Poetry competition: "Changing the subject"

It's time to come out of your shell – but watch your step

This weekend, I was nudged in the direction of a major new national advertising campaign, the primary message of which – to this viewer, anyway – seemed to be “be aware of snails on pavements; don’t tread on them, and if you do see one, move it to a safe place”. Long-time readers will appreciate how pleased I am to finally see this issue go mainstream, ten years after my own attempt at raising awareness, The Dead Snail Diaries (still available, by some miracle, from the Emma Press).

Around half the poems in that collection were parodies of other, more famous poems; snails replaced John Betjeman’s church mouse and Ted Hughes’ Crow, and from the canon of T.S. Eliot came ‘Pringleplanks: the Railway Snail’ and ‘The Hollow Snails’. The latter was based on Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’, an extremely serious poem which you will likely recognise from the concluding lines: “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.”

Part 1 of ‘The Hollow Men’ is as follows:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
   
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

Whereas my version went:

We are the hollow snails.
We are the dead snails.
Our voices, now echoing wind
through empty shells. Alas!
No-one lays wreaths
made of the blooms
we loved in life,
now we lie dead upon the grass.

They say we have the look
of jamless jar, of pageless book.
Shape without motion; protection
without life to protect. Remember us –
if at all – not as gaping holes,
not as spent vessels of good souls,
but only as the hollow snails.
The dead snails.

As reviewers at the time pointed out (repeatedly), what I was doing here was not great art – but it was great fun, serving the same need for a young poetry practitioner that I imagine sudoku does for a mathematician. In that spirit, I’m asking you to attempt a similar effort for our second By the Book poetry competition, which I’ve called ‘Changing the Subject’ (following ‘Rebirth Notice’ at the start of the year).

As with the previous contest, entry is only open to paid-up subscribers of the blog, so you’ll find the precise details of how to enter after the paywall. Prizes include Valley Press books, publication in a future post, and – thanks to the generous copyright laws regarding parodies – publication in an anthology, once we’ve done a couple of years’ worth of contests. So if you’re up for a challenge, I will see you after the jump!