Authors Electric

 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 I’m going to reproduce a few of the ones I had published here, and also some more recent poems which, although unpublished, have received honourable mentions in other magazines – also in response to a particular requirement.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...