In Competition No. 3176 you were invited to write a poem to a city.
This challenge was inspired by both Simon Armitage’s letter to London (‘Dear London, I’ve applied for a restraining order requiring that you remain 200 miles from Huddersfield at all times…’), and William McGonagall’s inadvertently hilarious ‘Jottings of New York’, of which a snippet:
Oh mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold, Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told, They were the only things that seemed to arrest my eye, Because many of them are thirteen storeys high.
The Tayside Tragedian’s voice lives on in entries from John O’Byrne and Alanna Blake, among others. Plaudits, too, to R.M. Goddard, for a clever reworking of Phil Coulter’s ‘To the Town I love So Well’, and to Emma Teichmann. The winners earn £25.
Dear Sunderland, your boulevards, Your strange exotic dark façades — Here on the coast your secrets sleep: Your ancient minster, castle keep, The statues to the past, the future.
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