Poemlet Blog

Here's the link to the Poemlet Blog on the Museum website.

Museum Workshop

Writing Children’s Poems

Workshop with Helen Clare

1.              Poemlets.     

Find 3 or 4 objects which inspire you. Take time to look at them properly. Think about the other senses too. Think about the object’s history. Answer these three questions. (No need to try to rhyme or be deliberately poetic)

What do we say about the object?

What does the object say about itself?

What does it really mean?

There are examples on a separate sheet.

2.              Bring your poemlets back to share.

3.              Find a phrase you like that you can build a poem from

The easiest way to do this is to make your phrase the last line of each verse. Make the verses as long or as short as you want.

Your verses can rhyme or not. If you want them to rhyme you might want to shift your last line around to make it easier. There are rhyming dictionaries provided or try rhymezone.com. There are also some sheets that help you rhyme.

There are more complicated forms such as villanelle or triolet in the books provided (or look online) if you’re feeling ambitious.

There are examples on separate sheets.

Don't forget you can share your poems as comments on this thread, or ask for help if you need it. 

Poemlet Examples

Maharajah: walked 200 miles from Edinburgh to Belle Vue zoo in 1872

Look at my huge feet, how easily they carry my weight.
It was a long way. It has been a long time.

Spice Racks: India 1865, wood

I have treasures. I have secrets.
Spin me fast enough and my pods pop off, fizz like stars.

Bark Cloth: made of beaten Masi stems, stencilled, Fiji, before 1942

Roll me out. I will hold your nights and your days, your lives and your children.
I will whisper to you in my patterns, sing the wind in the Masi.

Chinese Dish, Porcelain and enamel, decorated with bats and long life symbols, for export

Sprinkle me with leaves, lay me with fruit.
I am yellow like the sun. I came across the miles. I was always here.


Helmet: metal, Iran, donated 1946 

I was Persia, the Orient, Asia Minor.
I was war, death, dignity, defence.


Head-dress: Manchu, China, Kingfisher feather, bamboo, silk, more than 60 years old. 

I know your greatness. I will make you great in the eyes of the world.
I am pain - the kingfisher, the oyster, the silkworm, the hands that cut. Did you think it could be otherwise?


Iron Core of Meteorite:  Campo del Cielo (Field of Heaven) Argentina, 16th Century. 

I am alien. I am earth.
We are all spacedust.

Jaw: Hammerhead Shark

It was only ever hunger, life.
When there were nerves, this mouth knew the whole world which spewed into it.


Cabinet of Tiny Fossils: 19th Century Collection

I am the deep history of the earth. Collected, ordered, classified.
The earth resists this project. It flirts with chaos, comes back to us giggling with surprises.

Plaster Cast of Dog buried in Ash: Vesuvious, Italy

I am every dog, scratching his back. I didn't see it coming.
I might have followed you, begged for scraps, licked your face. I have smelly breath.

Green Tree Python: Modified muscles, prehensile tail, climbs trees, sleeps during the day, head tucked in the middle of its coils, bites, Australian rain forest. 

This is my tree. I have not moved all week.
I am more threatened than threatening. Let me sleep.

Fragments of Pottery: Archaeological interpretation and analysis. 

Each one of us was part of something, a jar, a dish, a cup.
Our mismatched fragments become a new whole.

Frog and duck weights: Mesopotamia, 2-3rd Millenia BC

The balance, the baking, the baggies. I am your history too.
How might it be not to apportion - mass, time, value, love?

Examples of poems using patterns of repetition

Brooch

When the night is cold and you’ve far to go

the rain will rain and the wind will blow.

You’ve a cloak of velvet over sleeves of lace,

and it’s my job to pin that cloak in place.

I’m beautifully crafted, bejewelled and gold,

your nobility’s shown and need not be told.

I’m precious enough to signal your grace

for it’s my job to pin you in your rightful place

Peasants and merchants can never own me -

the law won’t let them, though they’re told they’re free.

They may make their money, they can’t join the race

as it’s my job to pin them into their place.

The up will stay up and the down will stay down

The poor will stay poor and the king keep his crown.

Perched on your shoulder, right next to your face,

it’s my job to pin the world into place.

With a big furry body and a skull on my back

I surprise you, when summer turns to gold.

Do you know what kind of journey I’ve made?

Do you wonder what kind of luck I hold?

Do you know I hover? Do you know I squeak?

That I smell of bees and hide in their hives?

Do you know of all the places I’ve been?

The luck I’ve had living all those lives?

Have you been to the tip of Italy,

Have you been to the highest points in Spain

Where my caterpillars feed on potato plants?

Luckily their bites don’t cause you much pain…

Do you know that I burrow when I pupate

That I change my form within the earth

And emerge with wings and a nectar tube?

Metamorphosis. The luck of rebirth.

