What’s in a name? | 28 November 2019

In Competition No. 3126 you were invited to rearrange the letters of the names of poets (e.g. Basho: ‘has B.O.’) and submit a poem of that title in the style of the poet concerned.
 
The inspiration for this challenge was the puzzle writer and editor Francis Heaney’s wonderful Holy Tango of Literature, which includes such delights as William Shakespeare’s ‘Is a sperm like a whale?’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Dreary Hot Pork’ and William Carlos Williams’s ‘I will alarm Islamic owls’.
 
The anagrammatic titles that caught my eye in a large and stellar entry -included ‘Naughty Nude Wash’ by Wystan Hugh Auden (David Shields) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Ode to a Large Slimy Ulcer’ (Max Gutmann). Hats off, too, to Robert Schechter’s one-line ‘Toilets’ by T.S. Eliot: ‘Let us go then, you and I’.
 
The prizewinners, in what was a hotly contested week, are printed below and snaffle £25 each.

A fool might clothe his muddied cows in silk
And claim they therefore yielded finer milk,
Or give the grunting sow a laundered frock
That he through her might breed a purer stock,
Or throw upon his ox a velvet cloak
To hide the heavy burden of the yoke.
Apparel may proclaim the man not least
When he would use it to disguise his beast.
Such fools as he contrive to win our votes
By dressing brutish aims in lustrous coats.
They politick and scheme, adorning lies
With frills and tassels to distract our eyes.
Yet greater fools are they should they believe
Their trickery will common sense deceive.
‘Oxen Appareled’ by Alexander Pope/Hugh King
 
I’ll not go sober to the hall tonight.
Dram-dosed and bardic is the role I play.
They love my readings when I show up tight.
 
The boozy adulation I excite
Thrives on a ruby sloe gin lurch and sway.
Ovations swell when I’m not sober quite.
 
Roll up, roll up to hear a lush recite
Lush dingle-singing lyrics to convey
A barley-heightened measure of delight.