Literary competition

Your latest challenge was to imagine William Topaz McGonagall’s poetic response to Magaluf. McGonagall was much taken with the town of Torquay, and wrote a poem singing its praises. But what would the Tayside Tragedian have made of Shagaluf? He took a dim view of alcohol, if these lines are anything to go by: Oh, thou demon Drink, thou fell destroyer; Thou curse of society, and its greatest annoyer. What hast thou done to society, let me think? I answer thou hast caused the most of ills, thou       demon Drink. Some of you clearly reckon, though, that beneath the teetotal, god-fearing façade lurked something altogether wilder. Commendations go to Nicholas Hodgson, David Shields and Adrian Fry. The winners, below, pocket £35 each.

Jeff Brechlin’s inspired ‘Hokey-Cokey’ rewritten as a Shakespearean sonnet prompted this week’s invitation, to filter the song through the pen of another well-known writer. You were on cracking form this week. Here is a taste of Basil Ransome-Davies as Dorothy Parker: Oh, I have put my left leg in To join the merry dance, And I have contemplated sin With roisterers in pants. And I have followed with my right, But sticking to the rules I’ve spurned many a torrid night With gallivanting fools… And George Simmers’s Seamus Heaney: Put your left leg in then, its heavy boot so caked with the field’s loam that it’s wide as your father’s.

For the latest challenge you were invited to provide a sonnet with the following end rhymes (taken from Milton’s Sonnet 20, ‘Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son’): son, mire, fire, won, run, re-inspire, attire, spun, choice, rise, voice, air, spare, unwise. Milton was the most political of poets, and many of you followed his lead. Elsewhere, Sergey Trukhtanov and Joe Houlihan submitted fine homages to Conan-Doyle, and David Shields, Martin Elster, Jenny Hill and Tim Raikes also stood out. Props to clever John O’Byrne, who made his entry using first lines of Shakespeare sonnets (changing the final word to fit the brief). The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each. Frank McDonald Milton!

The latest competition called for poems with an ingenious twist at the end. Though popular, this challenge turned out to be deceptively tricky and while there were many accomplished and enjoyable entries, none of your twists truly blew my socks off. Paul A. Freeman kept it short and topical: Was it things that go bump in the night, or an earthquake’s formidable might?       I have to confess       that it’s anyone’s guess coz Boris’s lips are shut tight. Douglas G. Brown, Max Gutmann and Martin Elster were unlucky runners-up. The six below romp home with £25 each.

For the latest challenge you were invited to succumb to Women’s World Cup fever and submit a fragment of commentary on the tournament delivered by a figure from the world of fact or fiction, dead or alive. From Joseph Houlihan’s William McGonagall, who chronicles the Scottish team’s defeat at the boots of the Auld Enemy, to R.M. Goddard’s Samuel Beckett — ‘Miss Reilly, a fugue of female feet at frolic, dribbles delicately past the centre forward and passes to the sweeper, then pauses to spit decorously on the greensward…’ — it was an absolutely cracking entry. You gave 110%. J. Seery and W.J. Webster earn honourable mentions, those printed below take £25 apiece, and woman of the match, D.A. Prince, pockets the bonus fiver. D.A.

Your latest challenge was to encapsulate the life story of a well-known person, living or dead, in three limericks. The limerick form was neatly summed up by the late Paul Griffin, long-time competitor and a regular winner on these pages: A limerick’s short and it’s slick; Like a racehorse it has to be quick:       The front may seem calm       And cause no alarm But the end is the bit that can kick. The saints and sinners whose lives you squished into 15 lines ranged from Donald Trump, Jim Davidson and Mad King Ludwig to Jesus and Helen Keller. Honourable mentions go to C. Paul Evans, Martin Elster, David Silverman and W.J. Webster; the winners, below, are rewarded with £25 apiece.

The idea for the latest challenge — to compose a fan letter from one well-known person from the field of fact or fiction to another — came from a letter written by Kirk Douglas to Gary Cooper, received just days before Cooper died of cancer, in which Douglas reflects on the impossibility of complying with a director’s request to ‘play this the way Gary Cooper would’: ‘It sounded easy to me — because I say to myself Coop is a simple man — natural. So I’ll just be natural. Then I learned the big — big lesson. It ain’t easy. My temptation is to ask how the hell have you done it?

The latest challenge was an invitation to compose a contemporary take on ‘The New Colossus’, the 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus that is inscribed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. ‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she With silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

For the latest competition you were challenged to submit an ode to Alexa or Siri. A recent study by Unesco, entitled ‘I’d Blush if I Could’ (Siri’s alarmingly coquettish response to the phrase ‘You’re a slut/bitch’), claimed that submissive female-voiced virtual assistants perpetuate negative, outdated gender stereotypes, and this assignment did seem to bring out the unreconstructed roguish side in some. You know who you are. Honourable mentions go to Frank Upton and Alan Millard, who were narrowly outflanked by the winners below. They earn £25 each. Chris O’Carroll Alexa, you’re the sunshine of my life. You answer wisely like an honest wife.

