Lucy Vickery

Competition: Double dactyl

issue 10 March 2012

In Competition No. 2737 you were invited to submit a double dactyl.

This popular and, judging by the size of the entry, extraordinarily compulsive poetic parlour game was invented in the Sixties by the celebrated poets Anthony Hecht and John Hollander and is described in the blurb of Jiggery-Pokery, their magnificent compendium of the form, as a ‘devilish amalgam of rhyme, meter, name-dropping and pure nonsense’.

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