In Competition No. 3086 you were invited to submit a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem.
In a far-larger-than-usual entry, A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye:
I’m stuck.
Oh ****.
Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners below earn £25 each for their travails.
I struggled with my verse time after time,
Yet somehow I could never make it work.
It scanned quite well, but there’s no use pretending
My couplets had a satisfactory finish.
The words at their conclusion never matched;
They would not rhyme, however hard I rubbed
My head. The wretched quatrains fell apart,
And I despaired of mastering the skill.
But then, a rhyming dictionary transfigured
My verse; my audience no longer sniggered.
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