Authors Electric

I’ve dealt with Spectator competitions before, but last week husband Bob and I managed the double – after two years of trying. So in celebration of this momentous event, I shall post both the winning entries and ask you to guess who wrote which. We’ve tried this out at various groups we go to, and only one got them right. Indeed, the members of the creative writing group we both attend got them all wrong. So I’ll include a couple of other winners I’ve had recently, with the challenges, and see if you want to have a go at them yourselves. I had quite a few winners initially, and then it was eight months until I had another. I once had a friend who wrote songs, as well as poetry, and she tried several times to get one selected for the UK Eurovision entry, and did get shortlisted. But the one piece of advice she received I have always remembered: Try and get the word radio into your lyrics somehow. This often ensures it gets played. So on the same principle, I included the word Spectator ...

 Fifteen years ago, on the 20 th December, Vera Rich died. Among her many other incarnations she was the founder of  Manifold , "the magazine of new poetry" which was started in 1962 and appeared regularly until 1969, when it was suspended owing to her taking a job as Soviet and East European Correspondent for the scientific weekly  Nature . It was only in 1998 that it proved possible to relaunch  Manifold . It published original poetry and had two quarterly competitions, one written in a particular form, and the other on a particular topic. Many poets loved these challenges, as being given a specific task narrows the mind wonderfully. I’m going to reproduce a few of the ones I had published here, and also some more recent poems which, although unpublished, have received honourable mentions in other magazines – also in response to a particular requirement. What I want to do is to show how an exercise can really stimulate the imagination, which is often preferable t...