Competition: Novel Approach
Competition No. 2659: Novel approach
Lucy Vickery
Saturday, 14th August 2010
Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2659 you were invited to take the title of a well-known novel and write an amusing poem with the same title. There are some long lines this week, which leaves space only to mention unlucky losers Mae Scanlan and Max Ross. The winning six get £25 each; Frank McDonald nabs £30.
Anna Karenina used to cause Lenin a
few sleepless nights when he took her to bed;
and though he saw Tolstoy as big as the Bolshoi
he thought it revolting his books weren’t red.
Glum Dostoyevsky considered her risqué
and called her shenanigans flighty and vain;
and he was astonished at how she was punished:
a cleaver should cleave her, not wheels on a train.
Anna Karenina, mystica femina,
used to give Stalin a gallon of fun;
Old Joe would envision her held as his prisoner,
making him laugh when she played with his gun.
Anna Karenina used to put men in a
whirlwind of passion, so Leo declares,
but a present day student just couldn’t and wouldn’t
get any enjoyment from Anna’s affairs.
Frank McDonald (Anna Karenina)
Folk loved to hear Jude perorate;
He dearly loved to speak;
But what he said was nubilate,
Caliginous, oblique.
Some took him for an orphic sage,
While others thought he dealt
In witty, learned persiflage —
Too deep for them, they felt.
His abstruse, gnomic, zen-like style
Held audiences pent
In awed, suspenseful silence while
They pondered what he meant.
Yet those who knew him best agreed
That — not to be unkind —
Old Jude, apostle of the weed,
Was stoned out of his mind.
Basil Ransome-Davies (Jude the Obscure)
I woke up this morning feeling unreal,
Like the virtual remains of a virtual meal.
I went to the mirror to take a good look.
I was just a quotation from somebody’s book.
My wife didn’t know me, but what is a wife?
What is a marriage? What is a life?
The telephone told me I’d won a world cruise.
I said bollocks to that, what’s the good news?
I sat at the table with nothing to eat,
As mad as a painting by René Magritte.
I love Noel Edmonds, I love Cilla Black,
But my voices tell me they don’t love me back.
No more grand narratives, the pundits all say:
They broke into pieces & drifted away.
I’d love to play god, but I’m sure I would lose.
Instead I just strum the nonentity blues.
G.M. Davis (Diary of a Nobody)
I buzz about, above the fray,
Perfecting landings and escapes,
And calculate the breeze with ease.
I am a jackanapes.
On windows, bright and brilliant,
I hover for a while:
A king of kings, I flex my wings
And strut my busy style.
I frisk upon the ledge and edge,
Lead a life of risk and charm:
Those who’d repel this pimpernel
Will never cause me harm.
My eyes, which glint like mirror-balls,
See those who would unstate me —
But I dink, I vault, resist assault
From SWAT teams which await me.
Bill Greenwell (Lord of the Flies)
Oh, Carol what a day it was — a truly dreadful day
With Darryl and Kate, your parents, mine, and smutty Uncle Ray
Who swiftly polished off the wine and most of all the punch,
Three hours before we’d even thought of serving up the lunch.
The rain fell down, the hours dragged by and, oh, that piercing noise
When Darryl accidentally broke the favourite of Kate’s toys.
And was it more than just a kiss beneath the mistletoe
My father gave your mother? Seems my mother thought it so!
Then Uncle Ray, well gone by now and ever more obscene,
Disgraced us all by what he did when listening to The Queen.
Your father commandeered charades and bored us all to tears
With films and books, unknown to us, from long-forgotten years.
We stuffed ourselves from dawn to dusk on titbits, nuts and chocs
And groaned with indigestion while we goggled t the box.
Then, finally, to cap it all, Kate vomited on Darryl.
Oh Carol what a day it was — oh what a Christmas Carol.
Alan Millard (A Christmas Carol)
How they define me! Let me list the ways:
stiletto heels, the fetishist’s desire;
the black-silk basque with scarlet satin stays,
those on-line poker debts still mounting higher.
The densely oaky slam of chardonnay
and instant kick from export-standard gin;
racing Ferraris on the motorway,
alternative therapies for every sin.
Then baring all in blaze of noonday sun
and sexy chat rooms on the internet;
believing honesty and wealth are one;
all the seduction of a cigarette.
The star signs, or the tarot, to chase fear;
the queasy moral maze that’s Baudelaire;
that grass is greener anywhere but here.
Follies and vice: all human life is there.
D.A. Prince (The Way of All Flesh)
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