For the latest competition, you were asked to dream up an imaginary animal that is a hybrid of two existing ones and write a poem about it. The discovery, some time ago, that the Romans called a giraffe a ‘camelopard’ (and Thomas Hood wrote an ‘Ode to the Cameleopard’) gave me the initial idea for this challenge. I was then reminded of it when reading Spike Milligan’s Book of Milliganimals with my son (remember the Moo-Zebras and the Bald Twit Lion?). Your fantastic beasts included the Octophant, the kangasheep, the corgiraffe and a couple of llamadillos. It was a difficult comp to judge: there were loads of entries of great merit — many from old hands but plenty from newcomers too.

For the latest competition you were asked to compose a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, i.e. from the top down and the bottom up. I worried, as the entries trickled in, that I had set the bar too high, especially given the anguished comments that accompanied some of them. ‘This was one of your really tough assignments,’ wrote one old hand, ‘a combination of mathematics and poetics.’ ‘This challenge almost made me cry,’ wailed another. But I needn’t have worried: your submissions — some palindromic — combined technical adroitness with clever content. High fives to the winners below who are rewarded with £20 each. Chris O’Carroll What can you show me, mirror on the wall? A rendezvous with my own face?

The call for poems about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet produced a mostly predictable line-up — from Chesterton, so-called ‘prophet of Brexit’, through Larkin, Betjeman, Brooke, Housman and, of course, Kipling. But it was an American, Ogden Nash, whose pen portrait of us prompted me to set this challenge: Let us pause to consider the English Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish, Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz: That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is… Philip Machin, Joseph Houlihan and Hugh King caught my eye but were outstripped, in a field where the mood ranged from elegiac to caustic, by the winners below, who each earn £25.

The prompt for this challenge – to submit an elegy by a poet on another poet – was ‘Adonais’, Shelley’s celebrated 55-stanza tribute to Keats. Frank McDonald imagined Keats responding in kind: My heart aches for you, brother Percy Bysshe, Who wept for me although my name was writ In water. Dearest friend, it was my wish We two romantics might some autumn sit… Robert Schechter, meanwhile, channelled Auden, who also wrote a famous elegy to a fellow poet. Here he is on Ogden Nash: Earth, receive an honoured guest. Ogden Nash is laid to rest. Let the Yankee vessel sink Emptied of its light-heartedly whimsical yet somehow undeniably indelible ink. In a modestly sized but distinguished entry, David Shields earns an honourable mention.

The seed for this week’s task, to put your own spin on a weather forecast, came from the Master Singers’ take on a weather report, soothingly intoned in the style of an Anglican chant. But one competitor accompanied his entry with a note reminding me of that comic gem from the 1970s, courtesy of the Two Ronnies: ‘The sun will be killing ’em in Gillingham, it’ll be choking in Woking, dry in Rye and cool in Goole. And if you live in Lissingdown take an umbrella!’ The brief was deliberately open and it produced a pleasingly corpulent and diverse if somewhat gloomy postbag.

We already have short-form hybrids such as the clerihaiku (here’s one from Mary Holtby): Peter Palumbo Cries, ‘Mumbo-jumbo!’ and rails At the Prince of Wales And the limeraiku: A haiku will do For a limerick trick, called A Limeraiku That was by Arthur P. Cox. And now clever Bill Webster, veteran competitor, has come up with the haikick, a new version of the haiku-limerick combination. You responded to the call for topical haikicks with your customary vim and wit, and drew on such notables as William Spooner, Abraham Lincoln and Jeremys Clarkson and Paxman. The winners below are rewarded with a tenner per entry printed. Hugh King Abraham Lincoln Once made America great, When showing the place That honour and grace Held at the heart of the state.

The invitation to submit poems in dispraise of Valentine’s Day certainly struck a chord, drawing a large and heartfelt entry that captured the ghastliness well: overpriced dinners, sad, single-stemmed roses, chocolate genitalia, nasty cards – or no cards at all... Valentine’s Day is said by some to have its roots in the Roman pagan festival of Lupercalia. But one scholar has proposed the theory that it was Chaucer who first designated 14 February as a day of love in his poem ‘The Parlement of Foules’, and I wondered if any of you would come up with a Chaucerian pastiche (you didn’t). A consolatory handshake to Fiona Pitt-Kethley, Susan McLean, Hamish Wilson, Robert Schechter and Mike Morrison, who were unlucky losers.