Lucy Vickery

In Competition No. 3029 you were invited to provide a new year’s resolution (or more than one) in verse.   Woody Guthrie’s 1943 ‘new years rulin’s’ have considerable charm: ‘Dont get lonesome; stay glad; dream good; shine shoes; wash teeth if any…’ But perhaps it was Nietzsche who inspired Basil Ransome-Davies’s entry. In 1882, he

In Competition No. 3028 you were invited to submit lines for a Christmas card courtesy of well-known poets. Poets moved to write Yule-inspired verse include that old killjoy William Topaz Mc-Gonagall: ‘The way to respect Christmas time/ Is not by drinking whisky or wine’. And, of course, John Betjeman: ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad,/

In Competition No. 3027 you were invited to submit a poem inspired by the Shipping Forecast.   Life-saver, lullaby, poetic reminder of our maritime heritage, the Shipping Forecast celebrated its 150th anniversary this year. Charlotte Green has described it as the nearest she ever came to reading poetry on air; Carol Ann Duffy ended her

In Competition No. 3026 you were invited to submit topical double dactyls.   The double dactyl was dreamed up in 1951 by the poet Anthony Hecht and the classical scholar Paul Pascal. My well-thumbed copy of Jiggery-Pokery, a wonderful 1967 compendium of the form edited by Hecht and the poet John Hollander, reveals with pride

In Competition No. 3025 you were invited to submit a Lord’s Prayer for the 21st century.   One of my favourites, among the many parodies of the Lord’s Prayer already out there, is Ian Dury’s ‘Bus Driver’s Prayer’: ‘Our father,/ who art in Hendon/ Harrow Road be Thy name./ Thy Kingston come; thy Wimbledon…’.  

In Competition No. 3024 you were invited to submit a short story in the style of Dan Brown. This comp, a nod to the glorious awfulness of the wildly rich, bestselling author Dan Brown’s much-mocked prose, drew a nicely calibrated entry. In the interests of allowing space for six winners (who are rewarded with £25

In Competition No. 3023 you were invited to submit cringeworthy portmanteau words. The word portmanteau was first used in this sense by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass when Humpty Dumpty is explaining ‘Jabberwocky’ to Alice: ‘Well, “slithy” means “lithe and slimy”… You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed

In Competition No. 3022 you were invited to compose a safe poem that Boris Johnson could have on hand to quote from when out in the field. The recent kerfuffle caused by the Foreign Secretary’s murmured quotation of a few lines of Kipling’s poem ‘Mandalay’ during a visit to Shwedagon Pagoda in Myanmar led me

In Competition No. 3021 you were invited to compose terrifying lullabies. Lorca wondered why ‘Spain reserved the most potent songs of blood to lull its children to sleep, those least suited to their delicate sensibilities’, but the Scandinavians set the bar pretty high too: the unsoothing–sounding ‘Krakevisa’, from Norway, tells of gruesome uses for the

In Competition No. 3020 you were invited to submit the formula for a successful marriage courtesy of a well-known husband or wife in literature.   Some time ago, I challenged you to do the same on behalf of well-known poets, and if you like your advice brief and to the point, there’s always Ogden Nash’s