In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s system for classifying the chemical elements, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of
In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or for British ones travelling abroad. This is an assignment that you always embrace with relish, though one competitor observed that it felt curiously difficult this time round because ‘the interaction between Britain and Abroad isn’t
In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis Reinhard’s Don McLean-inspired entry stretched the definition of short story rather but was entertaining nonetheless: ‘Bye, bye Mister Trump’s tweeting lies/ Instagram’s nude shots of Kimmy and her plastic backside…’ John O’Byrne was good too
In Competition No. 3056 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of the High Street. Your entries were poignant and clever, and transported me back to teenage Saturdays frittered away in the likes of Dolcis, Lilly & Skinner and Freeman, Hardy & Willis. John Morrison’s lines ‘Oh Amazon how swift you
In Competition No. 3055 you were invited to take a well-known figure on the world stage, living or dead, and cast them in the role of agony aunt/uncle, submitting a problem of your invention and their solution. There is space only to high-five the winners below, who take £25 each. Bill Greenwell gets £30.
In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about double dactyls as it takes up space and I’ve done it before — and in any case they are easily Googled. Most of you seemed thoroughly at home with the form, and in a large,
In Competition No. 3053, an assignment prompted by Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel, you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known work that might be considered sexist by today’s standards and rework it for the #MeToo age. Highlights in a thoroughly enjoyable entry included Brian Allgar’s
In Competition No. 3052 you were invited to supply a sonnet inspired by a well-known contemporary figure’s characteristic feature. There was a spot of preposition-related confusion this week — my fault entirely — and sonnets either ‘to’ or ‘on’ were acceptable. Entries ranged far and wide, from Victoria Beckham’s pout via Gorbachev’s birthmark to
In Competition No. 3051 you were invited to supply an entry by a well-known diarist describing the wedding day of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. There was a bracingly waspish streak running through your contributions. Here’s Noël Coward’s verdict on the groom: ‘Massively butch but far too hairy, when he wasn’t even in the
In Competition No. 3050 you were invited to submit a school essay written by a well-known author, living or dead, about one of their works. The germ of this challenge was the revelation that the novelist Ian McEwan helped his son to write an A-level essay about one of his books (Enduring Love), only to
In Competition No. 3049 you were invited to submit a poem about a bromance. Pairings including Friedrich and Karl, Laurel and Hardy, Nigel and Donald lit up an entry that was witty, touching and generally pleasingly varied. I liked Chris O’Carroll’s ‘Boris and Donnie’, a twist on Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Frankie and Johnny’. And Bill
In Competition No. 3048 you were invited to take an existing word and alter it by a) adding a letter, b) changing a letter, and c) deleting a letter — and to supply definitions for all three new words. Inspiration for this challenge came from across the pond, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Style
In Competition No. 3047 you were invited to supply an imaginary testimonial for a high-profile figure that is superficially positive but contains hidden warnings to a potential employer. This was an exercise in the artful deployment of ambiguity, as displayed in Robert J. Thornton’s L.I.A.R. The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations, a handbook for
In Competition No. 3046 you were invited to supply a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem and ending with its first line, the new poem being on a different subject all together. This was a wildly popular comp, which elicited a witty and wide-ranging entry that was both pleasurable and
In Competition No. 3045 you were invited to provide a poem about euphemisms. You avoided politics and sex (mostly), preferring instead to focus on the language of dying and the words and expressions that enable us to sidestep the D-word (according to David Crystal, there are more than 1,000 words for death categorised in
In Competition No. 3044 you were invited to provide a lesson in the facts of life courtesy of a well-known character in fiction. There is space only for me to commend Jayne Osborn, who recruited Dr Seuss: ‘Doing sex is good fun, and it’s easy to do./ Let me demonstrate, using Thing One and
In Competition No. 3043 you were invited to provide a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings. Ian McEwan, a writer who is fascinated by spying, was asked recently on the Today programme how he would begin a novel inspired by the current confrontation with Russia. The image that comes to mind, he said,
In Competition No. 3042, a challenge inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis Carroll Were a Hollywood Press Agent in the Thirties’, you were invited to provide a Hollywood–themed ‘Jabberwocky’ for our times. Jacobs begins: ‘’Twas Bogart and the Franchot Tones/ Did Greer and Garson in the Wayne;/
In Competition No. 3041, to mark the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark, you were invited to submit a poem with the title ‘The Ballad of [insert place name here]. I admired Paul Carpenter’s nod to Ken Dodd (‘The Ballad of Knotty Ash’) and David Silverman’s caustic, comic ‘Ballad of Westgate Shopping Centre’,
In Competition No. 3040 you were invited to submit a poem against poets or poetry. Plato started it, but over the ages poetry has been accused of many sins: elitism, aestheticising horror, inadequacy as an agency of political change. In what was a wide-ranging and spirited entry there were references to Shelley (‘poets are