Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3068 you were invited to provide a sonnet in reverse, using as your model Rupert Brooke’s ‘Sonnet Reversed’, which turns upside-down both the form — it begins on the rhyming couplet — and the Petrarchan concept of idealised love, starting on a romantic high but ending in prosaic banality.   This challenge produced a delightfully varied and engaging entry. Honourable mentions go to Basil Ransome-Davies, Jennifer Pearson, David Shields, George Simmers and Philip Roe. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £20 each.   Six days to build the Cosmos! I was hot! With stars and planets, galaxies, the lot — And life! Amoebae, microbes, dinosaurs, Crustaceans, fish… and so on down the line.

In Competition No. 3067 you were invited to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known traveller from the fields of fact or fiction.   The seed of this assignment was a column in the Observer called My Crap Holiday, which invited readers to share travel horrors: inclement weather, devil children, oven-like bedrooms, Arctic bedrooms, wardrobe--like bedrooms — you get the idea.   I had high hopes of this one but it clearly failed to light your fire, producing only a modest haul of entries. D.A.

In Competition No. 3066 you were invited to submit an ode to a piece of sporting equipment. There is a long and distinguished tradition of verse inspired by sport, going all the way back to Pindar’s odes celebrating ancient Greek athletic achievement. (As London mayor, Boris Johnson commissioned a poem in the style of Pindar to mark the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games.) Some entries adopted the grand ceremonial tone and structure of classical odes Pindaric, Horatian or Sapphic. Others took the more modern, anything-goes route. Ian Barker and Philip Machin earn an honourable mention, as does Adrian Fry’s clever, Kipling-esque entry. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each. Sylvia Fairley pockets the bonus fiver.

In Competition No. 3065 you were invited to supply a happy ending for a well-known play, poem or novel.   Nahum Tate (the worst poet laureate ‘if he had not succeeded Shadwell’, according to Robert Southey) gave King Lear a cheery ending: Lear regains his throne, Cordelia marries Edgar, and Edgar joyfully declares that ‘truth and virtue shall at last succeed’. Charles Lamb hated it, but Samuel Johnson was a fan and so were the punters, it seems: Tate’s 1681 The History of King Lear is thought to have replaced Shakespeare’s version on the English stage, in whole or in part, for some 150 years. In a generally mediocre entry, Ian Baird, Paul Carpenter and Adrian Fry stood out.

In Competition No. 3064 you were invited to supply a newspaper leading article exposing the hitherto unsuspected corrupting influence of a seemingly innocuous everyday item. This assignment was inspired by the revelation, in a recent letter to the Times, that patent leather shoes were outlawed at a British girls’ public school as recently as the 1980s, lest they reflect undergarments and ‘excite the gardeners’.   It was a smallish field with a narrow focus. You divided fairly equally between those who consider fruit (bananas, in particular) to be the Devil’s work and those who reckon that the real threat to vulnerable young minds is cutlery.

In Competition No. 3063 you were invited to submit a poem about puns containing puns.   Dryden regarded paronomasia as ‘the lowest and most grovelling kind of wit’; Samuel Johnson took an equally dim view. But this most derided form of humour produced a witty and accomplished entry that elicited only the occasional groan.   Robert Schechter’s four-liner — ‘Opun and shut’ — caught my eye: As the punster’s puns were reaching a crescendo, I said, ‘Take your puns and stick them innuendo!’ Also displaying considerable punache were Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Sylvia Fairley, Michael Jameson and Joseph Houlihan. They narrowly lost out to the winners, printed below, who pocket £25 apiece. W.J.

In Competition No. 3062 you were invited to submit a Shakespearean-style soliloquy that a contemporary politician might have felt moved to deliver.   Inspiration for this comp came from Aryeh Cohen-Wade’s imagining, in the New Yorker, of Donald Trump performing Shakespearean soliloquies: ‘Listen — to be, not to be, this is a tough question, OK? Very tough…’   The Donald kept an uncharacteristically low profile this week, with most choosing British politicians. Theresa May and Boris Johnson in particular had plenty to get off their chests. You drew on Hamlet ‘O that this too too shrouding garb would drop…’; Macbeth ‘Is this a compromise I see before me…?

In Competition No. 3061 you were invited to imagine a well-known author who doesn’t normally write in the genre having a go at science fiction and submit an extract from the resulting work. In a 2015 interview, Ursula K. Le Guin, always a staunch and eloquent defender of the genre, took a pop at writers of literary fiction who move into sci-fi and simply think that ‘they can use some of the images and tropes and so on from science-fiction and stick them in their book and put it on another planet or in a spaceship or something…’ Although a fair few entries this week were — understandably — guilty as charged, they were clever and entertaining nonetheless.

In Competition No. 3060 you were invited to provide an updated version of ‘Jerusalem’ starting with the words ‘And did those tweets…’One of my favourite parodies of Blake’s poem is by Allan M. Laing. In it he describes the wartime blackouts:   Bring me my torch of waning power! Bring me my phosphor button bright! Bring me my stick — O, dreadful hour! That brings the darkness of the night!   Laing was a colossus of literary competitions and his successors — veterans and newcomers alike — continue to shine in these pages. In a crowded and lively field this week, honourable mentions go to Nicholas Stone, David Silverman, Brian Murdoch, Ian Barker and Nick Vasey. The winners, printed below, are rewarded with £25 each.

In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ Your entries were witty and well-turned, with many a nod to Tom Lehrer, whom I also had in mind when I set this challenge. Honourable mentions go to Frank McDonald’s smart acrostic, as well as to Martin Elster, Nicholas Stone and Christine Michael. The winners, printed below, snaffle £25 each.