In Competition No. 3311, you were invited to submit a song suitable for inclusion in a parliamentary songbook. In an entry in which most scored pleasingly high on singability, W.S. Gilbert rubbed shoulders with Simon & Garfunkel and the Kinks. An honourable mention to Emily Matthews, but leading the winners below, who take £30 each, is Bill Greenwell’s twist on ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’.
In Competition No. 3310, you were invited to submit a horror story on the theme of artificial intelligence. None of your entries, creditable though they were, matched the horror of Harlan Ellison’s gruesome short story from 1967, ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’, which was at the back of my mind when I set this challenge. A sadistic supercomputer AM – Allied Mastercomputer – has wiped out all humanity except five unfortunate survivors, whom it can keep alive and take pleasure in torturing in perpetuity: ‘We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time…’. I queried Russell Chamberlain’s use of ‘light years’ as a measure of time rather than distance with a more scientifically literate friend, but gave it the green light.
In Competition No. 3309, you were invited to compose a poem starting with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first, the new poem being on a different subject from the original. Max Ross’s sonnet, reflecting on the demands of the task in hand, earns a commendation: The task for which I now am all too weakConsumes a wealth of hours as I imploreHundreds of poets to give me what I seekAnd sometimes I decide to search no more… As does Bob Trewin’s entry, which uses Dylan Thomas’s line – ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’ – to highlight the challenging consequences, for some, of net zero. The winners earn £25 each. Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster,Defeat can be rewarding all the same.
In Competition No. 3208 you were invited to submit a short story whose first or last line is: ‘“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller.’ The given line opens Walter de la Mare’s slippery, haunting, much-anthologised ‘The Listeners’ and many entries echoed the 1912 poem’s supernatural theme. An honourable mention to George Simmers and David Shields, and £30 each to the prizewinners below. ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller. ‘“Asked” would be better.’ ‘Or “enquired”?’ ‘Too ornate. Keep to your authorial voice.’ Laura. Sacked from her academic post for the unacceptable views in her paper ‘Narrative Queerness – A Neostructuralist Critique’ and reduced to giving Creative Writing courses to amateurs like me.
In Competition No. 3207 you were invited to submit a verse obituary of Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian former prime minister who, despite sex scandals and court battles, managed three stints as PM, died last month aged 86. His more startling gaffes included suggesting that Abruzzo earthquake survivors see their situation as ‘a weekend of camping’ and describing Obama as ‘young, handsome and tanned’. The winners, printed below, pocket £30 each.
In Competition No. 3306, you were invited to submit a poem about procrastination. Procrastination looms large in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s hilarious account of his attempt to write a study of D.H. Lawrence, and it struck me as an excellent topic for a competition. As Samuel Johnson wrote, the tendency to put things off is ‘one of the general weaknesses’ that ‘prevail to a greater or lesser degree in every mind’. The assignment did indeed strike a chord, attracting a large entry that was witty and technically adroit. Commiserations to Alex Steelsmith, C. Paul Evans, David Silverman and Frank McDonald who missed out on a spot in the winning line-up by a whisker.
In Competition No. 3305, you were invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. The germ for this challenge was ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets And Experiences’ by the gifted, troubled Delmore Schwartz, friend to Robert Lowell and John Berryman (who wrote a suite of poems in memory of him). An imaginative and technically accomplished entry warrants high fives all round. The winners earn £20. Weary with toil, and grey and full of sleep,In the long, sleepless watches of the night,Below the thunders of the upper deep;Standing aloof, consider how my lightIs spent. No help? Come let us kiss and part.The world is too much with us, late and soon.
In Competition No. 3304, you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s reflections on a pressing issue of your choice. In BBC Radio Four’s Taking Issue With Shakespeare, which prompted this task, Michael Gove discusses levelling up with reference to King Lear, Will Self reflects on toxic masculinity in Hamlet, and Gordon Brown draws parallels between a rabble-rousing Marc Antony and Donald Trump. Many of your entries addressed our robot overlords. Here’s David Shields: AI or not AI: that is the question; Whether it is safer in the end to limit The capabilities of such artifice Or to take arms against a sea of robots And by opposing end them?... Hon menshes to George Simmers and D.A. Prince. The winners earn £25 each.
In Competition No. 3303, you were invited to submit an explanation of the facts of life by a person from the field of fact or fiction who might be deemed a surprising choice. A commendation to A.R. Duncan-Jones, whose lesson harnessed the reverse chronology of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow: ‘Every ejaculation is premature. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it?… Quite apart from the disappointment and frustration, it’s also extremely embarrassing to find yourself ejaculating inside a girl that you’ve never even met.’ And to David Shields’s Gradgrind: ‘Sexual congress. Undertaken by one male and one female. Purpose: propagation of species. Method: introduction of sperm to ovum.
In Competition No. 3302, you were invited to compose a dating app profile for a writer of your choice. To mark the centenary last year of Philip Larkin’s birth, the poet Imtiaz Dharker wrote ‘Swiping left on Larkin’ in which she imagined how, given his complicated relationship with intimacy, the poet would present himself on such an app. This led me to wonder how other writers might set themselves apart in the online dating scrum. A shout-out to Paul A. Freeman’s Kipling (‘If you can eat steak rare when all about you/ Are ordering their sirloins darkly singed…’)’ and Max Ross’s Wordsworth (‘Sadly I wander lonely as a cloud/ And so I seek some kind companionship…’). Nick MacKinnon, Sue Pickard, Paul D.
