Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 2966 you were invited to filter popular nursery rhymes through the prism of political correctness. Some years ago, CBeebies came under fire when it took all the fun out of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ by changing the words to give it a happy ending. And it wasn’t just Humpty;-Little Miss Muffet and the spider lived-nauseatingly happily ever after too. Now that this culture of avoidance has well and truly taken hold, with the explosion of safe spaces and trigger warnings, it felt like high time to invite you to recast other favourite rhymes into a format that will be acceptable to the offspring of Generation Snowflake. The first five winners printed below earn £20; the remaining seven take £10 each.

In Competition No. 2965, an enormously popular one, you were invited to write a poem about a verse form, written in that form. It was Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet-about-the-sonnet ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’ that inspired this challenge but there are other similar examples — Robert Burns’s fine ‘A Sonnet upon Sonnets’, for one: ‘Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;/ What magic myst’ries in that number lie!…’ There were plenty of poems about the sonnet in all its guises, but I was also drowning in limericks, clerihews, double dactyls, haikus, cinquains, pantoums, ottava rima, terza rima... Accomplished entries from D.A.

In Competition No. 2964 you were invited to suggest a really bad idea for one, or several, of the following: a children’s book; an Olympic sport; a television sitcom; a reality TV series. Reading the entry brought back fond if painful memories of Alan Partridge’s Inner-City Sumo — ‘We take fat people from inner cities, put them in big nappies…’ — and monkey tennis. V. Ernest Cox’s proposed children’s book, A Pop-Up Book of Sexting, vied with John Samson’s Dignitas show-jumping (don’t ask) for the bad-taste award, while Douglas G. Brown’s Poop Scoopin’ Fetishists scooped the gong for grossness.

In Competition No. 2963 you were invited to submit a poem about the North or the South or one comparing the two. -Tennyson’s lines ‘bright and fierce and fickle is the South,/And dark and true and tender is the North’ (from ‘The Princess: O Swallow’), which inspired this challenge, produced a wide-ranging and exhilarating entry that took me from the bridge table to North Korea and beyond. The winners earn £25 each. Frank McDonald pockets £30.   In the north there’s a fish with a serious wish To break out and be queen of the sea, And she tells all the others we’re sisters and brothers Who ought to get wise and be free. In her lust for control she looks out for a hole In the barriers keeping her in.

In Competition No. 2962 you were invited to supply a poem about a body part of an author of your choosing. This challenge was inspired by the engaging title of a book by John Sutherland: Orwell’s Nose. In 2012 Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. Shortly thereafter, he set about rereading the works of George Orwell’s and was struck by how obsessed Orwell was with what things smell like. The only noses in the entry, Gertrude Stein’s and Anna Akhmatova’s, had to share the limelight with Belloc’s bottom, Byron’s balls, Jane Austen’s breasts and Freud’s penis. In a palmary entry bursting with wit and invention Paul Evans, Christopher Boyle, Ann Drysdale, J.C.H. Mounsey, Robert Schechter and Roger Theobald stood out.

In Competition No. 2961 you were invited to submit limericks that might have been written by Boris Johnson in an attempt to smooth ruffled feathers on the international stage. Boris has said that ‘it would really take me too long to engage in a fully global itinerary of apology’ to all those who have taken offence at comments he’s made over the past 30 years. But that’s OK because you were on hand to do it for him. Olive branches were proffered to, among others, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hillary Clinton, the Chinese people and the citizens of Papua New Guinea, though I was disappointed that nobody felt moved to pen an emollient rhyme to the ten-year-old Japanese schoolboy mown down by Johnson in a street rugby match on a visit to Tokyo last year.

In Competition No. 2960 you were invited to submit a poem on the theme of summer in which the last two words of each line rhyme. It was only after the entries started coming in that I realised that my sloppy wording meant that the brief was open to interpretation. In most submissions, the last two words in a line rhymed with one another, which is what I had intended, but a few of you supplied poems in which the last two words in a line rhymed with the last two in the line below. Either approach was admissible, and variety made the comp all the more pleasurable to judge. The winners below earn £25 each; Alan Millard pockets £30. Summertime — and rain again. Expect Gay May to be Plain Jane And, having suffered May, soon June Will bring a daily noon monsoon!

In Competition No. 2959 you were invited to submit a poem on a political theme entitled ‘May day’. There was a good turnout, but the mood was overwhelmingly bleak despite the efforts of a relentlessly optimistic few, Tim Raikes and Alanna Blake among them. But there was much to admire, including a neat riff from Frank McDonald on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (‘Shall Maggie be compared to Theresa May / Who is more cautious and more temperate?’, a ‘Jabberwocky’-inspired submission from Andrew Bamji and Alex Lynford’s clever Blakean turn. Nicholas Hodgson, Martin John, George Simmers, G.M. Davis, John Whitworth and Michael Copeman were on top form too. The winners are printed below and earn their authors £30 apiece.

In Competition No. 2958 you were invited to submit a conversation between St Peter and a well-known figure who is demanding admission to heaven. Although the brief asked for a dialogue, Janice Harayda’s Donald Trump made the cut despite St Peter not getting a word in edgeways. Given that Trump doesn’t come across as the greatest listener — when asked who he consults on foreign policy he replied that his primary consultant was himself — this struck me as an altogether plausible ­scenario. Sid Field’s wisecracking Groucho Marx and Martyn Hurst’s silver-tongued Tony Blair deserve honourable mentions. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £30 apiece.   Donald Trump: ‘We will make heaven great again when you admit me.

In Competition No. 2957 you were invited to submit a poem with a title that is a twist on that of Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. There was a fair amount of doubling-up this week: while G.M. Davis and Tracy Davidson decided to speculate on what the first perusal of an Ann Summers shop window might be like, impressive entries from both Jayne Osborn and Alanna Blake revealed the contents of a teenage daughter’s diaries. There was a lot of skill on show elsewhere too: commendations to Paul Evans, A.R. Duncan-Jones, Tony Goldman, Tim Raikes John Whitworth and John Priestland. The winners take £25 each. Max Ross nabs £30.