Competition

In Competition No. 3053, an assignment prompted by Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel, you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s Constance Chatterley instructing Mellors in the importance of foreplay, Paul Freeman’s recasting of Orwell’s antihero as Weinstein Smith and Hugh King addressing the gender stereo-typing in The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The worthy winners, printed below, earn £20 each.   ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; Well, frankly, Will, I’d rather you did NOT.

In Competition No. 3052 you were invited to supply a sonnet inspired by a well-known contemporary figure’s characteristic feature. There was a spot of preposition-related confusion this week — my fault entirely — and sonnets either ‘to’ or ‘on’ were acceptable.   Entries ranged far and wide, from Victoria Beckham’s pout via Gorbachev’s birthmark to the rise — and fall — of Anthony Weiner’s penis. But both John O’Byrne and Barrie Godwin used Sonnet 18 to hymn hairstyles — Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s respectively (Shall I compare thee to a bale of hay?/ Thou art more windblown and intemperate…’).   Honourable mentions go to Mike Morrison, Jonathan Pettman, Douglas G.

In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.   There was a bracingly waspish streak running through your contributions. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the Navy. Are beards de rigueur these days?

In Competition No. 3050 you were invited to submit a school essay written by a well-known author, living or dead, about one of their works. The germ of this challenge was the revelation that the novelist Ian McEwan helped his son to write an A-level essay about one of his books (Enduring Love), only to be awarded a less than stellar ‘C+’. The winners below did rather better, and shoot straight to the top of the class, scooping £25 each. Teacher’s pet Alison Zucker gets a well-done sticker and the bonus fiver.   I read The Outsider today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I can’t remember. I don’t think very much happened in it, though there may have been a murder at some point. Or not. I don’t care either way. I struggle to understand why M.

In Competition No. 3049 you were invited to submit a poem about a bromance.   Pairings including Friedrich and Karl, Laurel and Hardy, Nigel and Donald lit up an entry that was witty, touching and generally pleasingly varied. I liked Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Boris and Donnie’, a twist on Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Frankie and Johnny’. And Bill Greenwell had the same idea, only with David and Jonathan from the Book of Samuel as the loved-up duo. Commendations also go to Shirley Curran, Jonathan Pettman, A.C. Smith and John Morrison.   Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry transported me back to the 1970s, when real men wore chunky cream-and-brown hand-knit cardigans. He and his fellow winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3048 you were invited to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter, b) changing a letter, and c) deleting a letter — and to supply definitions for all three new words.   Inspiration for this challenge came from across the pond, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Style Invitational column, whose regular neologism-themed contests are always a blast.   Though many entries were partially successful, few competitors managed to score a bull’s-eye in all three sections of the challenge. A fiver per definition goes to those printed below who hit the spot with just one or two.

In Competition No. 3047 you were invited to supply an imaginary testimonial for a high-profile figure that is superficially positive but contains hidden warnings to a potential employer.   This was an exercise in the artful deployment of ambiguity, as displayed in Robert J. Thornton’s L.I.A.R. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, a handbook for those who, whether out of kindness or fear of litigation, wish the precise meaning of their ‘recommendations’ to remain opaque.

In Competition No. 3046 you were invited to supply a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject all together.   This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry that was both pleasurable and painful to judge. The winners below, chosen only after much humming and hawing, earn £30 each.     I am the captain of my soul: Scant comfort when I’m six feet under Inside a crude and loamy hole. Has someone slipped up here, I wonder?   I thought that I would hob and nob With angels, all their wings aquiver, But I lie, stripped of pulse and throb, Inside some plywood, doomed to shiver.

In Competition No. 3045 you were invited to provide a poem about euphemisms.   You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring instead to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions that enable us to sidestep the D-word (according to David Crystal, there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in the Historical Thesaurus). I much admired Alanna Blake’s twist on Keats’s sonnet (‘Much have I dabbled in linguistic lore/ And many inexactitudes have used…’) and Max Ross’s neat acrostic. Hamish Wilson, Max Gutmann, Ann Drysdale and David Silverman also deserve a special mention. The prizewinners printed below earn £30 each. The extra fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 3044 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of a well-known character in fiction.   There is space only for me to commend Jayne Osborn, who recruited Dr Seuss: ‘Doing sex is good fun, and it’s easy to do./ Let me demonstrate, using Thing One and Thing Two…’ and salute the prizewinners below, who each receive £25. As any fule kno, gurls are utterly wet and weedy and no boy in his rite mind wish to speke or pla with them. This is why they are kept in there own skools with names lik gingham hall, where they will not hav to witness the savige antiks of boys and we will not be driven madd by there silvery giggles.

In Competition No. 3043 you were invited to provide a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings.   Ian McEwan, a writer who is fascinated by spying, was asked recently on the Today programme how he would begin a novel inspired by the current confrontation with Russia. The image that comes to mind, he said, was of a lion hunting a pack of deer-like creatures in a herd. ‘There’s one that’s trailing behind — too old, too young, perhaps, or has just left the EU…’ We find ourselves, McEwan said, back in that strange Cold War world of brazen lies. Many of you clearly agreed with him, judging by the regular appearances of George Smiley in the entry.

