Lucy Vickery

Lucy Vickery resents this week's competition In Competition No. 2677 you were invited to submit a poem in dispraise of Christmas. The challenge awakened your inner Scrooge, eliciting a heartfelt chorus of disapproval of all things yule-related. Stoking the anti-Christmas spirit was the prospect of dry, tasteless turkey, grasping, ungrateful children, needle-shedding trees and the torture of office parties — among much else. Commendations to W.J. Webster, Chris O’Carroll and Shirley Curran. The winners, printed below, get £25 apiece and the festive bonus fiver is Bill Greenwell’s. Happy Christmas!

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale. A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of volume, the nightingales were on especially withering form. Everyone shone this week, but Jan D. Hodge, Catherine Tufariello, W.J. Webster, John Beaton and G.W. Tapper stood out and were unlucky losers. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece; George Simmers pockets the extra five pounds. Darkling I’ve listened, too, while you orate About my warbling till I’ve grown quite shirty.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2675 you were invited to submit a book-jacket blurb for a well-known work of fiction that is designed to be as off-putting as possible. You were on sparkling form all round this week, especially Marion Shore, Robert Schechter and John O’Byrne. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and in a photo finish the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll by a nose. At last, a book that children and adults alike can turn to for a comprehensive analysis of the sexual mores and socio-economic paradigms that defined England in the 1930s. Mary Poppins is a stern young spinster employed by the Banks family (a name that alerts the reader to author P.L.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2674 you were invited to submit an elegy on the death of Paul the Octopus, who died peacefully in his tank last month aged a respectable two-and-a-half. Paul was catapulted from the obscurity of an aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany to international celebrity when he accurately predicted the outcome of several World Cup matches. Commendations to Jerome Betts and Bill Greenwell. The bonus fiver is Noel Petty’s. His fellow winners get £25 each. Great Paul, the psychic octopus, is dead, His wisdom lost, locked in that mighty head. Eight times his art was tried, eight times it passed, Thus proving that the future is precast.

Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each. Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture of the nation.

In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another well known poem: Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I — She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour... Ray Kelley, John Whitworth and George Simmers were unlucky losers, and while I was impressed by Clementine Travers’s Whitman pastiche the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty by a whisker. His fellow winners pocket £30 each.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2668 you were invited to submit a poem that contains advice from young to old. Several of you took as your starting point Robert Southey’s po-faced ‘The Old Man’s Comforts and how he gained them’ — or Lewis Carroll’s much more enjoyable parody of it as recited by Alice in chapter five of her Adventures In Wonderland. Michael Birt, Tim Raikes, Katie Mallett and Josephine Boyle impressed but were squeezed out by the winners, printed below, who earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch bags the bonus fiver. You are old, Father William, though threescore and ten Is not the top whack any more, And everyone tells me (though heaven forfend!) You might live to a hundred and four.

In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. In Competition No. 2667 you were invited to supply a reflection, in verse, on Sunday morning. You split into two camps: some infused with the bleak spirit of Billie Holiday’s ‘Gloomy Sunday’ (‘Gloomy is Sunday with shadows I spend it all, / My heart and I have decided to end it all’); others full of the joys of lie-ins, an ocean of colour supplements, bacon and eggs, and Sunday worship. It was Wallace Stevens’s meditation that inspired this challenge, and Basil Ransome-Davies’s response to it earns him the bonus fiver. His fellow winners get £25. I read it first in trancelike puzzlement.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2666 you were invited to supply an example of pretentious tosh in the shape of a review of a TV or radio soap opera or any other piece of entertainment aimed at the mass market. It is tempting with this type of comp to go over the top and points were awarded to those competitors whose tosh, however affected and overblown, had at least the semblance of developing an argument. Patrick Smith and Adrian Fry were unlucky losers; the winners get £30 each except Brian Murdoch, who nets £35. I am not I, they are not they, Coronation Street is not Inkerman Street. Coronation Street is, however, an ongoing paradigm, a speculum humanae vitae, whose cobbles incorporate the Heideggerian necessity of existence.

In Competition No. 2665 you were invited to submit a lullaby suitable for the modern child. ‘But do lullabies lull?’ writes competitor W.J. Webster, who puts an adult fear of heights (not to mention a horror of half-rhymes) down to repeated exposure as a little’un to the strains of ‘Rock-a-bye baby’. Among the more nightmare-inducing elements that you weaved into your songs for the infant of today were global warming, economic meltdown, gastric bands and cyber childcare. There were more winners than space this week, so bad luck to D.A. Prince, George Simmers and Martin Parker, who narrowly missed out. Bill Greenwell pockets the bonus fiver while his fellow winners net £25 apiece.

In Competition 2664 you were invited to submit a dialogue, in verse or prose, between two parts of yourself at odds with one another. As usual, verse entries vastly outnumbered prose ones. In an excellent field, Brian Murdoch, Adrian Fry, Bill Greenwell and Fergus Pickering stood out. Basil Ransome-Davies scoops the bonus fiver for a hilarious exchange between id and superego. This is your superego calling, Who finds your conduct quite appalling. do da dirty do da sin dump da pussy in da bin To raise us from the primal swamp We must curtail the instinct’s romp. why dont we do it in da road up ya bum ya moral code A sense of civic duty needs To govern all our words and deeds.

