[John Whitworth]

Sorry. I've been away. Crack on. These are all very good and some belong to us. Double success for Chris, who is also K.M. Smith. Bill and Bazza score yet again. Frank and Rob hit the woodwork.

Lucy Vickery 20 July 2013
In Competition 2806 you were invited to submit alternative endings for well-known novels or poems.

A Farewell to Arms, The Special Edition, gives Hemingway fans the opportunity to look at the 47 alternative endings that he played with before making what was clearly an agonising choice. Some are more blunt, some more optimistic than the one he went with in the end.

This was a popular assignment. The prizewinners, in what was a strong entry, take £25 each. Chris O’Carroll bags the extra fiver. Honourable mentions go to unlucky losers G.M. Davis, Ray Kelley, Lettice Buxton, Philip Machin, Rob Stuart, Frank McDonald and Brian Murdoch.

The Wedding-Guest he looks askance
At the hoar and wordy wight,
And cries, ‘No more, thou grey-beard loon!
For this is a festive night.

‘I’ve rounds to dance and healths to drink.
Thy wild, distempered words
Cannot shift my attention to
Deceased aquatic birds.

‘Nor do I care to hear thee preach
How best to love and pray.
What lesson thou hast learned is thine,
Not mine. Now go thy way.

‘Seek out thy bed, lie down and close
That frightful glittering eye, sir.
And may the morrow morn find thee
Less sad, less mad and wiser.’
Chris O’Carroll/‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

She was going from him now. In her misery she leaned against him. He was unresponsive.
Where would he go? The darkness pressed against him as he moved towards the lights, lost and helpless, of the town. And his soul felt, at its core, the fecundity of nothingness, as if a seed had been left behind in a wilderness of chaff. In every face, in every expression, there was a strange and luminous void, a drabness, a hopelessness, a distant understanding of extinction.
‘Forest!’ he whispered — ‘Forest!’
Aye, he would not give in. He heard his clogs rapping the paving-stones, felt his whole being swerve into the crowd that seemed to stream from the ale-houses. Very well, he would be one of them. He would serve, breath steaming, voice like a battered clarion.
‘What dost think?’ said a young lad. ‘Think?’ answered Paul. ‘Derby County? We s’ll thrash ’em.’
Bill Greenwell/Sons and Lovers


‘Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!’ I shrieked, upstarting,
Then I paused, beheld him smarting, sensed thepall of pain he wore,
Saw the stain of deprivation, felt the creature’s desolation,
Cried out ‘I’ll make reparation for the sorrows that you bore.
Take what succour I can offer, stranger at my chamber door.
Name thee evil? Nevermore.’
Visited by curious feelings, I secured in secret dealings
Berries, carcasses and peelings, pleasures for an omnivore.
Carelessly I watched him trapping tasty morsels, feathers flapping,
Little heeded he was crapping on the bust above my door.
‘Oh what joy you’ve brought,’ I whispered, ‘be my soul mate, I implore!’
Sighed the Raven ‘Evermore.’
Sylvia Fairley/‘The Raven’


After Terry left I went home and got pally with a fifth of rye. Next morning there was a flyer among the bills and hard-luck mail: ‘Become an accountant, earn $$$$$’. That usually went in the trash, but this time I lit a pill and had a think.
‘Tarzan on a big red scooter’ Menendez had called me. Well, the hell with that. The hell with quixotic Marlowe, nickel-and-dime Marlowe, the man who made your problems his problems, the punchbag for the Bay City cops. Out there were people with friends and families, latest-model autos, pension plans. It was a world as remote to me as the moon, but I felt its appeal like a hunger pain.
‘I filled out the form while coffee brewed. I’d said goodbye to Terry Lennox and now I was saying it to Philip Marlowe, P.I.
Basil Ransome-Davies/The Long Goodbye

But tintinabulation broke my dream;
the maid dissolved in moonlight’s silver ocean
when Alf from Porlock, wheeling alchemy,
confections sugared by sweet sorcery
and magic kin to Kubla’s sinful potion
ensnared my mind. To sea, to see the dome!
cried Alf, gilded all o’er in visionary light
bewitching fancy’s measure: we would float
our cockleshell of wonder to the source
of Alph, we two, and sup the icy course
where sun turns crystal juice, where honey wine
sings strangest anthems to the higher spheres.

Beyond the albatross’s journeyings,
further than frost’s imperious ministry,
so I, with Alf, to Alph, with angel wings
travel, and equal Kubla’s mystery.
D.A. Prince/‘Kubla Khan’

A mess of empty mollusc shells
Reeked in a knee-high mound.
The groaning Carpenter turned green
And writhed upon the ground.
No more on kings and cabbages
The Walrus did expound.

‘O Oysters, you have done us in’,
The Walrus glumly said.
‘Some toxin got the best of us
When on your flesh we fed.’
Then silence fell, which was not odd,
For both of them were dead.
K.M. Smith/‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’

[George Simmers]

John mentions the Spherian competition winners - but modestly does not draw attention to 'Outplacements', his own terrific poem about redundancy euphemisms, elsewhere in the magazine.
Come to think of it, euphemisms would make a good comp subject. Perhaps we should drop a hint to Lucy.

[John Whitworth]

Thank you, George. I didn't mention it because I didn't know it was there. I had a poem in last week as well. Now a cheque would be nice.

[Adrian Fry]

Congratulations, John, on crossing the lines and getting your poems in what I really shouldn't refer to as the magazine proper. I very much enjoyed Outplacements.

[John Whitworth]

You certainly shouldn't, Adrian, but thanks all the same. The difference is that in the front half I have to tickle the fancy of Hugo Williams and in the other half it is Lucy.

[Chris O'Carroll]

John, I admire both your front-of-the-book poems, this week's and last week's. And I love the arithmetic that counts Lucy's competition column as half the magazine.

(OK, technically, you didn't say the comp is half the magazine, just that it's located in the back half. But the other available joke involves you tickling Hugo in the front and Lucy in the back, and that's simply too rude to be contemplated. So I went with the shaky arithmetic gag.)

[John Whitworth]

The front half is the political half. The back half is the reviews, the arty half. Strangely, the poems appear in the front half. Lucy is in the back of the back half, together with the impenetrable crossword, the chess, the bridge and the columnists.

Years ago the poetry editor was the poet P.J.Kavanagh, Roman nosed and distinguished, bless him. I got lots of stuff in there. Hugo Williams is a more difficult nut to crack. I've done it four times. On the other hand in the old days when James Michie (Jaspistos), another poet, did the competition, I won very rarely. I do better under Lucy, though lately I've been off-form. Or perhaps there are too many of the likes of Brian, Bill, Bazza and Chris.