In Competition No. 2858 you were invited to imagine that a well-known figure from 20th-century history was a secret poet and to submit a recently discovered example of their versifying.
Politicians featured prominently in the entry: there were poignant lines from the pens of Edward Heath and Michael Foot, and here is Adrian Fry’s John Prescott, just getting into his stride: ‘Don’t call me unsophisticated, I’ve been to Villanelle,/ I know me assonance from elbow, I’ve a cracking tale to tell…’
The winners earn £25 each and George Simmers takes this week’s bonus fiver.
No, I must never let this menace
My relationship with Denis
(Such a help-mate, though at times alas a bore),
Yet sometimes I am able
Underneath the Cabinet table
To play footsie with a man who’s much much
more.
Norman Tebbit! Norman Tebbit!
My emotion will not ebb — it
Floods my being and it rages like a storm.
Darling polecat, my heart’s yearning,
And I might just be for turning,
Oh my lovely Chingford Superman, my Norm!
George Simmers/Margaret Thatcher
It’s always been my wish to be a poet.
OK, I published stuff like ‘The Waste Land’,
But that’s pretentious twaddle, and I know it!
I want to write things folks can understand.
They say I’m up there in the avant-garde, but
You can’t fool all the people all the time.
To write in metre I’d be pretty hard-put,
Besides, I’ve never really got the hang of rhyme.
An evening’s like a patient on a table?
Come on! And all that guff in Prufrock’s Song!
I know my images are pitiable;
You can make that stuff up as you go along.
I wish I could do daffodils, or seasons!
What kind of poem needs annotations to it?
I wish I could do things with rhymes and
reasons.
I’d really like to be a proper poet.
Brian Murdoch/T.S. Eliot
I’m Tony Blair the winner.
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