Literary competition

The request for your thoughts, in verse or prose, on who the Person from Porlock might have been (assuming, of course, that there was such a person) drew a large and inventive entry. Many thanks to John McGivering, who suggested this excellent competition. Some fingered, as De Quincey did, Coleridge’s doctor and laudanum source, but also in the frame were Jehovah’s Witnesses, PPI ambulance-chasers and the drugs squad. And many of you agreed with Stevie Smith’s assessment, in her poem ‘Thoughts about the Person from Porlock’: ‘As the truth is I think he was already stuck With Kubla Khan. He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished, I shall

For the latest competition you were invited to compose odes on a Grayson Perry urn. Jonathan Jones memorably described being in a roomful of Grayson Perry’s pots as ‘like being trapped in a room full of trendy folk talking bollocks’. Frank McDonald obviously agrees with this assessment. His ode begins: ‘Do Grayson Perry urns deserve an ode?/ Has modern art not shamed the Muse enough?/ That looks for beauty in a tortured toad/ And loads our galleries with frightful stuff?’ Elsewhere, the entry was chock-full of adroit Keatsian references. Honourable mentions go to Frank Upton, G.M. Davis, Sylvia Fairley and Graham King. The deserving winners below take £20 each. W.J.

The latest challenge was to supply an extract from an Ig Nobel Prize-winner’s speech that describes the ‘achievement’ (invented by you) being honoured. The Igs are spoof awards handed out annually at Harvard for scientific achievements that manage to be both hilarious and thought-provoking. In 2014’s Neuroscience category, for example, the award was scooped by Jiangang Liu et al. for their contribution to our understanding of what happens in the brains of people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. And just last month, Egyptian urologist Ahmed Shafik was honoured in this year’s Reproduction category for his work testing the effects of wearing various fabrics on

The seasonal challenge to submit a poem about autumn in the style of the poet of your choice was predictably popular and brought in a stellar entry: high fives all round. There were a couple of nifty twists on Philip Larkin; G.M. Southgate’s autumnal take on his poem ‘The Trees’, for example, which begins: The trees are falling out of leaf Like something almost being lost They’re waiting for the autumn frost The summer has been all too brief And here’s a taste of Basil Ransome-Davies’s clever reworking of ‘This Be the Verse: They let you down, the leaves on trees That get the accolades in spring, But five months

The invitation to take the title of a short story by Ted Hughes, How the Whale Became, substitute another animal or fish for ‘whale’ and provide a tale with that title brought in oodles of well turned entries bursting with charm. The comp was an absolute delight to judge, so well done, one and all. Special mentions go to C.J. Gleed, Michael McManus, Frank McDonald and Tracy Davidson, who were unlucky losers. The winners take £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to Bill Greenwell. Bill Greenwell: How the Aphid Became Call me Nana. I was born when my mother was being born, into one gender, no need for more, only

For the latest competition you were invited to filter popular nursery rhymes through the prism of political correctness. Some years ago, CBeebies came under fire when it took all the fun out of ‘Humpty Dumpty’ by changing the words to give it a happy ending. And it wasn’t just Humpty; Little Miss Muffet and the spider lived nauseatingly happily ever after too. Now that this culture of avoidance has well and truly taken hold, with the explosion of safe spaces and trigger warnings, it felt like high time to invite you to recast other favourite rhymes into a format that will be acceptable to the offspring of Generation Snowflake. The

It was Edna St Vincent Millay’s sonnet-about-the-sonnet ‘I will put Chaos into fourteen lines’ that prompted me to invite a poem about a verse form written in that verse form. But there are other similar examples — Robert Burns’s fine ‘A Sonnet upon Sonnets’, for one: ‘Fourteen, a sonneteer thy praises sings;/ What magic myst’ries in that number lie!…’ There were lots of poems about the sonnet in all its guises, but I was also drowning in limericks, clerihews, double dactyls, haikus, cinquains, pantoums, ottava rima, terza rima — many of them brilliantly well made. Accomplished entries from D.A. Smith, Jane Blanchard, Frank McDonald, Hugh King, Noah Heyl, Max Gutmann,

The latest call was for stonkingly bad ideas for children’s books, an Olympic sport, a television sitcom or a reality TV series. Reading your entries brought back fond if painful memories of Alan Partridge’s Inner-City Sumo — ‘We take fat people from inner cities, put them in big nappies…’ — and monkey tennis. V. Ernest Cox’s proposed children’s book, A Pop-Up Book of Sexting, vied with John Samson’s Dignitas showjumping (don’t ask) for the bad-taste award, while Douglas G. Brown’s Poop Scoopin’ Fetishists scooped the gong for grossness. Top marks to Tracy Davidson’s pitch for the one-size-fits-all reality TV show The Only Way Is Strictly Come Dine With Me In

