Charm Poetry Competition
2025 Judge’s Report
“I must not pretend that I know what it [a poem] is, but one thing I do know about it is that it comes in many, many, many different forms. In the English tradition, it comes as riddles, nursery rhymes, ballads, nonsense poems, profound poems of high solemnity and seriousness, funny poems, poems that rhyme, poems that don’t rhyme… The only thing that they do whether it be a nursery rhyme or a psalm, is that one comes out the other end thinking ‘Wow, what happened to me there?’. So that’s the idea.”
– Paul Muldoon
I shared these words with Martin McGovern when I met him in late April for the handover of the competition entries. What I love about what Muldoon says is that he’s emphatic about there not being a kind of hierarchy in poetry, where (apparently) more serious equals more valuable, or somehow better. What matters is that poems manage to startle us out of the relentless flow of our daily lives, and see the world, if only for a moment, in a different way.
The flipside of this is that a poem focused on “warmth, wordplay, wit and whimsy” has to be just as well-crafted as one that is political, confessional, or ecological. A number of poems in my initial read-throughs didn’t reach the mark for me in the way they handled language, along with others that were – while being well-written – not mindful enough of the website’s encouragement to “entertain us. Brighten our day.”
After reading each poem twice I was able to arrive at a shortlist of 31 poems. This is where things started to get trickier, although I was helped a little by recognising (through style and choice of typeface) that a couple of poets had several entries effectively competing against each other. I picked the best piece from each poet and carried on, not only reading with my eyes, but also reading the poems out loud to help me make my choice. All of the final ten poems – but especially the winners – made me smile a great deal, while impressing me with the quality of wordsmithing they contained. I hope they succeed in brightening your day too.
There are seven Highly Commended poems. In no particular order they are:
Dear Agony Aunt – the wife frustrated by her husband’s lack of cooking skills is a familiar comic trope, but what I appreciated here was both its framing (as a letter to an agony aunt), and the confident handling of ballad metre.
Less is More – once you’ve read this you’ll be tempted (as I was) to start creating your own malaphors, the offspring of a metaphor and a malapropism. But you’ll have a hard job coming up with one as good as “The road to hell isn’t paved in a day”.
Love Sick – here the language of being in love is given a rigorous medical examination: “I’m so hot for you / (Could be hyperhidrosis)”. A tightly-written, witty poem that ends – rather ghoulishly – with confirmation that the prognosis is very grave indeed!
We Play the Music of Food – this poem, with its intricate scheme of end and internal rhymes, contains some of my favourite lines from the whole competition. I don’t know why “the District Line loves Kew much more than Ealing”, but this poem convinced me it must be true.
A Festive Villanelle – as someone who feels ‘Do Not Gentle into That Good Night’ is more than a tad overrated, I felt there was no need for the apologies to Dylan Thomas. A top-drawer villanelle with some superb rhyming – great to see “stiffed” and “miffed” chiming off “gift”.
A Kindly Sonnet – a poem which spreads its message of warmth and friendship being everywhere without any showiness, though it’s a perfectly constructed sonnet. No turn, but – crucially – “I wet the bed” and “I wasn’t dead” prevent it from sliding towards sentimentality.
Mixed Messages – this poem tests the theory that the reader will understand it “though the leettrs are all muddeld in the mdidle”, and not only proves it correct, but does it within a skilfully rhymed, metrical poem. The question at the end invites some serious thought as well.
Third place:
Ciao, Baby – like all my winners, this poem shows that a good idea is no use unless its diligently and confidently followed through to a definite conclusion. The story of “a gentle stroll” – and by extension, a whole relationship – being told through Italian musical terms could easily (like its narrator) have run out of breath part way through. This poem sustains its initial premise beautifully over six well-crafted stanzas, and creates two very believable characters in the process. We’re instructed to read the last line “sotto voce, pianissimo”, though standing as it does separately from the rest of poem, its message of defiance can’t not be heard. I allow myself a small fist-pump each time I read it.
Second place:
Fossil Words – a fossil word (according to Wikipedia) is a word “that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom or phrase.” In drawing our attention to twenty-five of these words this poem has a serious purpose, though it also knows that humour is often the best vehicle for a subject we may think of as dry or unappealing. It’s a breathless, rollercoaster ride of a poem, a bravura performance with its impeccable handling of both rhyme and the oldest metrical template in English, the line of four strong stresses with a brief pause in the middle. I was repeatedly sent back to my laptop to explore the etymology of the words it highlights, not least in that very clever final line. A poem that demands to be read and re-read.
First place:
Fair Ellen – the story of Lochinvar, “So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war”, is often excerpted as a standalone piece from Sir Walter Scott’s 250-page narrative poem ‘Marmion’. In this wonderful response we get to hear the other side of the story, from the woman he effectively kidnaps on her wedding day. Scott writes in strict four-stress triple metre with perfect end rhymes, and to parody him successfully requires that framework be replicated perfectly, as it his here. But beyond its technical brilliance this poem is hugely playful, and very funny, as we hear Fair Ellen’s world-weary pragmatism laid out in a delightful mixture of language appropriate to the source – “sworn wedded wife”, “o’er Cannobie Lea”, “like a wee sleekit mouse” – with contemporary diction: “gate-crashed”, “all going south”, “just drop me back home”. What confirmed ‘Fair Ellen’ as my overall winner was its ending, with its deliciously unexpected turn. This woman is not only clear-sighted – she’s also far from being a passive player in a man’s drama, and I love her all the more for that.
Many thanks to all who sent in poems, and to Martin McGovern for championing an often-overlooked part of poetry’s estate through this wonderful competition.
Alan Buckley
Oxford
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