In Competition No. 3344 you were invited to submit a poem expressing feelings – positive or negative – about a poetic form. The standard was impressively high, with near-misses for Max Ross, Sylvia Fairley and David Silverman, whose entry ended by rendering Paradise Lost in a single haiku (‘Angel turns nasty/ Temptation in the garden/ A big mistake. Huge’). All below win a well-deserved £25.
The way its rigid pattern goes,
The triolet repeats a lot.
A canny reader quickly knows
The way its rigid pattern goes.
It’s an enchanting form to those
Whose memory’s completely shot.
The way its rigid pattern goes,
The triolet repeats. A lot.
You get to hear this first line thrice.
And this one is repeated, too.
In triolets, that’s not a vice.
You get to hear this first line thrice!
Familiarity feels nice,
Providing comfort. Lucky you!
You get to hear this first line thrice.
And this one is repeated, too.
Max Gutmann
Yes, it brought me fame and fortune,
But it’s horribly pervasive,
And I wish I’d never nicked it
From that wretched Kalevala!
Trouble is, trochaic rhythm
Never seems to want to leave you,
Till you cannot form a sentence,
Even talking to the milkman:
‘Leave an extra pint tomorrow
And I’ll settle up on Friday.’
If I try to write a sonnet,
Or some stuff in terza rima,
In comes Hia-bloody-watha’s
Tumpty tumpty tumpty tumpty!
Poets should from me take warning:
Trochees turn your brain to jelly.
Brian Murdoch
A villanelle is rigid in its form,
With five tercets, and quatrain to conclude:
It worships repetition as the norm.
In poetry, it’s true, one must conform,
But this feels like a supper badly stewed:
A villanelle is rigid in its form:
Good poetry makes waves, linguistic storms,
But not the villanelle, with lines renewed:
It worships repetition as the norm.
A poet knows she’s failed if readers yawn,
And see her as a fixed, unchanging dude:
A villanelle is rigid in its form.
For Speccie comps it’s too long to perform:
To 19 lines it’s resolutely glued:
It worships repetition as the norm.
So, how it ends, I’ll leave you uninformed…
Nicholas Lee
Rumpety pumpety
Dactyls when doublesome
Typically trip off the
Orator’s tongue.
Rhythmically rigorous
Characteristically
Fun for all ages and
Better when sung.
Joe Houlihan
Adept at prose, I strained to be poetic,
Given the talent Erato releases.
The wish was there, the outcome quite pathetic.
Failure. My ego crumbled into pieces.
I sadly lacked the Whitman-Ginsberg touch,
Unvarnished wit. I needed some prosthesis.
Disabled at free verse, I had to clutch
Whatever aids could lift me from the mire.
There, rhyme and metre acted as a crutch.
Dante, you played a blinder to inspire
Whole centuries of greats and not-so-greats
But seldom the insipid or the dire.
The chain of terza rima calibrates
Infinity, so when you hit the wall
Be thankful for the impulse it creates.
Relax and finish with a dying fall.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Oh what a lovely sonnet this one is –
How gloriously, in only fourteen lines
It somehow, without fuss or strain, combines
Its honest wisdom with linguistic fizz.
How surely it from line to line progresses,
With subtle tact approaching the sublime –
How neatly every line-end finds a rhyme.
How deep the aesthetic issues it addresses.
How nice a man its poet has to be
To make a work so rich and so impressive,
So full of thoughts, yet focused, not digressive;
It is a work of solid quality –
So neatly made! And notice how it flows
Towards its perfect and so poignant close.
George Simmers
When normal folk wrote formal verse
I heard a poet say,
Beware a fast-approaching curse;
Free verse will soon hold sway.
All formal rules will be destroyed
And cause poetic blight.
Free verse is not the real McCoy
But it’s easier to write.
I found its ‘freedoms’ so perverse
That I forbore to try it.
So I’m still writing formal verse
Though fewer folk now buy it.
Today free verse is just a joke
To those of us who know it’s
Clearly made too many folk
Believe that they are poets.
Martin Parker
No. 3347: Nursery crimes
You are invited to submit a nursery rhyme written in the style of a hard-boiled crime novel. Please email entries of up to 16 lines or 150 words to competition@spectator.co.uk by 24 April.
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