Literary competition

The title of a poem by Anthony Brode, ‘Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins’, prompted me to invite verse submissions describing a meal with a well-known poet. Sylvia Fairley tucked, somewhat reluctantly, into albatross with Coleridge, D.A. Prince shared cocoa with Wendy Cope and Rob Stuart enjoyed a curry with Dante. Honourable mentions go to John M. Fotheringham, who wouldn’t recommend taking up an invitation to tea from Robert Burns; and to Brian Allgar for oysters with Lewis Carroll. Well done, all: it was a top-notch entry. The winners take £25. Frank McDonald nabs £30. Frank McDonald/Elizabeth Barrett Browning ‘How do you like your eggs?’ the waiter says And with a

The latest brief was to submit irregular quatrains that bring together two people from the world of the arts and finish on a couplet describing the consequences. Popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen. Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince: If J.R.R. Tolkien met Graham Greene would a hobbit’s story become The Power and The Glory? And take two from Virginia Price Evans: Had J.R.R. Tolkien Met Graham Greene, The Hobbit’s lair Might have been the end of the affair. This one drew the crowds and

The most recent test of competitors’ skill, wit and ingenuity called for acrostics in the style of a well-known poet, where the first letters of each line spell out the poet’s name. This turned out to be a challenge of unprecedented popularity. Entries came pouring in from regulars and newcomers alike. The poets chosen ranged from Virgil, Sappho and Basho to Spike Milligan and Pam Ayres. Wordsworth, Eliot and Larkin cropped up a lot but John Betjeman was the top choice. Bill Greenwell was on fine form. I was impressed by both his take on Billy Collins’s poem ‘Forgetfulness’ and by his Spenserian stanza in the manner of Wendy Cope

Nietzsche famously said that in Heaven ‘all the interesting people are missing’. To judge by the entries for the latest competition — which asked you to describe your idea of heaven or hell in verse — most of you agree that paradise might not be all it’s cracked up to be. It was a large and lively postbag. Commiserations go to Peter Goulding, Sylvia Fairley, Bill Greenwell and John-Paul Marney, who were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winning line-up. The poems below earn their authors £25 apiece. Congratulations to Philip Roe, who nabs £30. Philip Roe When the heavenly choir eternal sings a glorious    

It was Samuel Pepys’s birthday this week and for the latest competition you were invited to imagine him let loose on the streets of 21st-century London and to provide a diary entry chronicling his impressions. Pepys’s candid and minutely observed diary entries hum with a seemingly inexhaustible lust for life and your attempts to capture this spirit were impressive. His perpetual randiness, in particular, loomed large in the entry (as one of Pepys’s biographers Richard Ollard notes, ‘an irresistible air of bedroom farce clings to him’). Commendations go to Barry Baldwin, Roger Rengold and Peter Sain ley Berry. The winners take £25; D.A. Prince nabs £30. D.A. Prince To coffee-house

The challenge to put a fresh spin on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 was the most popular competition for ages. The brief was to replace ‘summer’s day’ with a trisyllable of your choice. A competitor emailed to ask if I’d meant a single trisyllabic word or a three-syllable phrase. I meant the former but perhaps that wasn’t clear so I allowed both. Objects of comparison ranged from ocelot to shaggy dog, from Shakespeare play to Theresa May. It was a dazzling performance pretty much all round. I’ve squeezed in seven winners, who take £20 each, but there could have been so many more — Ray Kelley, Philip Roe, Douglas G. Brown, Rob

The beard has come a long way since the dark days of Mr Twit, Jimmy Hill and The Joy of Sex. As Ekow Eshun points out in his insightful essay ‘Welcome to Beardlandia’, the bewhiskered chin will one day come to stand as ‘the definitive visual shorthand for the early 21st century, as the moustache is for the Seventies and a pair of mutton chops for Regency England’. But now that the beard has gone mainstream, its days as a badge of cool must surely be numbered. Certainly, to judge from the response to the call for poems in praise or dispraise of facial fluff, not everyone is a fan.

In Competition No. 2881 you were invited to take your lead from Carol Ann Duffy and provide an amusing poem about a piece of government legislation. The first line of Duffy’s poem ‘22 Reasons for the Bedroom Tax’, ‘Because the badgers are moving the goalposts’, is, of course, a reference to environment secretary Owen Paterson’s unfortunate attempt to explain the government’s failure to reach cull targets. A congratulatory slap on the back to Adrian Fry, who managed to wring an entertaining poem out of the Chancel Repair Bill. Commendations, too, to Mike Morrison, Virginia Price Evans, Max Ross and John Whitworth. Alan Millard takes the bonus fiver. The rest get

The latest competition invited you to take a leaf out of Hilary Mantel’s book and provide a scene that shows a well-known villain from history or literature in an uncharacteristically kindly light. Mantel has said that she was driven by a ‘powerful curiosity’ rather than by any desire to rehabilitate Cromwell. ‘I do not run a Priory clinic for the dead,’ she wrote, which is a nice way of putting it. You plundered Dickens for baddies in need of a makeover — Fagin made repeated appearances alongside Daniel Quilp and Josiah Bounderby. Judas Iscariot and Dr Crippen were also popular choices. The standard was on the patchy side, but honourable

Your New Year challenge was to submit a poem composed of three haikus that looks forward to the year ahead. The traditional Japanese haiku contains 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables (though these rules are not always observed by western poets). It is neatly summed up here by the late Stanley J. Sharpless: This is a haiku. Five syllables, then seven. Then five more. Got it? The winners below take £17 apiece. Hats off to Max Ross for injecting a sliver of optimism into the almost all-encompassing gloom of the winning line-up. And Happy New Year to you all! Alan Millard Ukip wins more