Do you know I fly over land and sea?

That I visit just briefly when the time is right

When the sun by your home sits high in the sky?

That you’ll be lucky to catch a sight?

Do you know they said that the devil made me?

That I brought hunger and war? I am taboo?

There’s some kind of luck in my skull and my squeak.

But which kind of luck is up to you.

The Time Traveller

The hardest part is standing still ,

though I’ve been waiting all of my life to die,

for the blow of the axe that’ll smash my skull.

To travel I need to feel the thrill.

An animal’s stringy bit’s wrapped round my throat –

I’m dizzied with a pull on the tourniquet

then lighter as it’s loosened to let the blood flow.

To travel I need to feel my head bloat.

It takes a fair few hacks to get through my neck.

The axe wedges in bone and has to be yanked

back out, is lifted again and  falls with a crack

To travel I need to give into black.

My brains rot to soggy in a Salford bog,

The peat’s soaked in and tinged my skin

the colour of a dried up tangerine

To travel I need to sleep through the fog.

For two thousand years, folk walk past

The words they speak, are a strange music,

with a meaning that I can never grasp.

To travel I only need to last.

The Celts walk by and the Romans walk by

The Saxons walk by and the Vikings walk by

The Normans walk by and the Tudors walk by

To travel I only need to lie.

They farm their flocks and they farm their crops

and they build their houses and they build their homes

and they build their factories and they build their cities

And my waiting never stops,

until I’m discovered by a peat-cutter’s blade

and I’m pickled and scanned and placed in a case

and my blue glass eyes are confused and afraid

Because it’s time that moved while I stayed.

Things change

We really thought we’d always be fish

and then the ancestors went and grew legs

hardly more than fins, tough enough

to take their weight as they crawled

onto the earth and used their little lungs

and before we knew it we were frogs.

Things change.

We really thought we’d be just a few

amphibians, in the shallows

the land was ours, full of plants

and no-one to eat us (except us)

and the air was wet and warm.

There were millions of us

and toads, newts, salamanders

and the blind ones. We ruled the world.

Things change.

Dinosaurs came. We got crafty

hid under rocks and in the cups

of plants. We changed our colours

to be the colour of light on leaves

or sour yellows and reds

to put them off. We learned

to ooze poison from our skins.

Things change.

And me, the Golden Mantella,

I have lived my lives in the swamps

of Madagascar, where they fell

my forests and drain my ponds

so they can farm and mine.

They build cities and squeeze me

into the small spaces in between.

They sell me as pets.

There’s not many of me now.

Things change. People change things.

You’ll find me too in zoos and museums,

click-clicking for a mate

in the artificial mists, laying my spawn

to hatch into tiny tadpoles.

Come and visit me.

Watch carefully, you’ll see

my membranes flicker. Wait and I’ll jump.

Soon, they’ll take me home, release me.

Maybe I’ll be numerous again.

Things change. People change things.

How big is a dinosaur egg?

Just how big is a dinosaur egg?

Is it bigger than a nutmeg?

As big as a potato?

As big as a tomato?

As big as a plate, Oh?!

Just how tall is a dinosaur egg?

Is it taller than your leg?

As tall as a street light?

Is it higher than the Dolomites?

Higher than the flight

of a runaway kite?

Just how heavy is a dinosaur egg?

Is it as heavy as a beer keg?

As heavy as my chubby cat,

As heavy as a leaden hat?

As heavy as a falling acrobat

going splat?

Splat!

Just how wide is a dinosaur egg?

Is it wide as Winnipeg?

Is it wide as your settee?

Wide as the beaches in Torquay?

Wider than a very wide wide-screen tv?

Tell me now, don’t make me beg,

Just how big is a dinosaur egg? 

Various Pictures

A Meditation on Migration

From the beginning of this project, the gallery that has enticed me the most has been the Money Gallery. For a start it’s the quietist – many people are so enchanted by the live amphibians and reptiles that they don’t notice there’s anything beyond. Even better, the way through was blocked during most of the project due to building work, so you had to know which back stairs to go up. It’s also one of the least interpreted galleries, which in tandem with the quiet makes it a good space for meditation.

But it’s more than that. Right from the beginning I sensed that you couldn’t think about migration without thinking about money, although this was so much a gut feeling that I’ve struggling to find the rational bones of it.

Certainly from the earliest history of our species, people have travelled to to find the things they need or to exchange things. That much is obvious. None of our ancestors found food or water or shelter by staying in one spot. But there must have been a time when they began to farm and build and store when they began to travel less.

From the start there was someone who filled their knapsack and crossed the mountains – or filled the barrels that filled their boat and crossed the sea. Who knows what proportions of need, greed or curiosity motivated them, but it seems something as fundamental to our human species as the Deaths Head Moth making its journey North from Southern Europe each year.

