Conducted by Jonathan Hobratsch & Agon Haroldson

Introduction

For April Poetry Month I’ve decided to play an eccentric literary game. Thirty teams of American poets, past and present, and will go head-to-head through a March Madness-style sporting system to see which poetry team is the strongest team of all.

All 30 teams will face each other in round 1. The 15 winning teams of round 1 will go on to Round 2, except for one team which will have a bye week. The 8 remaining teams from round 2 will go on to round 3. Four teams will enter round 4. The championship between the 2 remaining poetry teams will take place in round 5.

How the Teams were Created

Each team was created by random from a list of 270 American poets. Each team has 9 poets. The names for each team were taken from poetry terminology.

Rules of the Game

In each contest, the 9 poets for each team will fact one opponent from the other team. Thus, all 9 poets on each team face on single poet from the other. These one-on-one match ups will be chosen at random.

In each match between individual poets, I will google for each poet’s most popular poem, according to Google. I will then determine, which poet’s poem is the strongest poem of the two poets. Teams that advance to the second round will use their second most popular poem, and so on for each round. As such, poets that are consistently strong will be helpful later in the game.

As each team has 9 poets; therefore, the team that scores 5 wins or more in a game will move on to the next round.

The last team standing, after all the remaining 29 teams have been dispatched, will be the winner.

April Poetry Madness Team Rosters (w/ Round 1 matchups) !!!

Note: matchups, like the rosters, were generated by random. Individual match ups among the poets will be a game day decision.

Game 1: