting ends Friday 5/10 at 6pm Eastern.

Here also is a quick view of the official tournament “bracket”, where you can see each authlete’s would-be path to the 2024 championship:

We’ve gotten to know some of these authletes pretty well over the years, and it can be fun to speculate on who might face off in future rounds. I won’t go so far as to encourage you to print the above image and write in who you think will win each match en route to the championship as many people do for the NCAA basketball tournaments … but I can’t stop you! (I personally will not do such a thing so as not to tip the scales in any one authlete’s favor, and of course I encourage everyone to vote each round based on which POEM they think is best, not which authlete they like best or had guessed to win).

That’s all for now. Enjoy the madness!

-Ed

p.s. We are still very much accepting and seeking MORE TEACHERS & THEIR STUDENTS to officially register and vote as student groups. Know a teacher? Please share this link with them: https://madnesspoetry.com/register … thanks!

This year will be our 11th tournament since 2012 (spanning 13 years: 🎉🎉🎉🎉🚫🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🚫🎉 …🎉!). So to kick things off, here are eleven things that you should know about this year’s event:

1. 📆 It’s all happening in May. I was hoping to conduct the event in April this year (and will aim to do so every year in the future) to coincide with National Poetry Month in the U.S., but life got in the way, so the event will be held during the month of May (with a hint of June) this year. Exact schedule posted here.

2. 😴 Our new schedule allows more sleeping writing time. We’re going to start giving authletes a little bit more time to write each round now vs. past years. That 36-hour clock was fun, but feedback from veteran successful authletes is that the burnout factor is real. Our new schedule is still fast and furious, but now respects that authletes are, in fact, human. Mostly.

3. 📩 The authlete application window closes SOON. Would-be authletes have until 11:59pm Eastern on Sunday 4/28 to apply. Here’s the application.

4. 🪢 We’re tweaking our poem length limits. Starting this year, the poem length limits by round will be 750 characters (including spaces and line breaks) in Rounds 1-2; 1,000 in Round 3; 1,250 in Rounds 4-5; and 1,500 in Round 6. These new limits give writers the space to expand their concept a bit in the early rounds (vs. the recent 600 character limit in Rounds 1-2), but also protect writers with tighter concepts or constrained forms from getting "out-typed" in the mid-to-late rounds (as with the recent 1,200-2,400 character limits in Rounds 3-6).

5. 🏫 Student group leaders can register any time! It’s a simple 2-step process: (1) register as a leader, then (2) create as many groups as you need! Voting begins Tuesday morning, May 7th. Here’s the registration form.

6. 📢 New feature: Community “Highlights”: We have a new page dedicated to showcasing how authletes, schools, and community members are experiencing the event. Any logged in user is welcome to contribute to the story (though all posts will be moderated). I’d love to see different perspectives show up here, in addition to my own! Post your highlights here.

7. 🏆 Improved “Champions” page: I looked back at each past season and wrote a blurb about each of our first 10 champions’ paths to victory. Read them all here.

8. 📜 Easier-to-use “Archive” page: Did you know that you can quickly search through all 1,267 poems ever written for this event? Search by keyword and/or filter by authlete name.

9. 📊 Cleaner user dashboards. We introduced a proper user dashboard last year to make it WAY easier (for authletes and teachers especially) to participate. We’ll continue to enhance this as time goes on, but if ever in doubt as to what you should be doing at any moment in time, look no further than the upper right corner menu to open your dashboard to find out!

10. 🧭 We updated the site navigation … again. A recurring user complaint is that it’s too hard to navigate one’s way around the site. We’ve made some additional changes so it’s hopefully🤞🏼now intuitive to find what you’re looking for using our new header navigation, mobile menu, and expanded footer.

11. 😮 A fun SURPRISE feature will be launched at tournament’s end. What could it be? And why wait until the tournament is over to launch it?

Okay I think that’s enough for now. Enjoy the madness!

-Ed

We’re nearing the end now … Round 4 featured four more terrific matches, which means that when the dust settled we were left with only four authletes remaining. Kudos to the group leaders who brought their students back to vote and show our valiant authletes some love in what I’ve been told is a somewhat tiring competition. 🙃 Student votes were up by 75% vs. the prior round!

It does seem, however, that our voter participation level “is what it is” at this point so my hope is to get everyone who has already signed up to return to the site each round as we wrap things up in the next 4-5 days. Please do continue sharing news of the event in your circles — the later round poems themselves have been especially terrific, and a good way to show off the power of poetry to people who may not yet be inclined toward it. The other nice thing about only having a few matches left is that it is not as overwhelming to readers, and the impact of one’s vote in each match is felt more clearly.

