Tie or open shirt?

Jaspistos

In Competition No. 2326 you were invited to write a poem either in free verse mocking rhymed, metrical verse or in conventional verse mocking free verse.

It's Larkin's team versus Hughes's. On one side stand Frost (Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down') and Auden CI cannot settle which is worse,/ The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.'), on the other Whitman (who bought his open shirts from Paris), Pound, Lawrence and Eliot. According to my Dictionary of Literary Terms (1990) free verse 'is now the most widely practised verse form in English'. I personally find that disturbing. Two good runners-up this week, on different sides, were Ralph

Rochester and Peter Lyon. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the Cobra

Premium beer goes to Ray Kelley.

Take any piece of prose you've written

lately—

The subject-matter doesn't matter greatly — Perhaps an unsent letter to a friend Contains a passage chronicling the end Of a relationship that caused you pain: This is your chance to write it out again In lines of varying length — two words, eight, nine Or more; you can use the to end a line And put the noun it goes with on the next, For such enjambment sexes up your text.

Omit all marks of punctuation, and For I write i: for and the ampersand.

Slip in a cryptic reference that's obscure Even to you, and you can then be sure It's done to a turn and ready to be seen As free verse in some little magazine.

Ray Kelley If lands were flooded by seas We should lose the shapes of the trees And the hedges and flowers and turf In exchange for a waste of surf.

Free verse is unbridled emotion Slopping around like the ocean, Pleasant, but lacking in form, Brief, like a thunderstorm.

When the battered reader escapes Back to the world of shapes, He turns from a chaos of waves To the land that his spirit craves.

You, still engulfed in the brine, Flounder from line to line. You are always free as the birds, But no one recalls your words. Paul Griffin Manners make verse no less than they make man, Asking of verse that it should rhyme and scan And be the ground where Grace and Patience meet On pathways trod by, say, iambic feet.

Lo! Verse that scorns such gently measured tread To be dismissed needs only to be read; Or should it spurn the courtesy of rhyme T'will rarely stand the briefest test of time.

Free verse is free with all its tawdry favours, A slut whose turpitude the dimwit savours, A strutting cock who from his dunghill crows, Conceited from his coxcomb to his toes.

Free verse, the work of charlatans and knaves, The shortest road to execration paves.

Yet, might it be in heaven, we dare to hope, That Mr Pound is chum to Mr Pope?

Jane Anwyl

Where do I start? The way you sprawl And slump and hog the stage?

Your careless, footless, shuffling crawl Page after page after page?

You've no control, you can't keep time, Your room's an utter mess.

Your teenage disregard of rhyme Won't, I'm afraid, impress.

You're s-o-o-o-o American: grow up!

Learn slim-line poise, a lean And fitter profile — and throw up That jumbo-sized cuisine.

The Whitman diet's bound to fail. Shed pounds; be strict; don't flop. Let metre be your Holy Grail And, please, learn how to stop. D.A. Prince

In traditional verse you start out with an important message, like how it was really sad that Pliny the Elder fell into molten lava white exploring a volcano, and you run straight into rhyme trouble.

Because to make it work you would have to give Pliny a balaclava, and a wife called Grizelda, from Aynho, which he did not have.

So you are forced to change Pliny into a peasant named Luke, who was hanged for stealing a pheasant from the Duke, thus completely betraying your original inspiration.

The whole thing is death to artistic integrity.

Michael Swan Poetry, like water, should be left to find and follow its own course sparkling in sunlight as it dances over the rubble of rhyme's breached dams and metre's crumbling conduits whose curbing confines fetter a free form that seeks to rush, race, run, rest or wander where it will; poetry, released, flows unimpeded: words leap waterfalls, slide beneath green willows, slip between bright water-lilies, lifting souls and flooding them with light until. . .

A rhyming couplet rears its ugly head And kills what should be flowing free stone-dead.

Alan Millard

No. 2329: Mystery man

'I often think of Bruno PimiAnd wonder what became of him' begins a comic poem by Alan Crick. You are invited to add 16 lines of rhymed octosyllabic verse providing the answer, 'Entries to 'Competition No 2329' by 19 February.