Competition 3400 invited you to write poems to mark YouTube’s 20th birthday. This challenge drew a large, accomplished entry which was both amusing and informative. Alex Steelsmith’s double dactylic submission was a strong contender for a place in the winning line-up, as were Bill Greenwell, Mike Morrison, Frank McDonald, David Silverman, Elizabeth Kay and Janine Beacham. But the John Lewis vouchers are awarded to those poems printed below.
I am the very model of a modern-day YouTuberist,
The cornucopia of its gifts creates for me a catalyst,
Since first I saw ‘Me at the Zoo’ my mood’s been irrepressible
And now in all my waking hours I beam up what’s accessible:
The medieval manuscripts and cheerful facts historical,
Like who beheaded what’s-his-name, for YouTube is my oracle.
And Baby Shark Dance floats my boat, though hardly educational,
While Fenton! Fenton chasing deer will always be sensational.
The music choice is limitless, I fix myself a rendez-vous
With Handel oratorios and then Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’.
If anything is on the blink and proving unreliable
A video will show me how to make the damn thing viable.
For twenty years it’s been my guide, I’ve ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ religiously
And through my online searching I have watched it grow prodigiously.
I say without a doubt, and my opinion is unprejudiced,
YouTube’s the very model for a modern-day YouTuberist.
Sylvia Fairley
Between the keyboard and the screen abides
An intricate force field that seeks and hides.
Transcendence is a single click away.
A magic world supplants the everyday.
You want a cat? A million cats await.
The networks teem with Agape and hate,
The pious and profane, nasty and nice,
Clickbait galore. Each item has a price.
This Babel of phenomena bespeaks
The double-decade dream of three young geeks
Evolved into a cyber-multiverse.
So versatile – a blessing and a curse,
A potent Janus of the social media
Inducing both arousal and acedia,
Gravid with narratives that cast a spell
For hours, but truth or fiction – who can tell?.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Wasn’t it great
when me and young Kate
hairbrush in hand
sang to a band
on YouTube’s world stage.
And wasn’t life grand
at twelve years of age?
Now, arm down the drain,
will YouTube explain
what I must do
to shift the remains
of an old Irish stew
plus life on the wane
at just thirty-two?
Martin Parker
I spent an hour on YouTube, golly, such delights!
Flanders, Swann and Stratford Johns, the Ali-Frazier fights,
Basils Brush and Fawlty, Fergie getting hitched,
I turned it off contented, and nostalgically enriched
I spent a day on YouTube, I was looking for El Cid,
But do you remember Crossroads? I’d forgotten that I did!
I stumbled into Gormenghast, and when I found the drawbridge,
It took me to a Roman ruin, somewhere outside Corbridge
I spent a week on YouTube, I began with Planet Earth,
Then lost some days inside a maze of mammals giving birth,
All those kittens, I was smitten! Yet something in me shivered:
I stayed in bed all day, and lived on takeaways – delivered
I spent a month on YouTube – Matt Hancock’s favourite bars!
And a woman from Los Angeles who says she comes from Mars,
A thousand ways with mayonnaise, a horse-box for a home…
And then a good friend struck me with a vast, improving tome
Nick Syrett
Time was, the screen was still and black,
The world unfilmed, unfiltered, free.
Now every moment, front or back,
Demands its clip, its commentary.
A chorus sings of daily bread
In pixels served on handheld shrines;
The living speak, the long since dead
Return in ads and ‘Top Ten’ lines.
No priest, no king, no teacher’s voice
Escapes the algorithm’s maze –
It crowns the loud, the half-informed,
And keeps the meek in comment bays.
Yet let us not be wholly grim –
A cat still jumps, a light still glows;
The human need to watch and share
Remains the truest show it shows.
Jonathan White
No. 3403: First thoughts
You are invited to provide an extract of up to 150 words or 16 lines from a prequel to a well-known work of prose or poetry (e.g. The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, Brighton Sediment…). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 4 June.
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