With that said, let’s move on to the recap …

Round 4 Recap:

Key stats:

Total votes cast: 1,505 🗳

Total comments made: 148 📣

Wackiest word prompt: “wizened” 🤯 … it probably does not mean what you think it means

Closest match: The battle of “zephyr” 🏁

• 54.4% Amy Moore vs.

• 46.6% Terri Cohlene

Once again, no true nail-biters as we’ve seen in past years and in some early round matches but still, oh so close. The battle of “spongy” between Jean O’Connor (44.8%) and Kelly Conroy (55.2%) was also very close.

Biggest margin of victory: Susie Sawyer won over 2/3 of the votes (67.3%) and swept all three vote categories with her sweet poem “Lucky Dog” 🚀

Biggest upsets: There are no real upsets at this point in the event, as any authlete who makes it this far has proven themselves a tough, tough competitor. But we’ll give the nod to Susie Sawyer’s slaying of the dragon that is former Champion, #1 seed, and All-Time-Winningest-Authlete Tiffany Strelitz to reach this year’s final four.

Round 5 (Pre)view:

Round 5 is already well underway and ends later today. If you haven’t voted yet, here’s what’s in store for you:

There are only two matches this round. The words prompts are:

• lackadaisical

• superfluous

Unlike past rounds, where I myself create the word list, 👆 these words were curated in a more collaborative way. Specifically:

1. The Round 1 and Round 2 non-winners suggested words that they thought would make great prompts for the Semi-Final and Final rounds.

2. Those words were passed on to the eight Round Three non-winners to cut down to a short list of ten words.

3. From ONLY those ten words, the four Round Four non-winners force-ranked the shortlisted words, which determined which of those words were assigned to the people who beat them to get to the Semi-Finals.

So in this case:

• “lackadaisical” was first suggested by Katrina Swenson, shortlisted by Jay Brazeau, Mike Flowers, and Heather Kinser, and then ranked highly by Jean O’Connor and Tiffany Strelitz

• “superfluous” was first suggested by Brenda Whitehead, shortlisted by Heather Kinser, and then ranked highly by Terri Cohlene and Jesse Anna Bornemann

What would YOU do with one of these words?

Would you also write a s l o w poem about a sloth facilitating a video call, compose an inspirational rap, muster up a well-metered environmentalist metaphor starring space pugs, or stitch together a tale about a superhero with seemingly-less-than-super superpowers? Because that’s what our four semi-finalists did, all in only 36 (I’ve been corrected) 35 hours.

Round 5 voting ends Friday 5/12 at 7pm EDT. If YOU haven’t voted yet, visit the match list right now to read and vote for your favorite poem in each match!

🗳 x 2 = ❤️

See you this weekend for our definitely-on-time-this-time Finals Preview!

Round 3 featured another 8 excellent matches that ruthlessly reduced our pool of remaining authletes by half yet again, from 16 to now 8. Voting held fairly steady in Round 3 vs. Round 2, but we’re still hoping for a lot more student votes than we’ve managed so far this year. I’ve unfortunately not been able to promote the event as much as I’d like this week or last, which has been a contributing factor. So once again, please share news of the event with the educators in your life so we can spark more students’ interest in and excitement about poetry! There’s still an opportunity for group leaders to vote with their students in the remaining rounds!

With that said, let’s move on to the recap …

Round 3 Recap:

Key stats:

Total votes cast: 1,704 🗳

Total comments made: 224 📣

Wackiest word prompt: Fairly tame round, but we’ll go with “fashionista” 🤯

Closest match: The battle of “encased” 🏁

• 45.3% Hannah Roy LaGrone vs.

• 54.7% Jean O’Connor

Unfortunately, Hannah finds herself on the losing end of the “closest match” battle this time after winning last round’s closest match. But sometimes that’s just the way it goes!

Biggest margin of victory: Kelly Conroy once again captured the highest % of votes in any match (74.3%) with her fun poem “My Backpack’s Too Heavy” 🚀

Biggest upsets: It’s hard to call anything an upset at this point in the event, but Terri Cohlene (11 seed) and the above-mentioned Jean O’Connor (12) continue their impressive runs by eliminating their higher-seeded opponents to advance to the quarterfinals. By the (admittedly very subjective and often quickly outdated) numbers, we’d “expect” mostly 1’s and 2’s to be the last authletes standing, but at the end of the day the only thing that matters is writing great poems, and Terri, Jean, and all of our “Elite Eight” authletes continue to do just that!

