Spectator competition: threesomes six ways (plus: clerihews for fictional characters)

The call for poems composed entirely of three-letter words certainly ruffled some feathers. ‘This is the most difficult comp you have set and has driven me mad!’ said Adrian Fry. It was a nasty assignment, I admit, but it could have been so much worse. Take John Fuller’s wonderful poem ‘The Kiss’: not only is it made up entirely of three-letter words; it also has three words per line in three three-line stanzas. Given the potentially dispiriting technical nature of the challenge, I was surprised by both the number of entries and the standard (high). There was a lot of skill and wit on show and it was unusually difficult to separate submissions into winners and losers. I very much admired Frank Upton’s translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 into three-letter words; there was nice work, too, from Chris O’Carroll, Julie Steiner, Bill Greenwell, Sylvia Fairley, John Martin, David Silverman, Max Ross, Gerda Roper and Nicholas Hodgson.