Competition

In Competition No. 2973 you were invited to give your thoughts, in verse or prose, on who the Person from Porlock might have been — assuming, of course, that there was such a person. Many thanks to John McGivering, who suggested this excellect competition. Some fingered, as De Quincey did, Coleridge’s doctor and laudanum source. Also in the frame were Jehovah’s Witness, PPI ambulance-chasers and the drugs squad. And many agreed with Stevie Smith: ‘As the truth is I think he was already stuck/ With Kubla Khan … When along comes the Person from Porlock/ And takes the blame for it.’ The winners take £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30. There came a man from Porlock And he knocked on Samuel’s door While he was hard at work.

In Competition No. 2972 you were invited to supply an ode on a Grayson Perry urn. Frank McDonald wasn’t keen: ‘Do Grayson Perry urns deserve an ode?/ Has modern art not shamed the Muse enough?/ That looks for beauty in a tortured toad/ And loads our galleries with frightful stuff?’ Elsewhere, the entry was chock-full of adroit Keatsian references. The deserving winners take £20 each.   A form of classic shape and grace, Here covered in graffiti style, Which offers us a Janus face, Half snarl, half smile. It looks at once both butch and fey; A line that joins the modish dots To illustrate a crafty way Of making pots. It’s true, of course, that ancient Greeks Made lust and war a common theme On vases not the chaste antiques Of Keatsian dream.

In Competition No. 2971 you were invited to submit poems written by Jeremy Corbyn. The seven printed below take £20 apiece but oh, for more space: there were so many terrific entries. Honourable mentions go in particular to Brian Murdoch, Paul Carpenter, John Whitworth, Rip Bulkeley and Josh Ekroy.  Shall I compare thee to Teresa May? Thou art more lovely and more socialist: More Corbynista thou than fashionista; More fair art thou to me, in every way. Stay by my side and be my Frida Kahlo; Oh, come and be my red under the bed, Or, in th’immortal words of Gary Barlow Stay with me, girl, we’ll rule the world instead. Join Strictly — give it everything you’ve got! Your grace would put Ann Widdecombe to shame — Go for it!

In Competition No. 2970 you were invited to supply an extract from an Ig Nobel Prize-winner’s speech that describes the ‘achievement’ (invented by you) being honoured. The Igs are spoof awards handed out annually at Harvard for scientific achievements that manage to be both hilarious and thought-provoking. In 2014’s Neuroscience category, for example, the award was scooped by Jiangang Liu et al. for their contribution to our understanding of what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. And just last month, Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik was honoured in this year’s Reproduction category for his work testing the effects of wearing various-fabrics on the sex life of rats.

In Competition No. 2969 you were invited to submit a poem about autumn in the style of the poet of your choice. It was a stellar entry so I’ll keep it brief to make way for an extra winner. Those printed below take £20 each; D.A. Prince nabs £30. High fives all round. Oh Autumn, you are one of the loveliest of seasons And for this there are a multitude of reasons. You bring us apples, and windfalls hardly bruised at all Despite being associated with Eve, the Serpent and The Fall. Then there are blackberries to accompany them for puddings and tarts (At least until the Devil drags his tail across their fruiting parts, Because there are all sorts of folk tales and such, Even if nowadays we don’t believe them, much.

In Competition No. 2968 you were-invited to take the title of a short story by Ted Hughes, How the Whale Became, substitute-another animal or fish for ‘whale’ and provide a tale with that title. This comp was an absolute delight to judge. There were oodles of well-turned entries bursting with charm. Well done. Special mention go to C.J. Gleed, Michael McManus, Frank McDonald and Tracy Davidson. The winners take £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.   Call me Nana. I was born when my mother was being born, into one gender, no need for more, only the cycle, the cycle of endless begetting. When I was a few days old, my great-great-great-great-grandnymphs yelled, ‘We’re pregnant.’ And indeed they were, my beautiful matryoshki.

