In Competition No. 2742 you were invited to take as your first line ‘Dear Lord the day of eggs is here…’, which is the opening to Amanda McKittrick Ros’s poem ‘Eastertide’, and continue, in a similarly bad vein, for up to 16 lines. Described in the Oxford Companion to Irish Literature as ‘uniquely dreadful’, McKittrick
In Competition No. 2741 you were invited to submit an extract from the libretto of an opera that pays homage to the town of your choice. The Lottery-funded operatic venture Swindon: the Opera, which inspired the comp, catapulted that unlovely town into the cultural spotlight, and this assignment was meant to be an exercise in
In Competition No. 2740 you were invited to submit the ten work Commandments of the writer of your choice, living or dead. There were some cracking entries this week — far more winners than there is space to print. Here is a taste of Brian Murdoch’s Tolkien: ‘1. If a book’s worth writing, it’s worth
In Competition No. 2739 you were invited to submit a poem lamenting an impulse buy on eBay. A hair from Justin Bieber’s chest; a colossal concrete brontosaurus; a lifesize poster of Albert Einstein; Franz Kafka’s shirt (with an authenticating Post-it note by Max Brod). These were just a few of the regrettable but hugely entertaining
In Competition No. 2738 you were invited to concoct a government ad that bravely attempts to attract applicants to an especially unappealing job of your invention. Some time ago a reader brought to my attention an ad for the position of ‘Band 3 Process Developers in the VOA2015 Process Team’. Such was its mind-boggling impenetrability
In Competition No. 2737 you were invited to submit a double dactyl. This popular and, judging by the size of the entry, extraordinarily compulsive poetic parlour game was invented in the Sixties by the celebrated poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and is described in the blurb of Jiggery-Pokery, their magnificent compendium of the form,
In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors. There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the
In Competition No. 2735 you were invited to take as your first line ‘My love is like a [fill in blank]’, and continue, in light verse. Amid the ailments — ‘a drippy nose’, ‘a whooping cough’; the animals — ‘a three-toed sloth’, ‘a sea urchin’; and foodstuffs galore: ‘ripe Gorgonzola’, ‘ a tub of lard’,
In Competition No. 2734 you were invited to provide anagrams of lines from Shakespearean sonnets. These assignments are not the most popular but every so often the urge to send you to anagram hell gets the better of me. ‘I found this competition exasperatingly difficult,’ wrote Josephine Boyle. Equally exasperated, it seems, was Basil Ransome-Davies,
In Competition No. 2733 you were invited to condense the plot of a Dickens novel into a triple limerick. In case you hadn’t noticed, it would have been Dickens’s 200th birthday this week, and this assignment is a modest contribution to the avalanche of Dickens-related events unleashed across the globe by the bicentenary. (Even estate
In Competition No. 2732 you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels. This challenge is a twist on the magnificent annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which salutes the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of the much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ Entrants
In Competition No. 2731 you were invited to supply a poem in praise of punctuation. An excellent entry, this. Space is tight and I very much regretted not having room for Alan Millard, David Duncan Jones and Frank Osen in addition to the worthy winners below. The bonus fiver belongs to Basil Ransome-Davies. The rest
In Competition No. 2730 you were invited to supply a refutation in verse of Philip Larkin’s assertion ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. ‘This Be The Verse’ may not be Larkin’s finest poem but it is certainly his best-known and most oft-quoted (he himself wryly commented that he fully expected to hear it
In Competition No. 2729 you were invited to recast a well-known nursery rhyme, filtering it through the lens of a recent news story. Josh Ekroy was on fine form: ‘Liam had a little friend/ his suit was white as snow/ and everywhere that Liam went/ his friend was sure to go.’ In a strong entry,
In Competition No. 2728 you were asked to provide a parody, with a Christmas connection, of a living British writer with an international reputation. The assignment invited you to follow in the mighty footsteps of Max Beerbohm, whose talent for parody few have matched. His A Christmas Garland, whose centenary falls this year, is considered
In Competition No. 2727 you were asked for a short story entitled ‘An unwelcome bequest’. The Guardian recently invited its readers to share their experiences of unwished-for bequeathals. The request elicited a crop of hugely funny and touching stories featuring, among other things, ‘a hideous pink pig in a hat and a pinny drinking a
In Competition No. 2726 you were asked for a modern version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ taking as your first line ‘On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me…’ and continuing for a further twelve. Perhaps inevitably there was a fair amount of repetition in the entry: plenty of leakers
In Competition No. 2725 you were invited to supply the sales particulars for planet Earth. ‘Need a home where you can really spread yourself?’ asks George Simmers. ‘It’s the ideal residence for the adventurous virus with an urge to propagate. There’s a comfily warm and humid climate in most parts of the planet (And it’s
In Competition No. 2724 you were invited to supply a poem in which the initial letters of each line read down the page reproduce the last line. Though some of you clearly relish competitions of this kind (check out Frank McDonald’s double-paracrostic in the winning line-up), there was the inevitable rumble of protest in the
In Competition No. 2723 you were invited to supply an updated version of Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge’. A reading of the sonnet on Westminster Bridge in September 2002, to commemorate its 200th anniversary, was all but drowned out by the roar of the rush hour. A far cry, then, from Wordsworth’s view of a slumbering