Tennyson’s lines ‘bright and fierce and fickle is the South,/And dark and true and tender is the North’ (from ‘The Princess: O Swallow’) prompted me to ask for poems about either the North or South or one comparing the two. Midlands man John Priestland felt that something was missing: We know the North is at the top, The South is at the bottom, But isn’t there another part That Lucy has forgotten? But that didn’t stop the rest of you producing a wide-ranging and exhilarating entry that took me from the bridge table to North Korea and beyond. Impressive contributions from Hamish Wilson, Samantha Skyrme and Ann Drydale were narrowly

In the latest competition you were invited to supply a poem about a body part of an author of your choosing. This challenge was inspired by the engaging title of a book by John Sutherland: Orwell’s Nose. In 2012 Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. Shortly thereafter, he set about rereading the works of George Orwell’s and was struck by how obsessed Orwell was with what things smell like. The only noses in the entry, Gertrude Stein’s and Anna Akhmatova’s, had to share the limelight with Belloc’s bottom, Byron’s balls, Jane Austen’s breasts and Freud’s penis. In a palmary entry bursting with wit and invention Paul Evans, Christopher Boyle, Ann

The latest competition called for poems on the theme of summer in which the last two words of each line rhyme. It was only after the entries started coming in that I realised that my sloppy wording meant that the brief was open to interpretation. In most submissions, the last two words in a line rhymed with one another, which is what I had intended, but a few supplied poems in which the last two words in a line rhymed with the last two in the line below. Either approach was admissible, and variety made the comp all the more pleasurable to judge. This nice four-liner from Robert Schechter turned

The invitation to submit a conversation between St Peter and a well-known figure who is demanding admission to heaven. Although the brief asked for a dialogue, Janice Harayda’s Donald Trump made the cut despite St Peter not getting a word in edgeways. Given that Trump doesn’t come across as the greatest listener — when asked who he consults on foreign policy he replied that his primary consultant was himself — this struck me as an altogether plausible scenario. It was a strong performance all round: your supplicants, who ranged from John Bunyan to Hitler, deployed wit, guile and barefaced cheek in trying to wiggle their way past the keeper of

The latest competition asked for poems with titles which riff on that of Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Although it was a varied and inventive entry there was a fair amount of doubling-up: while G.M. Davis and Tracy Davidson decided to speculate on what the first perusal of an Ann Summers shop window might be like, impressive entries from both Jayne Osborn and Alanna Blake revealed the contents of a teenage daughter’s diaries. There was a lot of skill on show elsewhere too: commendations to Paul Evans, A.R. Duncan-Jones, Tony Goldman, Tim Raikes John Whitworth and John Priestland. The winners take £25 each. Max Ross nabs £30.

The call for extracts from the unappealing-sounding programme of a festival that is making a misguided attempt to stand out in an overcrowded marketplace drew a smallish but distinguished field. Competitors might have taken inspiration from the Daily Mash’s ‘Magic Fox Vintage Smoothie Boutique Urban Forest Pop Up Chill Retreat’, a ‘hybrid of Waitrose and The Wicker Man’ and ‘a combination of all the most annoying, smug, po-faced aspects of festival culture into a smorgasbord of heavily-branded twatness’. Highlights included ‘people wearing fox masks just prancing around aimlessly’. Adrian Fry shone and is rewarded with the bonus fiver. The rest earn £30. Adrian Fry The Tipsy Boar, Tunbridge Wells, is

The invitation to supply a report on a Uefa Euro 2016 match written in the florid style beloved of some sportswriters produced entries of inspired awfulness. How about this, from Mike Morrison: ‘The craven defence unravelled like cartoon knitwear, enabling Dottirdottir, the archetype of stoic strategy, to blithely torpedo the decider through the enmeshed architraves of triumph.’ John O’Byrne, Josh Ekroy and Derek Morgan were on impressively toe-curling form too, but were pipped to the post by those entries printed below which earn their authors £25 each. Adrian Fry pockets the extra fiver. Adrian Fry Spain’s three-nil defeat of Turkey demonstrated how, in Spanish hands at least, soccer is a

The invitation to supply an ode to a greasy spoon was prompted by a recent column that Melissa Kite wrote bemoaning the rise of independent cafés and the consequent demise of the decent, non-locally foraged fry-up. In my neck of the woods, certainly, you can’t move for avocado and buckwheat while options that pack that satisfying fat-carb-combo punch are thin on the ground. Most of your odes were to a caff, but a few chose to address a greasy piece of cutlery instead. I liked Josh Ekroy’s spin on Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and there was nice work, too, from Nick Campailla and John Priestland. The winners take £25; Brian

The latest competition called for a sonnet that has the name of a tree hidden in every line. This fiendish challenge, which was suggested by a reader, drew a large entry — and the following envoi from Alanna Blake: ‘Gor blimey, not the easiest of romps!/ But, Lucy, press on with these teasing comps.’ We had room for seven winners this week. High fives to unlucky losers John Priestland, Nicholas Hodgson and Matt Quinn; 20 quid each to those below; Frank McDonald takes the bonus fiver. Frank McDonald The Roman gods were wittier than ours; They could appear in shapes that fooled our sense, Bamboozling hapless maidens with their powers