In Competition No. 2484 you were invited to provide the first 16 lines of an ‘Ode to Vegetables’. Thank you for the kind words that have been reaching me at the Charing Cross Hospital. Mike Morrison’s entry was particularly bracing: I’ve never known a patient quite like you,Jaspistos: no, you can’t have Irish stew …‘May
To say ‘I’m sorry’ once can be emollient, but as everybody knows, to say it three times with arms flapping like a penguin is downright inflammatory. Most of your apologies were for sexual misbehaviour. Since there are so many other domestic sins just as exasperating as infidelity I found this surprising. The prizewinners, printed below,
In Competition No. 2482 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem, involving questions and answers in which the first letters of the lines read SOCRATIC METHOD. Smartypants will have spotted that the title of this competition is an anagram of the required phrase. In hospital one undergoes much questioning as well as treatment. The
In Competition No. 2481 you were invited to supply a poem or a piece of prose ending with Gore Vidal’s nasty gnome, ‘It’s not enough to succeed. Others must fail.’ I’m not an especially nice person, but I’ve never experienced the pleasant frisson of schadenfreude; in fact, Rochefoucauld’s remark to the effect that there is
In Competition No 2480 you were invited to supply a song beginning, ‘Oh, what have you done to your …?, the blank to be filled by a relative of your choice. When you’re young, relatives — barring the family, of course — are automatically ridiculous. ‘Oh, Aunt Jemima, look at your Uncle Jim./ He’s in
The Beefeatress in question is not, as you might imagine, a middle-aged matron in the mould of Margaret Dumont but a 38-year-old lassie from Lochgilphead, Argyll, named Moira Cameron. (Those who got her forename wrong or thought she came from Fife are pardoned.) Special commendations to Jim Davies, Michael Brereton, W.J. Webster and David Schofield.
The rhyme scheme is from Auden’s ‘The Composer’. As eagle-eyed Basil Ransome-Davies, who spotted this, remarked, ‘It’s hardly the best of Auden, so compers have a chance of writing a superior poem.’ We shall see. Some objected to the word ‘adaption’, claiming their spellcheck didn’t acknowledge its existence. Auden was no slouch: the word is
In Competition No 2477 you were informed of a German firm that offers to say goodbye on your behalf to an unwanted friend or lover by telephone, letter or personal visit, and invited to describe one such operation from the viewpoint of either the victim or the messenger. If you look up Tata Ltd in
In Competition No. 2476 (in error numbered 2477) you were invited to supply three haikus (rhyme optional) which form a single poem greeting the New Year.The traditional Japanese haiku has 17 syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables. Western poets have widened their scope to cover almost any mood. I
In Competition No. 2475 you were invited to provide entries from the diary of someone trying to escape from the Christmas season — and failing. Maybe you were all suffering from pre-Christmas exhaustion, maybe it was an unsuitable comp, or maybe I was in an atrabilious mood, but the entries were so substandard that, to
In Competition No. 2474 you were invited to expand a nursery rhyme mockingly in the style of a well-known poet. G.K. Chesterton did ‘Old King Cole’ as written by Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Whitman and Swinburne, and Anthony Deane expanded ‘Jack and Jill’ to the tune of more than 50 hilariously Kiplingesque lines. These can be
In Competition No. 2474 you were invited to supply, following the format and formula of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Mad Gardener’s Song’, three stanzas which could aptly be titled ‘The Deluded Politician’.This is my favourite Carroll poem. People often miss it because it comes not from the Alice books but from Sylvie and Bruno, much less
In Competition No. 2472 you were given ten words or phrases and invited to incorporate them, in any order, in a plausible piece of prose. Why, when I asked for a piece of prose, did four of you submit verse? Why did Mary Holtby, usually a skilled competitor, substitute ‘plague’ for ‘plaque’? Did D. Gibson
In Competition No. 2471 you were given two opening lines and invited to supply an appropriate song or lyric. No room for chitchat this week. Commendations go to W.J. Webster, Keith Norman and G.M. Davis. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver lands in the lap of Brian Murdoch. Once I
In Competition No. 2470 you were invited to offer a votive poem to a pre-Christian deity.Venus, take my votive glass:Since I am not what I was,What from this day I shall be,Venus, let me never see. Matthew Prior’s 18th-century prayer by a fading beauty is hard to beat, but Ezra Pound comes close with his
In Competition No. 2469 you were invited to supply a poem in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first line.Another comp that was last set nearly 30 years ago, when it was won by J. Crooks with the intriguing key line, ‘Moguls at the BBC’. This time round
In Competition No. 2468 you were invited to imagine that you fall asleep and wake up 20 years hence, and then report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke. Brian Murdoch reported new stamps issued for the Queen’s 100th birthday and the 2012 Olympics postponed yet again, for the 17th time. Mike
In Competition No. 2467 you were invited to write a poem in which all the rhymes are eye-rhymes, not ear-rhymes. Many years ago, even before Jaspistos cast his shadow on this page, a similar competition was set, with this difference: clerihews were demanded. Stuart Woods won with this: If Johann Sebastian BachHad remembered to attachBraces
In Competition No. 2466 you were invited to supply a poem or piece of prose ending with the phrase ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’ These words, according to Eric Partridge’s definition, are ‘applied in retrospect, jocularly or ruefully, to anything done impulsively with disastrous consequences, whether or not those were foreseeable
The scissors-and-paste work involved in this, though laborious, is easy enough; what is difficult is to avoid sliding into nonsense. The trick is, in Dryden’s phrase, to ‘deviate into sense’ as often as possible. John C.H. Mounsey began promisingly: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land,/ A cricket cap was on his head./ “Hold