Spectator competition winners: ‘Email’: poems after Auden’s ‘Night Mail’

In Competition No. 3280, you were invited to submit an updating of W.H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ entitled ‘Email’.

‘Night Mail’ was written to accompany a section of the excellent 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like a ‘half-witted Swedish deckhand’). Auden used a stopwatch as he was writing to ensure that each snippet of spoken verse fit the shot on which it commented. ‘We were experimenting to see whether poetry could be used in films,’ he said, ‘and I think we showed it could.’

A commendation to Ann Drysdale, Sylvia Fairley and Frank Upton, who accompanied his entry with the observation that in ‘Night Mail’ the poet’s first thoughts – ‘bringing the cheque and the postal order’ – are of money. The winners, printed below, pocket £25 each.

This is the email surfing the ether,
Cool from the Arctic or hot from Ibiza,
Email from loved ones, email from creeps,
Some to delete, some filed for keeps,
Email that greets you with Ciao or Buongiorno,
Email that flogs Californian porno,
Miserable memos, or, very much cheerier,
Catfishing scammers from coastal Nigeria.
Client to server, server to client,
Hypertext transfer that must be compliant,
Protocol-perfect, or else, out of kilter,
It won’t even fill up your spam-hungry filter.
Round the clock email, any old hour,
Seducing the eye with an untoward power –
You biro-mad tyros, desist from your scrawl,
For the postie won’t knock on your front door at all.

Bill Greenwell

Out in the ether the emails are flying,
Always delivering, distance defying;
Leaving sad snail mail to dwindle and sink,
Wiping out envelopes, paper and ink;
There’s no competition because they are free –
But that’s at the cost of what contact should be.
Caps and emojis, a whimsical font
Are not the expressions of feeling we want.
But all the bland sameness and boxfuls of spam
Are nothing compared to the fear of a scam.
Behind