From Our Staff | October 24, 2011

When I learned about the amateur zookeeper in Zanesville who released his exotic animals and committed suicide, I immediately thought this is exactly the kind of event that should be written about in a poem.  When I came down from the wave of enthusiasm that accompanied this thought, I had a depressive moment, as I often do, and worried that perhaps not many poems would be written about the animals in Zanesville after all.  I don’t write poetry, so I can’t remedy this situation singlehandedly.

I need your help, so, as TMR’s Social Media Editor, I’d like to announce our first-ever 48-Hour-Poem Non-Contest.

You have 48 hours, after the posting of this blog post, to write a poem about the animal release in Zanesville and send it to themissourireview [at] gmail [dot] com The poem we decide is best will be featured on our tumblr page.

That makes the deadline about noon on Wednesday, October 26^th.  Because this is a Non-Contest, submissions will not be blind and anyone can enter, except for me.  No money will be awarded to anyone.

I call it a Non-Contest because I don’t want this to be in any way confused with our actual contest, the deadline of which came and went a few weeks ago – and because this Non-Contest is not directly affiliated with our magazine, only with our blog and tumblr page.

This is strictly for fun; if you end up writing a really good poem, you’ll probably want to submit it to our magazine as a regular submission – or, better yet, to the Unleashed Exotic Creature Review.

Also, in no way is this an effort to make light of what happened in Zanesville, which was awful and tragic for man and beast alike.

Happy writing.