Round 4 Preview:

I’m sounding like a broken record now, as once again this is not much of a “preview” since the round is already well underway and ends later today BUT it’s an exciting round nonetheless!

The now-very-short Round 4 word list consists of these four linguistic beauties:

• spongy

• vagabond

• wizened

• zephyr

What would YOU do with one of these words?

Round 4 voting ends Tuesday 5/9 at 7pm EDT. If YOU haven’t voted yet, visit the match list (the matches at the top are in most need of votes) right now to read and vote for your favorite poems in each match! 🗳 x 4 = ❤️

See you next round …

Round 2 featured another 16 excellent matches that, as must always happen in the end, reduced our pool of authletes by half again, from 32 to now 16. On average, we saw an uptick in the number of student votes cast per match in Round 2 vs. Round 1, which came as something of a relief, but to be honest student votes have still been significantly down vs. prior years. Again, please do share news of the event with the educators in your life so we can spark more students’ interest in and excitement about poetry!

And with that, let’s move on to the recap …

Round 2 Recap:

Key stats:

Total votes cast: 3,774 💪

Total comments made: 478 📣

Wackiest word prompt: Toss-up between “yeets” and “jejune” 🤯

FUN FACT: My 10yo son uses the word “yeeted” all the time in reference to throwing/bouncing stuff. I was not familiar with this word or its real-world use before I heard him start saying it. But once I understood how he was using it, and that all his classmates used it the same way, I knew it’d make a great Madness! prompt word. The resulting poems did not disappoint. (AFAIK, he has never used the word “jejune” … maybe next month?)

Closest match: The battle of “protruding” 🏁

• 49.1% Amelia Shearer vs.

• 50.9% Hannah Roy LaGrone

Biggest margin of victory: Jesse Anna Bornemann captured 81.0% of the vote with her adver-poem “Bob's Doggy Spa” 🚀

Biggest upsets: The above-mentioned Hannah (9 seed) and Jesse (8) both knocked out #1 seeded opponents; Mike Flowers (10) and Rebekah Hoeft (7) both took down #2 seed opponents; and Terri Cohlene (11) and Jean O’Connor (12) took out a #3 and #4 seed, respectively 😲

Round 3 Preview:

As with last time, it’s not much of a preview at this point since the round is already well underway and ends later today BUT it’s an exciting round nonetheless! This round’s entries are tremendous, in some cases to the point that voters have been delaying casting their votes until they come back and re-read both poems again, and/or expressing gratitude for this year’s new vote-splitting feature!

The Round 3 word list is:

• indelible

• deflection

• felonious

• fashionista

• encased

• marionette

• gatekeeper

• countrified

What would YOU do with one of these words?

Round 3 voting ends Friday 5/5 at 7pm EDT. If YOU haven’t voted yet, visit the match list (the matches at the top are in most need of votes) right now to read and vote for your favorite poems in each match! 🗳 x 8 = ❤️

See you next round …

In general, it’s been a great first week, both on the surface and behind the scenes. Given my near complete overhaul of the application over the last two years, we experienced very few technical difficulties for our first live run. The one challenge we did face was (and is) a lower-than-expected Student vote turnout. So please do share news of the event with the educators in your life so we can get more students excited about poetry! I even created a little badge that they can use to brag to their friends about how cool they are for bringing Madness! into their classrooms:

Anyways, on with the recap …

Round 1 Recap:

Key stats:

Total votes cast: 5,979 💪

Wackiest word prompt: “bivouac” 🤯

Closest match: Also, the battle of “bivouac” 🏁

• 48.4% Sarah Marhevsky vs.

• 51.6% Terri Cohlene

Biggest margin of victory: Kelly Conroy captured 89.4% of the vote with her poem “IMPETUOUS? NOT ME!” 🚀

Biggest upset: Newcomer Scott Thomson (16 seed) narrowly upsets former champion Lori Degman (1 seed) in this very close match featuring two terrific entries 😲

Round 2 Preview:

Well, it’s not much of a preview at this point since the round ends in about 6 hours BUT it’s an exciting round nonetheless. We have a fun set of words and an amazing slate of authletes who have moved into Round 2. The word list is:

• assuaged

• copacetic

• credo

• jejune

• yeets

• miasma

• neutralized

• nirvana

• obtrusive

• panacea

• protruding

• puerile

• pugnacious

• retrograde

• stultifying

• threadbare

What would YOU do with one of these words?