In Competition No. 3301, you were invited to delete one letter in the title of a well-known novel and provide an extract from the new work. This one pulled in the punters. Highlights included Russell Chamberlain’s All the Pretty Hoses and Ralph Bateman’s Bleak Hose:‘Water everywhere. Water up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; water down the river, where it rolls defiled by untreated sewage. It was the wettest of times, it was the driest of times, it was a time of floods, it was a time of drought, it was the age of incompetence…’. There were also entertaining twists on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which saw Winston Smith transported back to the Roman Empire.
In Competition No. 3300, you were invited to describe in verse a meal of your choice with a well-known poet, living or dead. The entry was a whopper, with too many star performers to name individually. Hats off, all round. The winners, which include David Silverman’s account of going on a bender with Dante, take £25. Our breakfast stood – a Loaded Plate –Of Bacon – crisply Hot Two Sausages – in bursting skins –Of mushrooms – a compoteThe farmyard’s Gift – two yellow Eggs Whose faces – shamed the SunFried Bread that sizzled in the Pan –Hot Sauce upon my ThumbA dash of fragrant Marmalade Tomatoes – in a SeaOf Baked Beans yielding rosy SauceFor added Piquancy.
In Competition No. 3299, you were invited to supply a short story that takes as its title the title of a Beatles song. Haruki Murakami used Beatles tracks from the album Rubber Soul as names for both his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood and a short story, ‘Drive My Car’. But the Japanese writer has confessed that he was never ‘a fervent fan’. In high school and college, he says, he ‘didn’t buy a single record’ by the Fab Four. In a large and inventive entry, Ben Hale’s dystopian ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, with its echoes of the film Logan’s Run,caught my eye, and I was moved by Frank McDonald’s poignant tale of the last surviving lemming.
In Competition No. 3298, you were invited to provide a book review in three haiku. When I saw that the unofficial poet laureate of Twitter Brian Bilston had tweeted some haiku book reviews, I thought I’d challenge you to do something along the same lines. The traditional Japanese haiku is a snapshot of a moment in time rendered in 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules have not always been slavishly observed by western poets). Or, as the incomparable Stanley J. Sharpless put it: This is a haiku. Five syllables, then seven. Then five more. Got it? Some entries incorporated references to the natural world, which is a hallmark of the haiku. And there was a streak of subversive humour too. The winners take £20.
In Competition No. 3297, you were invited to provide a psychiatrist’s report on a well-known literary character. The germ of this challenge was an interview with Olivia Colman, who played Miss Havisham in a recent adaptation of Great Expectations, in which the actress said of her character: ‘It’s terrible what happens to Miss Havisham… If only she’d had a therapist or a really good friend to chat to, she might be in a much better place.’ Only John O’Byrne chose to put ‘Ms H’ on the psychiatrist’s couch, though. Far more popular subjects were Bertie Wooster, Holden Caulfield and – star of the show – Winnie-the-Pooh. David Silverman, Martin Williams, Joe Houlihan, Charlotte Marshall, Joshua Price and Nigel Johnson-Hill earn honourable mentions.
In Competition No. 3296, you were invited to provide a poem whose rhyme words are all at least three syllables. You riffed off W.S. Gilbert, Wordsworth and Dylan Thomas,among others, in limericks, double dactyls and villanelles, about subjects ranging from Gary Lineker to sex dolls. Philip Roe, Barbara Jones and Chris Ramsey shone, but the winners below take £25. The wisdom of Lord Bostock was, to say the least, debatable, For, shunning living ladies, he had purchased an inflatable. He took her home, unpacked her, and he used her energetically, Excitedly, delightedly, and finally frenetically. He never doubted she could bear the strain of his virility; She burst when he was in a pose of minimal stability.
In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour – and to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Brian Murdoch’s entry opens with a nod to the notorious first sentence (a favourite of Snoopy) of Edward B-L’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The winners, below, take £25.
In Competition No. 3294, you were invited to provide the first 16 lines of an ode to a turnip or another similarly unglamorous vegetable. This assignment was prompted, of course, by Thérèse Coffey’s suggestion that we respond to shortages in salad vegetables by embracing the turnip. But I also had in mind the wonderful odes of Pablo Neruda, which celebrate the commonplace: onions, lemons, a piece of tuna in the market. In a witty and well-made entry, echoes ranged from Pindar to Keats. Commendations to Hunter Liguore, Ann Drysdale and Richard Spencer. The winners earn £25.
In Competition No. 3293, you were invited to provide an extract from the autobiography of a well-known public figure which manages to make a very interesting life sound extraordinarily dull. I am grateful to Sarah Drury for suggesting this terrific challenge. Honourable mentions, in a modest-sized entry, go to Sir Alec Guinness’s Spam anecdote (Jonathan Taylor), Elon Musk’s account of founding the Boring Company (John O’Byrne) and tales from St Paul’s tent-making days in Tarsus (Revd Richard Coles). The prizewinners below take £25. The Battle of Rivoli was my twenty-second substantial victory (for my definition of ‘substantial’ see Appendix IV, ‘Definitions’), which puts me one ahead of the duc de Vendôme and only five behind Julius Caesar.
In Competition No. 3292, you were invited to provide a poem to mark the death of Betty Boothroyd. The formidable Lady Boothroyd – the Guardian obituarist’s description of her exuding ‘warmth and wit’ and ‘a whiff of glamour’ was spot-on – brought out the best in you. There were neat acrostics from David Silverman and David Shields, and head--turning double dactyls from Richard Spencer and Alex Steelsmith. Here are Mr Steelsmith’s final two quatrains: Eulogists speak of herHonourability;Countless admirers, whileRaising a cup, Picture her shatteringParadisiacalCeilings of crystal whereTime’s never up. It was a struggle to whittle down a large and stellar field, and Janine Beacham was only just nudged out of the prizewinning line-up.
