Apple and orange

In Competition No. 2544 you were invited to submit a shopping list in verse form, making the last word of every line a brand name.

Although I try to vary the competitions as much as possible, this is the second list-poem assignment in a row. As this was, at least in part, an attempt to respond to the market — consumer demand is high for verse-based comps, which seem to attract a larger entry than prose ones — I thought shopping and brands an appropriate theme.

Randall Jarrell uses detergent brand names to great ironic effect in the first line of his poem ‘Next Day’, in which a woman wanders the supermarket aisles mourning the loss of a younger self: ‘Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All,/ I take a box/ And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens…’. And Pushkin liked to incorporate the champagne grandes marques into his work, Veuve Cliquot and Moët, in particular.