Lucy Vickery

Competition | 16 January 2010

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition

issue 16 January 2010

In Competition No. 2629 you were invited to submit a palinode (a poem retracting a previously expressed opinion) on behalf of a well-known poet.

Haunted by the success of his much-reproduced quatrain ‘The Purple Cow’, Gelett Burgess wrote a palinode to strike fear in the hearts of anthology-compilers: ‘Ah, yes! I wrote the purple cow,/ I’m sorry now I wrote it!/ But I can tell you anyhow,/ I’ll kill you if you quote it!’

This week the equally oft-anthologised ‘Sea Fever’, ‘Dover Beach’, ‘If’ and ‘This Be the Verse’ produced some robust recantations in an entry of record-breaking size. Some didn’t quite meet the brief but impressed none the less; honourable mentions go to a sprinkling of unlucky losers: Julie Stoner, G. McIlraith, Noel Petty, S. Wilson, Roger Theobald and Geoffrey Riley.

The winners, printed below, net £20 each. The bonus fiver is Alan Millard’s.

Though I vow that once we met,
I now confess that I was lying,
Truth to tell, with much regret,
It wasn’t me that she was eyeing.


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