In Competition No. 3042, a challenge inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties’, you were invited to provide a Hollywood--themed ‘Jabberwocky’ for our times. Jacobs begins: ‘’Twas Bogart and the Franchot Tones/ Did Greer and Garson in the Wayne;/ All Muni were the Lewis Stones,/And Rooneyed with Fontaine…’, and most (though not all) of you closely followed that template — to dazzling effect. Honourable mentions go to Rob Johnston and Joe Houlihan. Those printed below pocket £25 each.   ’Twas Downey, and the Harrelsons Did Cruise and Walken in the Pitt.

In Competition No. 3041, to mark the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark, you were invited to submit a poem with the title ‘The Ballad of [insert place name here].   I admired Paul Carpenter’s nod to Ken Dodd (‘The Ballad of Knotty Ash’) and David Silverman’s caustic, comic ‘Ballad of Westgate Shopping Centre’, but the prizes go to those printed below, who take £25 each. The Ballad of Mar-a-Lago In the gold of the Florida sunshine, Where gunplay enlivens the air, The rich pay to hang with the richer At the President’s opulent lair.   With its beach-blanket, surfer-dude moniker And its six-figure membership fees, This joint is the acme of classy, Like those White House Seals marking the tees.

In Competition No. 3040 you were invited to submit a poem against poets or poetry.   Plato started it, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’), and to Auden (‘-poetry makes nothing happen’), and to much else besides. Commendations go to Nicholas Stone, Mae Scanlan, Brian Allgar and Nigel Stuart. The winners take £30, except Basil Ransome-Davies who pockets £35.   There ’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machineHood, There’s Herbert the God-bothered parson. There’s Shakespeare the aspirant.

In Competition No. 3039, which was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s phenomenally successful memoir Eat, Pray, Love, you were invited to choose a well-known figure, past or present, invent a three-verb title you felt would be appropriate for their memoir, and provide an extract from it. Some promising-sounding titles — Sleep, Dream, Fleece by Sigmund Freud, Wait, Hang Around, Kick One’s Heels by HRH Prince Charles, Elise Christie’s Skate, Fall, Cry and Bill Clinton’s Fornicate, Ejaculate, Prevaricate — didn’t quite deliver but commendations all the same to Paul Carpenter, Richard Corcoran, David Silverman and Douglas G. Brown.

In Competition No. 3038 you were invited to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’.   Long before Twitter, so legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turns out to be a load of old cobblers — at least according to Frederick A. Wright who, in a 2012 essay, concluded that there was no evidence that Papa was responsible for the story. In fact, versions of it had been in circulation from 1906 (when Hemingway was seven years old).   Regardless of who wrote it, the six-word story seemed to capture your imagination inspiring sequels that ranged far and wide, from Scandi noir to Conan Doyle.

In Competition No. 3037 you were invited to take a song by Abba or the Beatles and rewrite the lyrics as a sonnet. Oh, for more space. Your entries were especially clever and funny this week, and the winners were chosen only after protracted agonising. Those printed below take £20 each.   O Jude! Fear not, and look not so downcast, But sing a plaintive air, then let her in. The minute Melancholy’s mood hath passed, Then seek her and invite her ’neath thy skin. Each time that sorrow pains thy sense, refrain! Nor, Atlas-like, bear not this mournful orb Upon thy weary shoulders, for in vain Do fools, appearing cool, its heat absorb.

In Competition No. 3036 you were invited to provide a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author. I was inspired to set this challenge by the great William Faulkner, who bowed out with panache from his job as University of Mississippi postmaster: ‘I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.’ Some entries were resignation letters on the part of the author in whose style they were written; others were written by well-known figures in the style of a given author. Given my somewhat woolly brief, either approach was permissible. There was much wit and cunning invention on display. Commendations go to Richard Corcoran and Michael R. Burch.

In Competition No. 3035 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a well-known figure]’. There was no obligation to write in the style of Eliot, but a few brave souls did so. David Shields’s ‘Love Song of Kim Kardashian’ (‘I have measured out my life in selfie sticks…’) made me smile. Max Gutmann’s ‘Love Song of Larry Nassar’(‘In this room the gymnasts come and go/ Saying, “My injury’s not near my — oh!”’) made me wince.   High fives to Ralph Rochester, Nicholas Stone, Mike Morrison and Mike Greenhough. The winners take £25 each. The Love Song of F.

In Competition No. 3034 you were invited to provide a poem written by a poet laureate present or past on the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.   There are those who view the role of laureate as a poisoned chalice. Craig Raine has described how he said to Ted Hughes, during a discussion of the then-vacant post, ‘Of course, no one in their right mind would really want it.’ (‘You’d get some terrific fishing,’ Hughes responded.) And Andrew Motion was candid about its pitfalls: ‘How was I to steer an appropriate course between familiarity (which would seem presumptuous) and sycophancy (which would seem absurd)?’   You strode into the minefield with gusto, and there was much to admire in a largish and vigorous entry.