Round 2 voting ends Tuesday 7pm EDT. If you haven’t already, visit the match list (the matches at the top are in most need of votes) right now to read and vote for your favorite poems in each match! 🗳 x 16 = ❤️

See you next round …

That was Madness 1.0 — a happy accident.

The next few seasons followed the same pattern. From 2013-2015, I implemented a few changes to the contest rules, and automated a process or two, but most of the work of running the event remained 100% manual behind the scenes.

When it came time to prepare for the 2016 event, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it the same way another year. My family and I had just moved to California and I was working long startup hours. I had recently begun experimenting with a new software platform that I believed could become the new backbone of the event, but I wasn’t ready to built it. So as much as it pained me, as a matter of human survival, I cancelled the 2016 event. But over the course of the year, I committed to build as much as I could in my spare time, and by the time the calendar flipped to 2017 I had accomplished enough to confidently re-launch the event while building the rest on-the-fly. Though pretty “hacky” as software goes, everything worked like a dream on the front end compared to before, including automatically organizing authletes’ poems (⬇🤯), automatically ensuring each poem’s compliance with the rules (⬇😡), and automatically structuring each match page for reading and voting (⬆💤).

That was Madness 2.0 — a monumental achievement.

Since then, I have implemented several more rules changes and tried to bolt on a few new features, but for the most part the site that I built haphazardly in 2017 is the same one that went on to publish 500+ more poems from 2018-2021. With each passing year, however, I began noticing more and more about the site design that I didn’t like, I found myself still struggling to administer pretty basic things on the back end, and I continued to answer the same questions and respond to the same complaints due to the same user experience problems that plagued the site from the beginning.

So as 2022 approached, I decided I would update at least a few key components of the site. I started with one of the most basic — the header that sits atop each page — but once I changed that, I felt the need to change another component to match it, and then another, and another, and soon I felt it necessary to change … everything. But “everything” proved too much. January soon passed, then February, and though by mid-March 2022 I had made a ton of progress, it still felt only half-finished at best, so once again I made the painful decision to cancel Madness! Poetry 2022 rather than try to run it “the old way” yet another year.

So here we are, in early 2023, and I’ve again had the better part of a year to try to complete my overhaul of the app. Similar to 2017, I feel good about what I’ve achieved, and even though it’s not 100% done (let’s go with 85%), it’s close enough that I’m confident I can host a successful event. I’m still nervous about the usual things — that I won’t have enough time to administer things properly, that the site will break down, that a nefarious user will find a novel way to manipulate the vote, that I won’t be able to get enough teachers to register their classrooms, etc. — but I’m also very excited , because the improvements I’ve been making are designed to address all of these challenges, and more!

Here is a quick list of site improvements since the 2021 event, touching just about every aspect of the user experience:

• 🕶 Complete visual redesign including responsive page layouts

• 🧭 More intuitive navigation and menus to help people find their way around

• ✅ Easier registration and login flows

• 🗄 Personalized dashboards for every user type

• 🗳 Individual student voting within their classrooms

• 🔪 All voters can now split their vote any way they want (except 50/50 🤣)

• ⏱ The return of the countdown clock!

• ⚙️ Plus lots of new admin features to make things easier for me to manage

👆 This is Madness 3.0 — my labor of love. ❤️

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I know this event means a lot to a lot of people, and I hate to think of what we might have missed during our two “lost years”, but in both cases the time off gave me a chance to re-assess, re-focus, and re-energize, and eventually re-emerge with a more personally sustainable and collectively superior experience. Enjoy the madness! 🚀

By the way, THIS is also the official new communication channel of Madness! Poetry. Here we will share news, stories, highlights, polls, and opportunities related to the tournament and other Madness! happenings, and more broadly to poetry and children’s/YA literature at large.

We will start simple, and slow — and completely free — and see where it goes.

🙏 PLEASE SUBSCRIBE NOW to be notified of all future communications from this channel. Thank you!

Subscribe now

01.08.2012 — VISITOR ADVISORY WARNING ⚠️

Ed DeCaria launches his Think, Kid, Think! website publicly with a post titled “VISITOR ADVISORY WARNING”, cautioning visitors that the site may not play by the same rules as other kidlit blogs. This will prove prophetic in myriad ways, for better and for worse.

