Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3098 you were invited to submit 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. This is a verse you can flip, you can flop. The top is the bottom, the bottom the top.

In Competition No. 3097 you were invited to submit a poem about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet.   The line-up was mostly predictable — 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…   The winners, in a field where the mood ranged from elegiac to caustic, earn £25.

In Competition No. 3096 you were invited to submit a short story that ends ‘I feel like a half-eaten gorgonzola.’   Thanks to reader Mark O’Connor, who suggested that this observation which, in case you were wondering, comes from a letter written by Lytton Strachey to his elder brother James on 27 July 1908, might be incorporated into a challenge.   It turned out to be a tricky one: despite valiant — and often ingenious — attempts to incorporate the given phrase without the edges showing, there was an inevitable element of stiltedness and contrivance. Medusa and Emile Zola enjoyed starring roles in many entries — some more successful than others.

In Competition No. 3095 you were invited to submit an elegy by a poet on another poet.   The prompt for this challenge 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 Competition No. 3094 you were invited to submit a ‘Sonnet Found in a Deserted Mad House’. G.K. Chesterton once observed that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. Well, not the anonymous author of the curious poem that inspired this challenge: line eight of ‘Sonnet Found in a Deserted Mad House’, which appeared in A Nonsense Anthology (1915), edited by Carolyn Wells, refers to ‘…mournful mouths filled full of mirth and cheese…’   Food featured strongly in your excellent and varied compositions (a boiled egg — two mentions — artichokes, yogurt, custard pies…). It was tricky to nominate winners, but after much prevarication I settled on the seven below, who take £20 each.

In Competition No. 3093 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel that chronicles the adult life of a well-known fictional hero from children’s stories.   I enjoyed Jess McAree’s account of Paddington Bear’s Conrad-esque voyage — ‘evicted by Brexit, residence visa revoked’ — to the heart of darkness in deepest Peru. Hugh King, D.A. Prince and A.R. Duncan-Jones also shone with their portrayals of the later lives of the stars of the Just William and Noddy stories.   In Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the play based on J.K. Rowling’s books, the boy wizard has grown up and become a father of three who works for the Ministry of Magic.

In Competition No. 3092 you were invited to submit a spring villanelle. The villanelle lends itself to themes of loss and time passing, but the somewhat gloomy mood of the entry was offset by how well you rose to the form’s technical challenges. Congratulations all round, but especially to unlucky losers Noah Heyl, R.M. Goddard, Philip Roe, and Jasper and Julia Griffin. The winners earn £30 each.   A green haze hints that spring might soon appear, The trees come into leaf, unhurried, slow, Like Brexit, always coming, never here.   The sky grows blue, the grey begins to clear And as the flowers’ colours start to show, A green haze hints that spring might soon appear.

In Competition No. 3091 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. This is an idea shamelessly pinched from the Washington Post, whose contests have produced the impressively so-bad-they’re good ‘Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze’ (Chuck Smith) and ‘Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever’ (Jennifer Hart). Yours, too, were gloriously cringe--inducing. Laboured, overwrought, banal, tasteless — yet grimly compelling for all that. The winners take a fiver each per analogy printed below. As the narcotic took effect, Frank felt extremely odd, as if he were sole occupant of a set in a Venn diagram containing men who loved the novels of Barbara Pym and people who sought the reintroduction of bear baiting.

In Competition No. 3090 you were invited to submit a recently discovered lost poem by a well-known poet that makes us see him or her in a new light. Step forward, Philip Larkin, flower arranger, Slough fan John Betjeman and knickers-on-fire Emily Dickinson. Congratulations all round are in order this week, but I especially admired Alanna Blake’s palinodic villanelle from Dylan Thomas:   Calm down, relax, accept the dying light, It will be unaffected by your rage, For all our sakes, give up this futile fight…   And G.M. Davis’s Tennyson revealing what he really thought of her maj:   What a prissy old Queen is Victoria! She looks like a case of dysphoria In the straitest of lace With that vinegar face, Though they say that in private she’s whorier.

In Competition No. 3089 you were invited to put your own spin on a weather forecast.   The seed for the task came from the Master Singers’ take on a weather report, soothingly intoned in the style of an Anglican chant. But as one competitor reminded me there is also that 1970s gem, 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. An honourable mention goes to Brian Murdoch for his 12-isobar blues, the winners take £25 and Bill Greenwell’s Henry Reed-inspired bulletin earns him an additional fiver.