Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3045 you were invited to provide a poem about euphemisms.   You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring instead to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions that enable us to sidestep the D-word (according to David Crystal, there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in the Historical Thesaurus). I much admired Alanna Blake’s twist on Keats’s sonnet (‘Much have I dabbled in linguistic lore/ And many inexactitudes have used…’) and Max Ross’s neat acrostic. Hamish Wilson, Max Gutmann, Ann Drysdale and David Silverman also deserve a special mention. The prizewinners printed below earn £30 each. The extra fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell.

In Competition No. 3044 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of a well-known character in fiction.   There is space only for me to commend Jayne Osborn, who recruited Dr Seuss: ‘Doing sex is good fun, and it’s easy to do./ Let me demonstrate, using Thing One and Thing Two…’ and salute the prizewinners below, who each receive £25. As any fule kno, gurls are utterly wet and weedy and no boy in his rite mind wish to speke or pla with them. This is why they are kept in there own skools with names lik gingham hall, where they will not hav to witness the savige antiks of boys and we will not be driven madd by there silvery giggles.

In Competition No. 3043 you were invited to provide a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings.   Ian McEwan, a writer who is fascinated by spying, was asked recently on the Today programme how he would begin a novel inspired by the current confrontation with Russia. The image that comes to mind, he said, was of a lion hunting a pack of deer-like creatures in a herd. ‘There’s one that’s trailing behind — too old, too young, perhaps, or has just left the EU…’ We find ourselves, McEwan said, back in that strange Cold War world of brazen lies. Many of you clearly agreed with him, judging by the regular appearances of George Smiley in the entry.

In Competition No. 3042, a challenge inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties’, you were invited to provide a Hollywood--themed ‘Jabberwocky’ for our times. Jacobs begins: ‘’Twas Bogart and the Franchot Tones/ Did Greer and Garson in the Wayne;/ All Muni were the Lewis Stones,/And Rooneyed with Fontaine…’, and most (though not all) of you closely followed that template — to dazzling effect. Honourable mentions go to Rob Johnston and Joe Houlihan. Those printed below pocket £25 each.   ’Twas Downey, and the Harrelsons Did Cruise and Walken in the Pitt.

In Competition No. 3041, to mark the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark, you were invited to submit a poem with the title ‘The Ballad of [insert place name here].   I admired Paul Carpenter’s nod to Ken Dodd (‘The Ballad of Knotty Ash’) and David Silverman’s caustic, comic ‘Ballad of Westgate Shopping Centre’, but the prizes go to those printed below, who take £25 each. The Ballad of Mar-a-Lago In the gold of the Florida sunshine, Where gunplay enlivens the air, The rich pay to hang with the richer At the President’s opulent lair.   With its beach-blanket, surfer-dude moniker And its six-figure membership fees, This joint is the acme of classy, Like those White House Seals marking the tees.

In Competition No. 3040 you were invited to submit a poem against poets or poetry.   Plato started it, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change. 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 pockets £35.   There ’s Chaucer the gofer, there’s ode-machineHood, There’s Herbert the God-bothered parson. There’s Shakespeare the aspirant.

In Competition No. 3039, which was inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert’s phenomenally successful memoir Eat, Pray, Love, you were invited to choose a well-known figure, past or present, invent a three-verb title you felt would be appropriate for their 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.

In Competition No. 3038 you were invited to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’.   Long before Twitter, so legend has it, Ernest Hemingway crafted this mini masterpiece in response to a bet that he couldn’t write a novel in half a dozen words. This turns out to be a load of old cobblers — at least according to Frederick A. Wright who, in a 2012 essay, concluded that there was no evidence that Papa was responsible for the story. In fact, versions of it had been in circulation from 1906 (when Hemingway was seven years old).   Regardless of who wrote it, the six-word story seemed to capture your imagination inspiring sequels that ranged far and wide, from Scandi noir to Conan Doyle.

In Competition No. 3037 you were invited to take a song by Abba or the Beatles and rewrite the lyrics as a sonnet. Oh, for more space. Your entries were especially clever and funny this week, and the winners were chosen only after protracted agonising. Those printed below take £20 each.   O Jude! Fear not, and look not so downcast, But sing a plaintive air, then let her in. The minute Melancholy’s mood hath passed, Then seek her and invite her ’neath thy skin. Each time that sorrow pains thy sense, refrain! Nor, Atlas-like, bear not this mournful orb Upon thy weary shoulders, for in vain Do fools, appearing cool, its heat absorb.

In Competition No. 3036 you were invited to provide a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author. I was inspired to set this challenge by the great William Faulkner, who bowed out with panache 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. There was much wit and cunning invention on display. Commendations go to Richard Corcoran and Michael R. Burch.