In Competition No. 2967 you were invited to submit an article written by the author of your choice under the headline ‘If I were Prime Minister’. In a fascinating 1959 essay written for The Spectator under that headline, Ian Fleming proposed, among much else, a combination of ‘benevolent Stakhanovism’ in the workplace and the conversion of the Isle of Wight into ‘one vast pleasuredome … where the frustrated citizen of every class could give full rein to those basic instincts for sex and gambling which have been crushed through the ages’. There were some equally arresting proposals in the entry courtesy of Bill Greenwell’s Nevil Shute, Hugh King, C.J. Gleed and Barry Baldwin’s Samuel Johnson, and G.M.

In Competition No. 2966 you were invited to filter popular nursery rhymes through the prism of political correctness. Some years ago, CBeebies came under fire when it took all the fun out of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ by changing the words to give it a happy ending. And it wasn’t just Humpty;-Little Miss Muffet and the spider lived-nauseatingly happily ever after too. Now that this culture of avoidance has well and truly taken hold, with the explosion of safe spaces and trigger warnings, it felt like high time to invite you to recast other favourite rhymes into a format that will be acceptable to the offspring of Generation Snowflake. The first five winners printed below earn £20; the remaining seven take £10 each.

In Competition No. 2965, an enormously popular one, you were invited to write a poem about a verse form, written in that form. It was Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet-about-the-sonnet ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’ that inspired this challenge but there are other similar examples — Robert Burns’s fine ‘A Sonnet upon Sonnets’, for one: ‘Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;/ What magic myst’ries in that number lie!…’ There were plenty of poems about the sonnet in all its guises, but I was also drowning in limericks, clerihews, double dactyls, haikus, cinquains, pantoums, ottava rima, terza rima... Accomplished entries from D.A.

In Competition No. 2964 you were invited to suggest a really bad idea for one, or several, of the following: a children’s book; an Olympic sport; a television sitcom; a reality TV series. Reading the entry brought back fond if painful memories of Alan Partridge’s Inner-City Sumo — ‘We take fat people from inner cities, put them in big nappies…’ — and monkey tennis. V. Ernest Cox’s proposed children’s book, A Pop-Up Book of Sexting, vied with John Samson’s Dignitas show-jumping (don’t ask) for the bad-taste award, while Douglas G. Brown’s Poop Scoopin’ Fetishists scooped the gong for grossness.

In Competition No. 2963 you were invited to submit a poem about the North or the South or one comparing the two. -Tennyson’s lines ‘bright and fierce and fickle is the South,/And dark and true and tender is the North’ (from ‘The Princess: O Swallow’), which inspired this challenge, produced a wide-ranging and exhilarating entry that took me from the bridge table to North Korea and beyond. The winners earn £25 each. Frank McDonald pockets £30.   In the north there’s a fish with a serious wish To break out and be queen of the sea, And she tells all the others we’re sisters and brothers Who ought to get wise and be free. In her lust for control she looks out for a hole In the barriers keeping her in.

In Competition No. 2962 you were invited to supply a poem about a body part of an author of your choosing. This challenge was inspired by the engaging title of a book by John Sutherland: Orwell’s Nose. In 2012 Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. Shortly thereafter, he set about rereading the works of George Orwell’s and was struck by how obsessed Orwell was with what things smell like. The only noses in the entry, Gertrude Stein’s and Anna Akhmatova’s, had to share the limelight with Belloc’s bottom, Byron’s balls, Jane Austen’s breasts and Freud’s penis. In a palmary entry bursting with wit and invention Paul Evans, Christopher Boyle, Ann Drysdale, J.C.H. Mounsey, Robert Schechter and Roger Theobald stood out.

In Competition No. 2961 you were invited to submit limericks that might have been written by Boris Johnson in an attempt to smooth ruffled feathers on the international stage. Boris has said that ‘it would really take me too long to engage in a fully global itinerary of apology’ to all those who have taken offence at comments he’s made over the past 30 years. But that’s OK because you were on hand to do it for him. Olive branches were proffered to, among others, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hillary Clinton, the Chinese people and the citizens of Papua New Guinea, though I was disappointed that nobody felt moved to pen an emollient rhyme to the ten-year-old Japanese schoolboy mown down by Johnson in a street rugby match on a visit to Tokyo last year.

