Pome Competition Result

Mesdames et messieurs, bienvenue. Voici les résultats du concours de poésie au sujet des jeux Olympiques.

Ladies and Gentleman, welcome. Here is the result of the Pome Competition on the Olympics.

Now that I’ve got OZ’s fur thoroughly frizzed, thanks to all the entrants.

In order of submission:-

‘An Olympic Anthem’ by the one of Janus. A fine start. The great thing, of course, is that I have had a lot of chances to listen to the tune to which it is sung over the past twelve days and was able to check that it fitted that tune seamlessly. Those ‘zil’ lanes were very topical at the time of composition as well.

Soutie’s point about the parodying of our National Anthem is well made, duly noted and regretfully ignored. It’s a British thing, Soutie – we only don’t mind when we are making fun of ourselves. I do, however, apologise to you for being more huffy than I should have been when you did your parody.

‘An Olympic Rant’ by OZ. One from the less-enthusiastic end of the rainbow of opinions on the London Olympics. Heart-felt and well put together. I look forward to Oz’s promised rant on the whole stramash once the party is over for those of us who are enjoying it at the moment.

‘My Olympic Pome’ by Four-eyed English Genius. Very funny, FEEG and I am glad that you enjoyed your trip to the Olympic Park so much. I enjoyed your account thereof.

I think that, given the lack of nudity and the presence of women in the modern Olympics, the only bit of them that the Ancient Greeks would enjoy would be the Graeco-Roman wrestling. There’s still a fair bit of male nudity in that and I have to say that I found some of the positions they adopted a bit peculiar. As Colin Murray said on Radio Five Live, they should probably only show it after the watershed.

‘A paean for London 2012’ by the other of Janus. Beautifully crafted and structured and (irrelevantly for the purposes of judging) expressing sentiments which I share. The embarrassing thing is that the style seems familiar but, if there is a source, I could not identify it. Please put me out of my agony, Janus?

‘The Stasi Years’ by the Chariot’s own Sonny and Cher (TR the artist formerly known as JW with CO).
In the first movement, TR gives a cracking and stirring poetic account of a tense race at the pinnacle of the sport. I only ever egged and spooned at grass root level – 3rd in the Kinnoul School Primary 3 race on the North Inch in 1955 but his effort brought back happy memories of that time.

Moving on to CO’s terse climax to this joint work. What can one say? Except welcome to the World of Creative Writing. This is a day which we all thought we would never see.

Good work too. Short, to the point and clearly giving your opinion. I have one minor quibble with ‘circii’, CO. I have no objection to your self-confessed doggerel but am no fan of dog latin. Surely ‘circenses’ would have given better scansion? Juvenal would certainly have preferred it. Juvenal and you would have got on very well, in my opinion.

‘Citius, Altius, Fortius (Take Two)’ by Kojo’s Dad, Papaguinea. Not much wrong with your first serve, PapaG, but your tweaked second one is an Ace. Yours is another effort where I really regret that I am not awarding points for sentiments expressed to avoid letting my own opinion cloud my judgement. Good to see that others lie a-bed worrying about their entries and how to improve them.

I hope that the aforementioned Kojo is building up lots of memories of the London Olympics. Thanks to Soutie for the link lesson in the comments on your post. Very helpful.

‘What daffodils?’ by LW. LW submitted in haste with only a few hours to go and I enjoyed his pome at leisure. Almost gave up on his effort at the start of the second line when he hit me with such an appalling apostrophic aberration but I then gave him poetic licence and pressed on. Wordsworth’s words are words worth parodying when it comes to ‘Daffodils’ and LW has done a brilliant take thereon.

And so to the winner. Well obviously, I should just hand it to TR and CO in the knowledge that we would all enjoy the process of their joint determination of the next subect. They did come very close indeed as did Janus 1 but the winner for me is LW’s last minute submission.

Congratulations to him.