Competitors rose admirably to the recent challenge to step into the shoes of a well-known writer and submit a poem or piece of prose in praise or defence of something unexpected.
It was nice to glimpse a lighter side of Leonard Cohen courtesy of Martin Parker’s twist on ‘Bird on a Wire’, and Alanna Blake submitted a well-made Wordsworthian tribute to wind farms. Ernest Hemingway came out for the League Against Cruel Sports and against sobriety, and in J. Seery’s entry Barbara Cartland showed her true Marxist colours: ‘There is no phrase in English more sensuous than “dialectical materialism”’.
Other stellar performers were John Samson, Josephine Boyle, C.J. Gleed and Jamie Burnham, who restyled Arthur Ransome as a health-and-safety nut. The winners take £25 and Frank Upton earns the extra fiver.
Frank Upton/Jack Kerouac
My only witness, the damp grass. I close my eyes, let my nerves untangle, feel my breath fall into time with the slow throbbing futility of the universe.
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