In Competition No 2563 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose whose lines or sentences end with twelve given words in any order. This is my last week minding the Comp Shop while Lucy Vickery has been on maternity leave. It has been a pleasure and a privilege doing business with you all and witnessing your wit and wisdom. Special thanks to Bill Greenwell, Basil Ransome-Davies, Alan Millard and a few other early-bird entrants; if a comp passes the B and B test, the setter knows that it won’t be a total turkey. No less valuable are the later arrivals, like the doughty Scots duo Brian Murdoch and Frank McDonald, whose strong contributions often beef up an otherwise jejune postbag.
This competition was an interesting exercise in word associations: ‘wolf’ tended to prompt nursery memories and fairy tales; ‘gulf’, ‘depth’ and ‘bilge’ maritime themes; ‘plinth’ Trafalgar Square. The winners get £20 each while the bonus tenner goes to Frank McDonald. So now it’s goodbye from me and back to the studio….
Was Caesar just a butcher plagued with angst
About his fits, a monster with no depth,
A vicious brute who fell beneath the plinth
Of murdered Pompey? All the Shakespeare bilge
Of striding the narrow world is good for film,
As though this tyrant thug possessed a breadth
Of wit and wisdom; but he liked his pint
Of blood in Gaul where clemency was scarce.
Sentimental lies have made the month
Of March’s Ides a saint’s day for this wolf.
Perhaps Calpurnia, no treasured sylph,
Saw ’twixt the man and myth a yawning gulf.
Frank McDonald
It’s 1912, and April is the month.
Below the decks, the Irish down a pint,
And jig (come on, this is a Yankee film),
With winsome Winslet like a perfect sylph.
The berg arrives, a giant icy plinth.
The ballroom illustrates the social gulf:
Champagne, and not a hint of moral angst.
Here’s Ismay, with the ethics of a wolf,
Escaping on the lifeboats (very scarce).
The camera explores the length and breadth
Of corridors. Did you expect some depth?
Go, man the pumps! It’s sentimental bilge!
Bill Greenwell
The door of my consulting room creaked and in loped a rangy wolf. He settled himself on the couch and complained of his attacks of angst. ‘It’s all this big and bad stuff which is such bilge! I’m an actor and I’ve got real breadth. Also, dammit, depth. Not that you could tell that from Disney’s wretched film. What hurts is the massive nature of the personality perception gulf. Lupine compliments are pretty scarce. But I bet you could distinguish any one of those bloody pigs from a sylph. Nobody praises my charcuterie and demolition skills, but just listen as soon as one of the little swine has the nous to build his house on a brick plinth!’ To be fair, he said the same thing every month. I calmed him down and then took him down to the Fox and Hounds for a pint.
Brian Murdoch
I found my Soho local and I dropped in for a pint
Of champers, not my usual muddy bilge,
And drank until these eyes had lost their dark,
discerning depth
Behind a bleary, alcoholic film;
No longer poor, outside my door there lurks no
howling wolf —
Trafalgar Square has offered me a plinth
To celebrate my sculptor’s skill of boundless
scope and breadth
And show my latest work — The Slender Sylph.
Such sweet success I’ve never known, so sweet
that I can scarce
Believe my carved creation, born of angst,
Will, fairer than the Square itself, gaze out
across that gulf
From high upon her plinth for many a month!
Alan Millard
That poetry should rhyme is utter bilge,
Like saying sculpture needs a formal plinth;
There are no rules on how to cut a film;
The Bayeux Tapestry’s not normal breadth.
The moon floats free of any dated month,
The freshest milk’s not bottled by the pint;
Loch Ness runs deeper than its stated depth,
And corsets wouldn’t make a lither sylph.
But wait: ‘I hope thou hangst’ does rhyme with
‘angst’,
And north of Watford Gap (that wound-like gulf)
Miss Brodie’s ‘verse’ would surely chime with
‘scarce’
And in good Geordie ‘gulf’ would sound like
‘wolf’.
W.J. Webster
In my dream’s surreal depths
Space has tempo, time has breadth.
Magic creatures swarm; a wolf,
A unicorn, a snake, a sylph.
In that dark, unconscious gulf
Filled with toxic mental bilge
Sanity and strength are scarce.
Feel it leaking by the pint,
Crumbling reason’s fragile plinth,
More corrosive by the month
As I suppurate with angst.
Sleep’s a trashy horror film.
Basil Ransome-Davies
‘Ooowwwww, with this one I’m out of my depth!’
‘What’s wrong, my scrumptious little sylph?’
‘It’s this bloody Spectator competition, the one with the ridiculous words; I mean, for goodness sake, “plinth”?’
‘I’ve no idea why you bother with that bilge. Look at you, you’re a raging cauldron of angst. I’d be forgiven for thinking it was the wrong time of the month!’
‘At least I don’t howl like a wolf! Honestly, you sound like something from a tacky horror film! Look, I need to concentrate; make yourself scarce!’
‘Oh my petal, gone are the days when your horizons had such breadth. You’ve become so obsessed with that damn magazine that it’s creating a chasm between us; an ever-widening gulf!’
Celeste Francis
No. 2566: Paracrostic
You are invited to submit a poem (16 lines maximum) in which the initial letters of each line, read down the page, reproduce the first. Entries to ‘Competition 2566’ by 9 October or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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