New Statesman -- Gerard Manley Hopkins -- August 8 deadline
 

No 4286
By Leonora Casement
We want a poem in the style of Gerard Manley Hopkins about any story in the news over the summer.
Entries in by 8 August comp@newstatesman.co.uk

The NS asking for a poem? Wonders will never cease!

To make this one easier, all we really need is a nice topical story about some nuns being shipwrecked...

Indeed, Brian. I fear that this is beyond my paltry skill (I could never really grasp how sprung rhythm is different to free verse) but I will be interested to see what others come up with.

I think it's a high time we had a short poems competition; limericks, clerihews, double dactyls etc.

Rhythm is sprung, de rhyme is riz
I wonder who dis Hopkins is?

I don't try NS comps but this one is interesting. Gerard and I once travelled across the Atlantic in a plane- poem extolling the grandeur of flight. I see you have come top of The Spectator bill again, Chris; I hope you move over for me next week. Many congratulations.

Thanks, Marcus. But it's actually John Griffiths-Colby who scores the Tesco vouchers this week. At the Spectator, the entry printed first is always the winner of the bonus fiver, but at the New Statesman, the order in which the winners appear on the page doesn't have the same significance. Go figure.

Grue, I can't write Hopkins - can't even read him: I shall sit this one out, too!

yuk
 

Give me Lightnin' Hopkins any day.

Pied Authority
 

So you know you can do much better!

Pied Authority

After Hopkins

Glory be, he is by God a dappled being—
His house now couple-coloured as a brindled cow;
For faces all a-stipple standing by him;
For words he says for burnt-brown Trayvon’s dying;
Statescapes gutted, pieced—white, black, & now
A verbal fight in which Floridians mock him.

All things countered, North & South estranged;
War's un-civil embers; inscaped Jim Crow.
With words puzzled, clear, sweet , sour, bright, dim
My president insists this will be changed:
Praise him.