Spectator competition winners: selfies in verse

It was Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet-about-the-sonnet ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’ that prompted me to invite a poem about a verse form written in that verse form. But there are other similar examples — Robert Burns’s fine ‘A Sonnet upon Sonnets’, for one: ‘Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;/ What magic myst’ries in that number lie!…’ There were lots of poems about the sonnet in all its guises, but I was also drowning in limericks, clerihews, double dactyls, haikus, cinquains, pantoums, ottava rima, terza rima — many of them brilliantly well made. Accomplished entries from D.A. Smith, Jane Blanchard, Frank McDonald, Hugh King, Noah Heyl, Max Gutmann, Susan McLean and Katie Mallett narrowly missed the cut. The first six printed below take £25 each; the final two earn their authors £15 apiece.

John Whitworth A rondel is made like a roundelay, With a rhyme, call it A, and a rhyme, call it B, Which repeats, it repeats, (do you see, do you       see?) Until back comes your A like he’s ready to play,

Like he’s ready to play in a holiday way, Until B with a buzz, with a buzz like a bee, Yes it’s B like a bee coming back to the fray, Like a bee or a flea, yes as fit as a flea,

Is your B.