In Competition No. 2960 you were invited to submit a poem on the theme of summer in which the last two words of each line rhyme. It was only after the entries started coming in that I realised that my sloppy wording meant that the brief was open to interpretation. In most submissions, the last two words in a line rhymed with one another, which is what I had intended, but a few of you supplied poems in which the last two words in a line rhymed with the last two in the line below. Either approach was admissible, and variety made the comp all the more pleasurable to judge. The winners below earn £25 each; Alan Millard pockets £30. Summertime — and rain again. Expect Gay May to be Plain Jane And, having suffered May, soon June Will bring a daily noon monsoon!

In Competition No. 2959 you were invited to submit a poem on a political theme entitled ‘May day’. There was a good turnout, but the mood was overwhelmingly bleak despite the efforts of a relentlessly optimistic few, Tim Raikes and Alanna Blake among them. But there was much to admire, including a neat riff from Frank McDonald on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall Maggie be compared to Theresa May / Who is more cautious and more temperate?’, a ‘Jabberwocky’-inspired submission from Andrew Bamji and Alex Lynford’s clever Blakean turn. Nicholas Hodgson, Martin John, George Simmers, G.M. Davis, John Whitworth and Michael Copeman were on top form too. The winners are printed below and earn their authors £30 apiece.

In Competition No. 2958 you were invited to submit a conversation between St Peter and a well-known figure who is demanding admission to heaven. Although the brief asked for a dialogue, Janice Harayda’s Donald Trump made the cut despite St Peter not getting a word in edgeways. Given that Trump doesn’t come across as the greatest listener — when asked who he consults on foreign policy he replied that his primary consultant was himself — this struck me as an altogether plausible ­scenario. Sid Field’s wisecracking Groucho Marx and Martyn Hurst’s silver-tongued Tony Blair deserve honourable mentions. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £30 apiece.   Donald Trump: ‘We will make heaven great again when you admit me.

In Competition No. 2957 you were invited to submit a poem with a title that is a twist on that of Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. There was a fair amount of doubling-up this week: while G.M. Davis and Tracy Davidson decided to speculate on what the first perusal of an Ann Summers shop window might be like, impressive entries from both Jayne Osborn and Alanna Blake revealed the contents of a teenage daughter’s diaries. There was a lot of skill on show elsewhere too: commendations to Paul Evans, A.R. Duncan-Jones, Tony Goldman, Tim Raikes John Whitworth and John Priestland. The winners take £25 each. Max Ross nabs £30.

In Competition No. 2956 you were invited to provide extracts from the unappealing-sounding programme of a festival that is making a misguided attempt to stand out in an overcrowded marketplace. Competitors might have taken inspiration from The Daily Mash’s ‘Magic Fox Vintage Smoothie Boutique Urban Forest Pop Up Chill Retreat’, a ‘hybrid of Waitrose and The Wicker Man’ and ‘a combination of all the most annoying, smug, po-faced aspects of festival culture into a smorgasbord of-heavily branded twatness’. Highlights included ‘people wearing fox masks just prancing around aimlessly’. Adrian Fry shone in a smallish field and takes the bonus fiver. The rest earn £30.

In Competition No. 2955 you were invited to supply a report on a Uefa Euro 2016 match written in the florid style beloved of some sportswriters. There was some inspired awfulness on display this week. How about this, from Mike Morrison: ‘The craven defence unravelled like cartoon knitwear, enabling Dottirdottir, the archetype of stoic strategy, to blithely torpedo the decider through the enmeshed architraves of triumph.’ John O’Byrne, Josh Ekroy and Derek Morgan were on impressively toe-curling form too, and those entries printed below earn their authors £25 each. Adrian Fry earns £30.

In Competition No. 2954 you were invited to supply an ode to a greasy spoon, a challenge prompted by a recent column that Melissa Kite wrote bemoaning the rise of independent cafés and the consequent demise of the decent, non-locally foraged fry-up. Most of your odes were to a caff, but a few chose to address a greasy piece of cutlery instead. I liked Josh Ekroy’s spin on Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and there was nice work, too, from Nick Campailla and John Priestland. The winners take £25; Brian Murdoch pockets £30. Thou spreadst a breakfast in my sight, Thy filling grease bestoweth, O transport caff, such pure delight, My tea mug overfloweth!