Round 4 Recap, Round 5 Underway + Ends Today!
Key stats and highlights from Round 4
It’s time for yet another ultra-abbreviated Madness! Poetry round recap and next round preview. Only for “More” subscribers (that’s you!).
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:
The Round 1 and Round 2 non-winners suggested words that they thought would make great prompts for the Semi-Final and Final rounds.
Those words were passed on to the eight Round Three non-winners to cut down to a short list of ten words.
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!