Literary competition

This week's challenge marks the centenary this year of the birth of Muriel Spark. 'I still take a poetic view of life as I see it through the novel,' Spark once said, explaining that she viewed her novels as long prose poems. So a verse assignment seemed just the thing: you were asked to come up with poems with the title 'The Ballad of [insert place name here]'. The entry that most closely referenced Spark's glorious The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Max Gutmann's but there were deft Sparkian touches elsewhere. I especially admired David Silverman's crisp, caustic, comic 'Ballad of Westgate Shopping Centre', and Paul Carpenter's timely 'Ballad of Knotty Ash') was good too. The prizes, though, go to those printed below, who take £25 each.

For the latest challenge you were asked to come up with poems against poets or poetry. Plato started it, of course, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change — to name a few. 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 snaffles £35. Basil Ransome-Davies There’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machine Hood, There’s Herbert the God-bothered parson.

The latest challenge was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s phenomenally successful memoir Eat, Pray, Love. Competitors were invited to choose a well-known figure, past or present, invent a three-verb title they felt would be appropriate for the 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.

The latest challenge, to cook up a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author, was inspired by the great William Faulkner, who bowed out with panache – and uncharacteristic brevity – 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.

The latest challenge asked for a poem written by a poet laureate present or past on the engagement of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The role of laureate is not for everyone. Craig Raine once 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 — who was in the hot seat for ten years and was much mocked for the rap he wrote to mark Prince William’s 21st birthday — 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)?

The latest competition was a nod to Donald Trump's first year in office, and what better as a springboard than the US President's own words. Taking inspiration from @huntthesnark on Twitter, I invited you to compose a presidential patter song, taking as your first line ‘I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius’. https://twitter.com/huntthesnark/status/949640355615473666 John Beaton's first two stanzas caught my eye: I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius and though my tiny hands can't grab the bigness of my penius- and, by the way, its bigness is so big it is obscenious- they're fine for grabbing babes who've kept their bodies beauty       queenious. I sniff a lot and slur a bit. That's coz I'm so spontaneous.

The latest challenge was to provide a poem about passports. While the news that British passports issued after October of next year will be navy blue rather than burgundy was heartily cheered in some quarters, others — like Nicola Sturgeon, who denounced it as ‘insular nonsense’ — weren’t so delighted. And others still wondered what all the fuss was about. The full spectrum of opinion was reflected in a small but punchy entry, and in the winning line-up. Commendations go to David Silverman’s ‘Jerusalem’-inspired verse, and to Frank Upton, Sylvia Fairley and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, who also shone. The winners printed below are rewarded with £25. Basil Ransome-Davies pockets the extra fiver.

The latest challenge was to provide a review by a restaurant critic that is tediously loaded with sexual language. I have had this comp up my sleeve since reading a piece by Steven Poole in the Observer in which he laid into the relentless sexualisation of food in our culture: ‘Everyone revels in the “filthiness” of what they are naughtily pleased to call “gastroporn…”’, he writes. And Jamie Oliver ‘describes pretty much everything he is about to cook as “sexy”, as though not quite sure whether he would like to shag it or eat it …’ With the recent return to our screens of the queen of innuendo, Nigella Lawson, now seemed like a good time to set it.

In the brief for the latest challenge — to submit poems entitled ‘January’ — I mentioned William Carlos Williams, R.S. Thomas and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as all of them wrote poems with ‘January’ as their title. But that most maligned of months also lands a starring role in the opening stanza of George Barker’s charming ‘January Jumps About’: ‘January jumps about/ in the frying pan/ trying to heat/ his frozen feet/ like a Canadian…’ Freezing temperatures were very much on your minds, too, and for Jayne Osborn they are a cause for celebration: ‘Being constantly hot is tremendous fun – not!

This year’s festive challenge, inspired by Hillaire Belloc’s epigrammatic stinger ‘May all my enemies go to hell,/ Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel’, was to compose lines for a Christmas card courtesy of well-known poets. Poets moved to write Yule-inspired verse include that old killjoy William Topaz McGonagall: ‘The way to respect Christmas time/ Is not by drinking whisky or wine’. And, of course, John Betjeman: ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad,/ And oafish louts remember Mum,/ And sleepless children’s hearts are glad./ And Christmas morning bells say “Come!”…’ JB cropped up a fair amount in the entry, but nobody, alas, chose U.A. Fanthorpe, a poet notable for having sent verses to friends as Christmas cards over many years.

The latest competition, a wildly popular one, invited you to compose topical double dactyls. The double dactyl was dreamed up in 1951 by the poet Anthony Hecht and the classical scholar Paul Pascal. My well-thumbed copy of Jiggery-Pokery, a wonderful 1967 compendium of the form edited by Hecht and the poet John Hollander, reveals with pride that Auden (to whom the book is dedicated) used the form ‘thrice’ for the choruses in his Aesopian playlets Moralities.

The latest comp was a nod to the curiously enjoyable awfulness of the wildly rich, bestselling author Dan Brown’s much-mocked prose. You were invited to submit a short story in the style of the master. Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, nails it when he describes Brown’s style as ‘not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad’. Here, for the uninitiated, is an oft-cited example of one of the most deliciously toe-curling sentences from Deception Point: ‘Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.’ It was a nicely calibrated entry, in general, and fun to judge.

The latest competition invited you to submit cringeworthy portmanteau words. The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass when Humpty Dumpty is explaining ‘Jabberwocky’ to Alice: ‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”… You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.’ There’s nothing wrong with new words, of course. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter of 1820 to John Adams: ‘I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.’ The best, most enduring portmanteaus are witty, pithy and fill a gap (‘brunch’, ‘metrosexual’, ‘workaholic’).

In what proved to be a popular comp, you were invited to submit the formula for a successful marriage courtesy of a well-known husband or wife in literature. Some time ago, I challenged you to do the same on behalf of well-known poets, and if you like your advice brief and to the point, there’s always Ogden Nash’s ‘A Word to Husbands’: To keep your marriage brimming With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up. Your prescriptions were less pithy, but no less impressive for that. The winners take £30, and a fine display of Mr Polly’s ‘innate sense of epithet’ earns Alan Millard £35.