Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3091 you were invited to submit toe-curlingly bad analogies. This is an idea shamelessly pinched from the Washington Post, whose contests have produced the impressively so-bad-they’re good ‘Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze’ (Chuck Smith) and ‘Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever’ (Jennifer Hart).

In Competition No. 3090 you were invited to submit a recently discovered lost poem by a well-known poet that makes us see him or her in a new light. Step forward, Philip Larkin, flower arranger, Slough fan John Betjeman and knickers-on-fire Emily Dickinson. Congratulations all round are in order this week, but I especially admired

In Competition No. 3089 you were invited to put your own spin on a weather forecast.   The seed for the task came from the Master Singers’ take on a weather report, soothingly intoned in the style of an Anglican chant. But as one competitor reminded me there is also that 1970s gem, courtesy of

In Competition No. 3088 you were invited to submit a short story in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction set in the corridors of power. Raymond Chandler cast a long shadow over an entry bristling with stinging one-liners, dames, black humour and grandstanding similes laid on with a trowel. The mean streets of Westminster were

In Competition No. 3087 you were invited to submit haikicks. We already have short-form hybrids such as the clerihaiku (here’s one from Mary Holtby): Peter Palumbo Cries, ‘Mumbo-jumbo!’ and rails At the Prince of Wales   And the limeraiku:   A haiku will do   For a limerick trick, called A Limeraiku. That was by

In Competition No. 3086 you were invited to submit a poem about the difficulty of writing a poem.   In a far-larger-than-usual entry, A.H. Harker’s punchy couplet caught my eye: I’m stuck. Oh ****.   Elsewhere there were nods to Wordsworth, Milton and ‘The Thought Fox’, Ted Hughes’s wonderful poem about poetic inspiration. The winners

In Competition No. 3085 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Valentine’s Day. The day is said to have its roots in the Roman pagan festival of Lupercalia. But one scholar has proposed the theory that it was Chaucer who first designated 14 February as a day of love in his poem

In Competition No. 3084 you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘Breaking up is hard to do’.   From David Kilshaw’s Brexit-inspired twist on Neil Sedaka — ‘Commons, commons, down, dooby, doo, down down…’ — to Dorothy Pope’s poignant haiku — ‘plum blossom petals/ mistaken now for snowflakes/ so cold is your love’ —

In Competition No. 3083 you were invited to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with a tweet…’.   Hats off to Philip Machin for an appropriately pithy submission: It started with a tweet — There’s nothing wrong in that — But, sadly, indiscreet: It ended with a cat. Elsewhere, in

In Competition No. 3082 you were invited to write a poem taking as your first line ‘Happy the man, and happy he alone’, which begins the much-loved eighth stanza of poet–translator Dryden’s rendition of Horace’s Ode 29 from Book III.   At a time of year when we traditionally take stock and have a futile