Writer’s block

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 ****.

Most popular

Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

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.
The deftness of my rhymes became astounding,
And critics’ praise unstintedly resounding.

I felt like stout Cortez — I mean, Balboa —
Discovering Mexico — or was it Goa?
A realm of gold, that book, no doubt about it;
I don’t know how I ever did without it.
Brian Allgar

It’s awfully hard to write a villanelle
Because your thoughts are trapped by repetition.
It’s tough to find the rhymes that cast a spell.

It might become an artificial shell,
An empty piece, an uninspired submission.
It’s awfully hard to write a villanelle.

And just when things seem to be going well
Shortage of rhyme will send you to perdition.
It’s tough to find the rhymes that cast a spell.

And where those rhymes will lead to none can tell;
For frequently they hamper your decision.
It’s awfully hard to write a villanelle.

It’s harder when you’ve sixteen lines to sell;
More would debar you from the competition.
It’s awfully hard to write a villanelle.
It’s tough to find the rhymes that cast a spell.
Frank McDonald

Nobody these days gets how hard
It has become to be a bard,
When ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’
Can rhyme online with ‘LOL’,
And everything one used to know
About love poems is rendered faux
By gender multiplicity.