01.13.2012 — Poetry Friday 🗓

Ed participates in “Poetry Friday” for the first time, contributing an original poem "Who Is This Woman and Why Is She Trying to Kiss Me?" He enjoys the high of seeing people read and respond to his work for the first time. For three more weeks, he continues to participate in the weekly roundup, visit other poetry sites, and meet new poets. Their enthusiasm for the genre gets him thinking ...

02.09.2012 — A Crazy Idea 😜

Ed posts a half-baked idea for a kids' poetry tournament in his post "Madness! Writing 126 New Children’s Poems in 21 Days", making clear that 1) the idea probably won't work, 2) he doesn't even know 64 poets, and 3) almost everyone who volunteers to participate is going to lose.

02.11.2012 — Maybe It’s Not So Crazy 🤔

Sixteen writers, mostly from the Poetry Friday community, sign up to participate within 36 hours. People are talking. Invitations are flying. Could this really happen? Does Ed really want it to?

02.16.2012 — “Everybody’s Talking About It” 💬

Messages are coming in faster than Ed can respond to them. Caldecott Medal Winner Jane Yolen signs up. Everyone freaks out. Reigning Poet Laureate J. Patrick Lewis drops in to say hello minutes later. Superstar poet Kenn Nesbitt throws his hat in the ring, and invites a number of other famed poets to do the same. Ed's brain explodes.

03.05.2012 — This Is Really Happening 🌋

64 people have signed up to write poems at the command of an unpublished, possibly-insane blogger who has tricked them all into thinking he knows what he's doing, which he most certainly does not.

03.06.2012 — Launch Week ☕️

What would in future years prove to be 2-3 weeks of manual prep work is crammed into 5 nights, during which Ed sleeps a cumulative 10 hours. He does not die, so by folk logic he is now stronger. Launch week ends with a "Selection Sunday" video revealing the first ever tournament bracket.

03.11.2012 — "You Just Made USA TODAY" 📰

The Madness! Poetry tournament is mentioned in USA Today. It doesn't even start until tomorrow. Everybody IS talking about it.

03.12.2012 — 1-bruise vs. 16-androgynous 🧱

The first Madness! word pairing is posted, and for the first time participants truly realize what they're in for. Poems are due 36 hours. Busy day? No excuses. Tired? Tough luck. Need to include the word "androgynous" in a kids’ poem? Take it up with that brick wall over there.

03.13.2012 — Poetry Found 📣

The Poetry Foundation, headquartered in Ed's backyard in Chicago, promotes the event on its website and tweets a link to 100,000 people. They all show up at the exact same time. Luckily we had enough to read.

03.26.2012 — Win? Lose? Who Cares. It's A Party! 🎉

Two weeks blow by. Poems litter the site. Writers, now referred to as “authletes”, are dropping like dactyls. Votes are cast. Leads are mounted, then surmounted. Complaints are filed. Fates are accepted. The show must go on.

03.29.2012 — Poetry Breaks The Internet ❗️

The Think, Kid, Think! website crashes repeatedly as visitors furiously refresh their browsers to see the latest results. Hearts break. Heads hang. Letters of abuse from web hosts are sent. Poetry wins.

04.02.2012 — Crowning A Champion 🌍

"Unpublished potential superstar" Stephen W. Cahill wins his sixth consecutive matchup to become the first ever Madness! Poetry Champion. His word prompts, from first to final round, were: innuendo, marginalize, varnish, warbled, barnacle, and bovine.

04.09.2012 — Final Tally 1️⃣2️⃣6️⃣

When the dust cleared, we looked back at what happened. 64 poets wrote 126 poems in just three weeks, during which they were cheered on by 12,000 people, who visited the site over 100,000 times.

04.30.2012 — A New Community 🤝

The tournament is over, but no one wants to leave. Having exchanged over 1,800 comments during the event, relationships that budded during Madness! continue to bloom elsewhere on kidlit blogs, on social media, and in real life.

… and lastier, but not leastiest:

12.07.2012 — The Thinkier Trophy 🏆

Ed unveils The Thinkier, a traveling trophy named after Allan Wolf’s clever rhyme with his Round One prompt word “kinkier” (yes, really), to be engraved with the name of each year's champion and sent to live with them for a year. Or a few months. Or never. It depends who wins and how much else there is going on in the world, really.

⏩ And 10+ years and 1,000+ poems later … the rest is history.