A pesky magazine deadline kept me from going out to Strand Books Monday night to watch the showdown between poets Paul Muldoon (left) and Brad Leithauser (right), who’d been invited by QuickMuse.com to write competing poems in front of a live audience…with a ten-minute deadline. Luckily, Ami Greko of FSG (Muldoon’s publisher) was on hand to snap this picture of the dueling versifiers with QuickMuse’s Ken Gordon, and now that it’s all over I can at least go online and read their efforts online… perhaps even watch them unfold in real-time. (Muldoon, I’m seeing, went with all-caps; bold move!)

Greko also reported from the “literary steel cage match” for FSG’s National Poetry Month blog. “The audience decided that it was just too hard to crown one winner,” she says, but you can follow through her to both poems and judge for yourself…