Literary competition

This year’s festive comp asked for Christmas round robins as they might have been written by a well-known fictional character. It was all there: the boasts, bad jokes, inappropriate intimacies and inconsequential detail. Most of the entries were bursting with forced jocularity, but Basil Ransome-Davies, in the shape of an unusually frank Jeeves, neatly subverts the round-robin tradition of presenting a relentlessly positive face to the world. And John Samson’s Phileas Fogg takes holiday bragging to a whole new level, thereby earning the yuletide fiver. His fellow winners take £25. Happy Christmas, one and all! John Samson Where have all the days gone? I know where 80 went! But lost

It was ‘In Praise of Cocoa — Cupid’s Nightcap’ by that legend of the comping world Stanley J. Sharpless that gave me the idea for the most recent challenge, to write a poem about an unlikely aphrodisiac. How confessional your entries were, who can say, but I liked Adrienne Parker’s account of an erotic encounter with a washing machine. Others who caught my attention include C.J. Gleed (Lucozade!) and Ralph Rochester (‘When I am limber, limp or slack/ I turn my mind to Lady Thatcher/ Waltzing along a forest track/ And no one there but me to catch her.’) The winners take £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to John

The call for scenes describing a well-known character from children’s literature past grappling with a 21st-century problem drew an entry full of wit and variety. Pamela Dow reimagined Louisa May Alcott’s girls posting selfies and practising mindfulness, while Harriet Elvin’s Eeyore longed for someone to invent anti-social media, and Adrian Fry provided a thoroughly 21st-century exchange between William and Violet-Elizabeth Bott: ‘“William thexted me. And I thexted him. We’re going to thext and thext until we’re…” “Thick.” William concluded, self-pityingly.’ Commendations to Paul Wheeler for his portrait of Paddington Bear falling foul of immigration and to Josh Ekroy. The bonus fiver goes to G.M. Davis’s ‘Jabberwocky’ reworked for the digital

E.E. Cummings does the anti-dedication in style in his 1935 volume tellingly titled No Thanks, which he self-published with financial help from his mother. Its dedication page contains a concrete poem printed in the shape of a funeral urn that opens with the words ‘NO THANKS TO…’ and goes on to list the names of the 14 publishing houses who had turned the collection down. The latest competition, which called for an author’s acknowledgments page that bears subtle indications that no thanks at all are due to those mentioned, required an altogether more softly-softly approach, with any ill will on the part of the author to be cunningly concealed beneath

Stephen Fry is a fan of the villanelle — it was what inspired him to write his how-to book for poets, The Ode Less Travelled. And so are you, if the response to a recent call for autumn villanelles is anything to go by. Here is the poet Stanley J Sharpless on the demands of this fiendish form: ‘There are strict rules you cannot misconstrue:/ Five three-line stanzas, capped with a quatrain,/ With only two rhymes all the poem through’. In general, you coped admirably with these technical challenges. D.A. Prince, Mike Morrison and Brian Allgar were especially impressive and narrowly missed the cut. A round of applause for the

Since the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez earlier this year, I have been meaning to set a comp with a magical realist twist and I finally got around to it with this latest challenge — to take something mundane (a parish council meeting or the weather forecast, for example) and filter it through the lens of magic realism. Marquez conjures a world in which the arrival of one character is heralded by a swarm of yellow butterflies, the death of another by a light rain of yellow flowers. Where Remedios the Beauty floats, ‘as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end’, into ‘the upper atmosphere where not even

The call to add a final stanza to a well-known poem attracted an enormous entry. Nicholas Stone imagined how Coleridge might have continued had it not been for the intrusion of the Person of Porlock. Tracy Davidson’s coda to ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ painted a picture of interspecies conjugal bliss-turned-sour. And Penn Harvey added a final installment to Wallace Stevens’s chilly modernist masterpiece ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’. There were strong performances all round this week, and it was difficult to whittle down the entry. Bill Greenwell, Katie Mallett, Alanna Blake, Mike Morrison and Brian Murdoch were pipped to the post, but only just, by the prize-winners below, who are

The latest challenge, to compose a poet’s elegy for him or herself, took you down a path trod by poor Chidiock Tichborne. He wrote his own elegy, the poignant ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’, in 1586, on the night before his execution, aged 28, for his part in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I. Nicholas Stone’s entry, in which he channels the inventor of the clerihew, E.C. Bentley, is rather more upbeat: Edmund Clerihew Bentley Slept fairly contently; But at his life’s close He found total repose. And Mae Scanlan came up with neat twists on Christina Rossetti’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’ and Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. In fact, you were all

The recent invitation to submit an imaginary feature from a newspaper’s health pages extolling the benefits to wellbeing of something traditionally thought to be bad for you drew a smallish entry, but I was impressed by your ability to cast pork scratchings and lard in a favourable light. If you have always viewed the deep-fried Mars Bar with suspicion, think again: Rob Stuart’s entry argues (not altogether convincingly) that, far from being ‘nutritional Armageddon’, the DFMB actually provides us with the requisite five-a-day. Who knew. Brian Murdoch makes a heroic attempt to rehabilitate excessive boozing: ‘The Romans knew about it, of course, and new guidelines have re-endorsed the values of

Submissions to the latest competition, which invited you to provide a poetic preview of when the lights go out, were impressively varied and kept me thoroughly entertained. Honourable mentions go to Katie Mallett, who had Betjeman in mind (‘Fetch out the candles, Norman…’), and to Sylvia Fairley, who was in double-dactylic mood: ‘Jittery-tickery/ Grid electricity/ won’t last for ever, you’d/ better beware…’ Others unlucky to miss out on a place in the winning line-up are Chris O’Carroll, Davina Prince and Pamela Dow. Those that cut the mustard are printed below and are rewarded with £25 each. Alan Millard takes £30. Alan Millard And will the lights fade one by one,

The recent challenge to come up with misleading advice for British tourists travelling abroad produced a postbag that was infused with a spirit of sadistic mischief. As usual with comps of this kind there was an element of repetition. A fair few of you echoed Basil Ransome-Davies’s wise counsel about that ‘quaint British custom’ queueing. ‘Let go of your inhibitions,’ he suggests, ‘and take part in the enjoyable free-for-all of a waiting line in, for example, a French post office.’ There were also several variations on Sean Haffey’s ‘The only state in the USA where marijuana is legal is Florida. However, it is mandatory to declare drugs at Miami customs

Leigh Hunt’s much-anthologised mini rondeau ‘Jenny Kissed Me’ was the inspiration for the latest challenge, which asked competitors to take its first line, substitute another word for ‘kissed’ and continue for up to 16 lines. The poem was apparent-ly inspired by Thomas Carlyle’s wife, Jane Welsh, who gave Hunt a smacker on learning that he’d recovered from a severe bout of flu — as Ray Kelley obviously knows. Here is the concluding half of his excellent entry: Who was Jenny, from her chair Leaping? It was Jane Carlyle. She and Tom, that inkstained pair, Were my neighbours for a while. Sometimes only Jane was there In their Chelsea domicile… Memories