Dear Brian,

Thank you for applyin’.

I hope you don’t find this distressful
but on this occasion you have been unsuccessful.

We found your poetry
unsatisfactory to the nth degree,
a cross between a dog’s dinner and a catastrophe.
In fact, the kind of drivelling doggerel
one might find inscribed
on a cheap sheet of bog roll.

Your limericks are limited,
haikus quite hopeless,
your sonnets have as much class
as soap-on-ropeness.
Oh, and your ballads are bollocks.

We wish that you suffered from more writer’s blocks.

Your verse is about buses and tank tops and socks;
you think you’re profound but you’re more like pro-lost.

And as for your poems about Clarkson
they’re bordering on the litigious.

On the plus side,
your spelling’s quite good
and your output prodigious.

Yours sincerely,

Professor A.P. Brearley