In Competition No. 2773 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘On First Looking into a Rhyming Dictionary’.
That class act Stanley J. Sharpless’s twist on Keats’ famous sonnet (which I found in E.O. Parrott’s How To Be Well-Versed in Poetry) was the inspiration for this assignment. Mr Sharpless begins: ‘How often have I searched for clever rhymes/ To ginger up some verse I’d scribbled down…’ And rounds off with this defiant couplet: ‘They tell me rhymes are out of fashion, now./ Who cares? I’ll go on rhyming, anyhow.’
Douglas G. Brown, David Silverman, Martin Parker and Ralph la Rosa shone in a large and varied entry but were narrowly outflanked by the winners below who take £25 apiece. G.M. Davis pockets the extra fiver.
Vers libre nourished my career.
I tilled eclectic ground
By turns elated and austere
A gallon of Walt Whitman here
And there a whiff of Pound.
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