[John Whitworth]

Competition: Against the grain
SATURDAY, 15TH OCTOBER 2011
In Competition No. 2717 you were invited to supply a poem expressing distaste for something or someone widely considered to be beautiful.
You poured scorn on Paris, daffodils, Michelangelo and Alan Bennett’s plays. Newborns were also a popular target. Here is Melissa Balmain giving it both barrels: ‘You can dress it in taffeta, ribbon and lace;/ you can scrub it each hour of the day;/ you can name it Belinda Veronica Grace;/ it’ll still look like rump roast manqué’. Martin Parker took an entertaining swipe at ‘Les Grandes Baigneuses’ — ‘They may in youth have all been ravers; Cézanne, though, did their looks no favours’ — but the most heartfelt chorus of disapproval was reserved for the ‘Mona Lisa’, which gets Bill Greenwell’s goat and earns him the bonus fiver. His fellow winners nab £25; Roger Theobald, J.C.H. Mounsey and Philip Roe were unlucky losers.

I loathe the Mona Lisa
With her lips that seem to lurk
Together like a clam’s: a sham
That most would call a smirk.

She looks you in the eyeball
With an aristo disdain
As if your gaze in umpteen ways
Is causing her a pain.

They say she’s an enigma
But she causes no surprise
Surrounded by the Japs whose snaps
Take home her idling eyes.

I like a girl with spirit,
A talker and a teaser –
But not a snob who sews her gob
Shut like the Mona Lisa.
Bill Greenwell

Da-da-da-da, Da-da-da-da,
Up the scale and down we go,
Heavy with Romantic ardour,
Dreary, ponderous and slow.
Joy is joyous, that’s the story;
Sure, and so say all of us.
Doesn’t, then, to hymn its glory
Verge on the tautologous?
Add to this portentous flannel
Ludwig’s plodding melody,
And it finds its perfect channel —
Did he who wrote the Mass write thee?
Ode to Joy, then? On yer bike!
Ode to Banality, more like.
Noel Petty

A gross, misshapen, crenellated hulk,
Eight ghostly spires stuck on its crusted bulk,
It rears abortively above the town.
George Orwell thought they should have knocked it down
For ugliness alone. It stands outré,
The mutant fruit of genius in decay,
Of Gaudí’s sad, deteriorating age,
Of inner visions too bizarre to gauge.
Yet now this horror is a must-see sight,
A tourist magnet, boosted to invite
The naïve visitor, whose arm is wrung
For funds to finish off the pile of dung.
Hard to determine which grates most, the waste
Of time and money or the ghastly taste,
But tourists by the million gasp and coo.
The pickpockets and thieves, they like it too.
G.M. Davis

Over-furnished, suffocating kitsch ,
a brothel-owner’s show, Walt Disney camp,
upholstered horrors; each neurotic bitch,
breathes through her mouth and loiters in the damp,
preoccupied with drapery and frocks.
Post-coital and vacuous, they wait
for fate to shake the door down when he knocks
to take advantage of their helpless state.
No Fra Angelico restraint, instead
John Ruskin found hysterical relief
without the rude proximity of bed.
Pornography with drapery and grief
enacted in the land of Camelot.
A floral necromanic, tortured dream
of flesh and death. A bit of you-know-what
where women die and men remain supreme.
Janet Kenny

My list of the absurdly overrated
Began quite modestly, with Posh and Becks,
But then the roster steadily inflated,
Incorporating Wii and tantric sex,
Psychology, Manhattan, haut-cuisine,
The Oscars, botox, biking, chardonnay,
Tchaikovsky, pandas, planking, Wittgenstein,
Blogging, vlogging, salad, anime,
Flashmobs, Gaga, iPhones, spray-on-tans,
Sat-nav, roses, hot tubs, shopping, spring,
Religion, Sartre, picnics, comic sans,
Cold fusion, Bauhaus, meta-anything.
Then as the list grew so alarmingly,
I scrambled hard to find a stopping-place
And if I hadn’t happened, next, on me
I might have finished off the human race.
Frank Osen

Conceived within a marble slab
And chiselled out to be
A form without an ounce of flab
Revealed for all to see;
‘A thing of beauty,’ Keats might say,
A joy to every eye,
With all his wonders on display,
Proud ‘David’, raised on high
And adulated here, below,
By crowds who’ve queued to see
This gift of Michelangelo
Revered by all but me —
The only one who’s bold enough
To think and say outright,
That any man viewed in the buff
Is not a pretty sight.
Alan Millard