In Competition No. 2425 you were invited to do as Ovid did: give poetic advice as to how to pick up, seduce and keep a lover of either sex. Here’s one of Ovid’s shrewd pieces of advice to girls (my translation, The Modern Library, New York, rush out and buy it): Steer clear of the
In Competition No. 2424 you were invited to write a poem naming in each line a startling event which will occur during each month this year, ending with a four-line glimpse of the more distant future. ‘Fasten your seatbelts’ was the consensus. I shall gag myself to make space for the winners, pausing only to
In Competition No. 2423 you were invited to write a poem in the voice of a fed-up soldier, of any country or date, far from home. I was apprehensive that most of you would use this invitation to vent your feelings about the unhappy war in Iraq, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety
In Competition No. 2422 you were invited to write a poem or a piece of prose entitled ‘Dinner with the Devil’. ‘My meal consisted of an omelette made from eggs seven years past their sell-by date and stuffed with the minced brains of lunatics who never attended church on Sunday’ — Adam Campbell’s menu, reminiscent
In Competition No. 2421 you were given an opening couplet of a poem, ‘I knew a girl who was so pure/ She couldn’t say the word manure’ and invited to continue for a further 16 lines. The couplet comes from ‘A Perfect Lady’, a poem by Reginald Arkell (who he?) in The Everyman Book of
In Competition No. 2420 you were invited to invent words describing something familiar which fill a need in the English language. The germ of this competition was a book called The Meaning of Tingo which assembles ‘extraordinary words from around the world’, from which I learnt that the Japanese have a single word to describe
In Competition No. 2419 you were invited to supply a poem in free verse beginning ‘I think continually of …’ ‘…those who were truly great’ completes the first line of a much anthologised poem by Stephen Spender. Free verse has a tendency to slip into something like very rough blank verse, and some of you
In Competition No. 2418 you were given certain rhyme-words in a certain order and invited to write a poem accordingly. The rhymes came from Masefield’s ‘Where They Took Train’ which has a rather unexpected first line, ‘Gomorrah paid so for its holiday’. I hope the old Poet Laureate would be happy rather than horrified at
In Competition No. 2417 you were given the opening: ‘He was twenty-three and oh! so agonisingly conscious of the fact. The train came bumpingly to a halt …’ and invited to add 150 or fewer words launching a sensitive and inadequate anti-hero on his fictional adventures. Denis Stone, Huxley’s passenger in Crome Yellow, was the
In Competition No. 2416 you were invited to reduce the life story of a famous person or a fictional character to three limericks. I was strict about metre and rhyme. A limerick is technically a very conventional form of poetry, and so when my ear was offended I turned my thumb down. And I was
In Competition No. 2415 you were invited to categorise six types of …walk? drunk? bore? I left it to you. Here is one of Sydney Smith’s types of handshake: ‘The retentive shake — one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware
In Competition No. 2414 you were invited to supply some typically trivial twaddle from a gossip column. All my life, from the days of ‘Jennifer’s’ vapid chatter in the Tatler to the more toxic and intrusive modern muck-rakers, I have regarded gossip columnists, along with the paparazzi, as one of the lower forms of life.
In Competition No. 2413 you were invited to supply a poem such as might have been written by the Revd Spooner. William Archibald Spooner, the myopic, albino warden of New College, was not, as I had always imagined, a Victorian figure: his wardenship was 1903–24 and he died in 1930. As an educationist he would
In Competition No. 2412 you were invited to supply a ‘jabberwocky’ poem beginning ‘’Twas brillig…’and containing new words of your own invention. By ‘jabberwocky’, which was deliberately lower case, I meant no more than surreal. I wasn’t inviting you to follow Carroll’s monster-slaying scenario, or his metrical scheme, only to match his inventiveness with neologisms
In Competition No. 2411 you were invited to supply a poem or piece of prose entitled ‘The Last Smoker on Earth’. William Danes-Volkov wrote to me, ‘Anyone attempting this competition should read Garrison Keillor’s brilliant and terrifying story “The Last Cigarette Smoker in America”.’ Terrifying too is Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Last Man’, in which
In Competition No. 2410 you were provided with opening and closing words and invited to write a story with the above title. The given words were supposed to be the opening and closing ones of a Maclaren Ross story with this title, but owing to a clerical error, in other words my own foolish blunder,
In Competition No. 2409 you were invited to provide a vitriolic review of a generally acknowledged masterpiece by a critic at the time of its appearance. ‘Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer’ was Le Figaro’s stern verdict on Madame Bovary. The Odessa Courier greeted Anna Karenina with ‘Sentimental rubbish …Show me one page that contains
In Competition No. 2408 you were given an opening couplet — ‘Oh, plague of plagues! Wherever I turn, French tricks,/ French schemes, French morals, and French politics!’ — and invited to continue either in the modern or the 18th-century mode. The opening couplet came from a contributor to Fraser’s Magazine, a Tory journal, in the
In Competition No. 2407 you were invited to incorporate 12 words into a plausible piece of prose, using them not in an animal, vegetable or mineral sense. Inadvertently, I made this competition more difficult than the genre usually is by giving you fewer choices of alternative meanings to play with. Consequently I have been lenient
In Competition No. 2406 you were invited to write a nostalgic poem about commercial products or brand images that are no longer with us. ‘O my Brylcreem and my Trugel long ago!’ sighed Tony Dawson. ‘Just bring me my Seebakrascope,’ begged John Whitworth (for those of you too young to remember, this was a miniature