In Competition No. 2663 you were invited to submit a politically correct version of a well-known fairy tale. The inspiration for this challenge was  Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life and Times by James Finn Garner, who recasts favourite yarns to take account of modern political sensibilities. In  Garner’s PC world, witches are ‘kindness impaired’ and Cinderella wears a robe ‘woven from silk stolen from unsuspecting silkworms’. Bill Greenwell pockets the extra fiver this week. His fellow winners, printed below, get £30 apiece. Honourable mentions go to G.M. Davis, Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing and Marion Shore.

In Competition No. 2662 you were invited to submit a poem composed in the midst of a travel hold-up. The entry, a magnificent collective letting-off-of-steam, was peppered with exasperated references to apoplectic rage, bursting bladders and bickering children but these were tempered by those who acknowledged that there are benefits in being forced to take things more slowly. Basil Ransome-Davies was one of them, and he pockets the bonus fiver. The other winners, printed below, get £25 each. Honourable mentions go to D.A. Prince, Ray Kelley, Gail White, Bill Greenwell and Joan Harris. When trains are late you wait. There is no     choice.

In Competition No. 2661 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Day of Doom’. As Google will tell you in a trice, the title is that of an epic poem about Judgment Day by the 17-century New England minister Michael Wigglesworth. Puritans lapped up its florid account of a wrathful God meting out punishment to the sinning hordes and the first edition — 1,800 copies — sold within a year, which was remarkable at the time. So, not the most uplifting subject matter, but it obviously continues to compel, producing a large entry full of originality and spark. On especially strong form were John Whitworth, Nigel Harding, Nick Hubbard, Margaret J. Howell, Adrian Fry and W.J. Webster, who were all unlucky losers.

Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition In Competition No. 2660 you were invited to submit a poem in praise of a bodily part that has been overlooked by poets. You turned out in force to celebrate the unsung heroes of our anatomy. Sonnets to the spleen rubbed shoulders with paeans to the pancreas and odes to organs I’d never heard of. Some made me queasy, others — Mick Poole, especially — made me chortle; but everyone impressed, so congratulations all round. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and G.M. Davis pockets £30. There are those whose gonads ripple at the mention of a nipple, While others prize the knuckle or the heel, And although the thought may pain us there are some who view the anus As their cherished anatomical ideal.

In Competition No. 2659 you were invited to take the title of a well-known novel and write an amusing poem with the same title. There are some long lines this week, which leaves space only to mention unlucky losers Mae Scanlan and Max Ross. The winning six get £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30. Anna Karenina used to cause Lenin a few sleepless nights when he took her to bed; and though he saw Tolstoy as big as the Bolshoi he thought it revolting his books weren’t red. Glum Dostoyevsky considered her risqué and called her shenanigans flighty and vain; and he was astonished at how she was punished: a cleaver should cleave her, not wheels on a train.

In Competition No. 2658 you were invited to submit a bedroom scene written by a novelist who would not normally venture into such territory. A wise choice, it seems: even literary giants come a cropper when writing about sex. John Updike was shortlisted four times for one of Britain’s least coveted literary prizes, the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, eventually scooping a lifetime achievement award. You rose to the challenge admirably. The winners earn £25 each and the bonus fiver goes to Chris O’Carroll.

In Competition No. 2657 you were invited to imagine what merry band Chaucer might bring together if he were writing today. It was another bumper entry this week, and you fell into two camps. There were those who reasoned that were Chaucer writing today he’d probably use modern English. Others, though, couldn’t resist the lure of Middle English, which was used to great comic effect. As spelling in the 14th century was a fluid affair (despite Chaucer’s attempts to standardise it), I didn’t worry too much on that score. What was more important was to capture the wit and vibrancy of his writing, and many of you did so admirably. Commendations go to unlucky losers Marion Shore, Brian Murdoch, Gerard Benson, Bill Greenwell, Paul Griffin and G.W.

In Competition No. 2656 you were invited to submit a dialogue between two well-known figures from different centuries, each using the argot of the time. You responded to this challenge with your usual verve and skill, and I especially liked Frank McDonald’s conversation between Julius Caesar and Churchill (Templumcollis) on the trials of wartime leadership. The winners, printed below, get £30 each and the bonus fiver goes to Brian Murdoch for an entertaining exchange between literary giants about Britain’s woeful performance in sport and song, of the sort that is to be heard in pubs up and down the land. GC: ‘By Christes bludde and Goddes bones, saye me, Shakespeare, what men in Engeland nowadaye tell sootheliche of sporte and of playe.

In Competition No. 2655 you were asked to submit a poem about a mundane household task such as boiling an egg or changing a light bulb in the style of a poet of your choice. Pastiche always pulls in the crowds, and true to form the entries came flooding in. Commendations go to Virginia Price Evans, Paul Griffin, Martin Parker, Gee McIlraith and Tim Raikes, all of whom were unlucky losers. But a pat on the back all round: entries were almost uniformly magnificent and it was extremely tough to choose only a handful. The winners are printed below and earn their authors £25 each. The bonus fiver belongs to George Simmers.