Lord Peter Wimsey's arms

LordPeter List
Literary Contest

Harriet Vane's arms

You shouldn't think the good old days are new,
my therapist said. Just because the chicks are coy
as well as cute doesn't mean you're in their league,
not now or ever. Honey, retro don't mean retread.
The dark one in the corner there, she knows
it's all just velcro and ruffles. Tomorrow
they'll knock you flat on your tush in tennis
and they already earn more than you deserve.
So why don't you get out of your wallow
and work on your game, or if you won't
why don't you listen to your mother?

When the entry proved hard to identify, the contributor added this clue:

Not everyone listens to NPR,
my therapist said, and even when they do,
how many poets do you think they can afford to remember?
But think of it this way, your first two entries
were guessed within less than a minute. If you're reading
a poet's nobody's heard of, you can think of it
as reading a classic ahead of its time
although it won't be a classic if nobody else
reads it even after they've heard of the schmuck
who ought to be listening to his mother instead
of writing poems about his therapist.

Parody of...

Contest entries
First lines | Contributors | Parodied works

Back to the LordPeter Literary Contest page.

Lord Peter Wimsey's and Harriet Vane's arms are from:
Scott-Giles, C.W., 1977, The Wimsey Family: New York, Avon Books, 88 p.
Last updated