In Competition No. 3013 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of August. There was a whiff of collusion about the entry this week, so many references were there to rubbish television, rubbish weather, fractious kiddies, tired gardens, traffic jams; as Katie Mallett puts it: ‘A turgid time of torpor
In Competition No. 3012 you were invited to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit a programme note for the new production. Thanks to Steven Joseph, who suggested this excellent competition topic. David Silverman’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Deaf started well but ran out of steam halfway through. Other
In Competition No. 3011 you were invited to submit a disgustingly flattering poem in heroic couplets in praise of a contemporary person of power. You were at your bootlicking best this week: Donald Trump, Anthony Scaramucci, Xi Jinping, Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin were all on the receiving end of some serious sucking-up. Bill Greenwell’s
In Competition No. 3010, a nod to the late, great George Romero, you were invited to provide an extract from a mash-up of a literary classic of your choice and horror fiction. Nathan Weston’s Werewolf Hall, Brian Murdoch’s The Gruffalo in Transylvania, Bill Greenwell’s Three Men and a Zombie and Nicholas MacKinnon’s The Nightmare
In Competition No. 3009 you were invited to submit a poem about a domestic object. I set this challenge with Philip Larkin’s ‘The Mower’ in mind, which he wrote in the summer of 1979 after inadvertently killing a hedgehog while cutting the grass. According to Betty Mackereth, Larkin’s secretary and onetime lover, he told
In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question. There’s room only for me to lament the lack of space for more winners; the judging process was especially
In Competition No. 3007 you were invited to submit a poem about Larry, the Downing Street cat. Larry came to No. 10 in 2011 from Battersea Dogs & Cats Home during David Cameron’s premiership. He was left behind when the family moved on, though Mr Cameron denied that this was because he hated cats. Although
In Competition No. 3006 you were invited to submit a sonnet that takes as its opening line Keats’s ‘Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:’ (This was a sonnet Keats chose not to publish but transcribed into a long letter he wrote over a period in early 1819 to George and Georgiana Keats,
In Competition No. 3005 you were invited to take your inspiration from Anthony Lane’s terrific ‘The Book of Jeremy Corbyn’, an account of the general election that ran recently in the New Yorker and was shared widely on social media: ‘And there came from the same country a prophet, whose name was Jeremy. His beard
In Competition No. 3004 you were invited to submit an extract from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Trumpland. As I was listening to Kellyanne Conway’s alternative-facts interview earlier this year, Humpty Dumpty’s words from Through the Looking-Glass floated into my mind (‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means
In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular rhymes included ‘charmer’ and ‘Starmer’; ‘Boris’ and ‘Horace’; ‘Sturgeon’ and ‘burgeon’; ‘Corbyn’ and ‘absorbing’. Putin likes to ‘put the boot in’, apparently, and that David Davis is, by common consent, a ‘rara avis’. There
In Competition No. 3002 you were invited to provide lyrics to the European anthem. The anthem has as its melody the final movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 but dispenses with Schiller’s words. I wondered if anyone might go back to his 1785 ‘Ode to Joy’ and repurpose the following lines: ‘Yea, if any hold
In Competition No. 3001 you were invited to take inspiration from the recently published Walt Whitman’s Guide to Manly Health and Training and supply an extract from a similar guide penned by another well-known writer. While Whitman extols the benefits of stale bread and fresh air and cautions against eating between meals, Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s John
In Competition No. 3000 you were invited to provide an answer, in verse or prose, to a famous literary question of your choosing. Two admirably pithy responses to Hamlet’s dilemma came courtesy of Carolyn Beckingham: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question.’ ‘If you’re not certain, wait,’ is my suggestion. The
In Competition No. 2999 you were invited to supply a poem which takes as its first line W.S. Gilbert’s ‘A policeman’s lot is not a happy one’ but replaces ‘policeman’ with another trade or profession. Although this line doesn’t come until line eight in Gilbert & Sullivan’s ‘Policeman’s Song’, it was the opening I prescribed and
In Competition No. 2998 you were invited to submit a set of instructions for an everyday device that have been badly translated into English. Poorly translated menus are more or less guaranteed to raise a holiday snigger (albeit tinged with a guilty awareness of one’s own linguistic shortcomings), but the challenge here was to
In Competition No. 2997 you were invited to submit an obituary for planet Earth. It was a smallish but varied and heartfelt entry. John Whitworth earns the bonus fiver and his fellow winners are rewarded with £25 apiece. Honourable mentions go to C.J. Gleed, D.A. Prince and Duncan Forbes. In an obituary There’s
In Competition No. 2996 you were invited to submit an acrostic sonnet in which the first letters of each line spell AT THE SPECTATOR. You weren’t obliged to make the theme of your sonnet this magazine and its contributors but many of you did, to great effect. (The tone was mainly though not universally affectionate.)
In Competition No. 2995 you were invited to submit ribald limericks as they might have been written by a well-known poet. William Baring-Gould, who wrote a history of the genre, noted that when a limerick appears, sex is not far behind And the writer Norman Douglas considered limericks to be ‘jovial things… a yea-saying to
In Competition No. 2994 you were invited to submit a letter of complaint from a fictional character to his, hers or its creator complaining about their portrayal. There are some long lines this week (blame Poe) and as the standard was high, I’ll step aside to make space for six winners. The excellent entries printed