So from being a people who moved around, we become a species where just some of us move around. Just as we become a species in which just some of us build, and just some of us farm, and just some of us raise children. But those people that move round are fulfilling that function for all of us. They’re bringing us things we need, they’re selling what we’ve got a surplus of, and they’re sharing information about the world.

Now of course we’ve divided the labour even more. There are a dozen other groups of people that move the stuff we sell and buy, and even more that share the information round. So we all get to be a little more still and everything comes to us. And the people that travel come to sell us their labour rather than their goods. But is there really that much difference. The beans we buy from Kenya aren’t just beans. They are the labour of the people that planted and nourished them, picked them and flew them to us. Our phones are the often cheap labour of the people who mined for minerals and assembled them (and I’m a bit sketchy about the rest to be honest!).

The second part of this argument comes from a different gallery. I spent some time speaking with Phil the entomology co-ordinator talking about insect migration. There are a lot of butterflies and moths which used to just visit us seasonally – but which now stay here all year round and breed here – because our climate is getting warmer.

Is this a problem I ask? Do they compete with our native species, many of whom are under threat? Is there anything we do about this? I’m a Botanist by trade. I know about Oxford Ragword and Japanese knotweed. Phil pointed out that by and large our efforts to control insect species backfire on us. Pesticides usually end up killing or damaging the insects we don’t want to damage. Biological control hasn’t turned out to be as clever as we thought either – think how cane toads, introduced to kill insects that fed on the sugar cane have become a pest themselves in Australia and the Caribbean.

And of course it makes perfect sense. If we want to stop this happening we have to deal with global warming. If we want to protect our native insects we have to look after their habitats.

You probably don’t need me to draw the line back to human migration. Human beings have always moved around. Now many of us don’t, it’s money that moves as our proxy. Underlying those movements of people, desperate of hopeful, is the movement of money around the globe. Yes, it’s because of war too, but peel back the grotesque veneer of war and someone’s being impoverished and someone’s being enriched.

Building walls and dragging people kicking and screaming onto aircraft are as pointless and self-defeating as introducing cane toads.  If you want to balance out migration, you have to balance out global financial inequality. And funnily enough as you do so, you’ll probably do help balance out the carbon dioxide level and save a few polar bears into the bargain.  

Aaaargh Dinosaurs! with Dommy B

Dominic who's been such a help on this project, reflecting on my writing with me and working with me on my performance, has a new show touring - and coming to Salford on September 23rd. I haven't seen this one but Dom's shows are well worth watching, with plenty of giggles for grown-ups as well as children.

Weeks 31-33

The posts are getting fewer and farther between and soon this page will be archived and replaced with this one: http://juicefromspace.blogspot.co.uk That's mostly because the main thing happening at the moment is me hammering away on the keyboard and learning my lines.

In the meantime, there are a few things you should know: there's a preview of the show at the museum on Wednesday 26th October, the teacher's pack has been drafted and is ready to be reviewed by Tania, my colleague at Sustain Education, and we've a filming day with Jason booked next month to create films of two of the poems to be featured on youtube.

So here are the details of that preview - also featured on the Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space page. Please do book as numbers are limited.

Juice from Oranges, Rocks from Space

Wed 26 Oct

11.30am - 12.15pm & 1.30-2.15pm

A new poetry performance from Helen Clare, about exhibits from around the museum; where they came from and the journey they’ve made. There will be happy poems, sad poems, gory poems and fun poems – and opportunities for children to join in and create too.

Find out about the giant carved tusk, a moth, bloodworms, a man who was murdered and left to rot in a bog, a Greek God, Stan the T. Rex, and an ancient rock from outer space. 

For children aged 8-12 and their parents/carers

Free, book on mcrmuseum.eventbrite.com or 0161 275 2648

Week 27-31

Today, as I chatted to Jenny on reception I stood feet, possibly inches away from the woman who unwrapped one of the mummies on display in the Ancient Worlds gallery. I ought to make that the over-arching metaphor of this blog, but in truth I mention it just because it's so unbelievably cool, and even though I don't really like the mummies I find it exciting in a way that's almost certainly uncool.

It's also been a notable day today because it was Debbie's last day. Debbie's been a crucial part of the project since the beginning helping to facilitate my needs and support the production of materials for the Learning Team. She's going back into school to work full time as a secondary Drama teacher. She'll be great! Good luck Debbie!

We met in the cafe for celebratory cake but Debbie was a bit green around the gills after her leaving do last night so Cat and I tucked into Red Velvet cake.

It's been a while since my last blog, not because I've been doing nothing but because we seem to have reached the stage where there's a lot of beavering behind the scenes.

We retrialled the Trading Words activity with one of our schools and edited that - so that's more or less finished. I've also worked on teacher instructions for turning the children's sentences from the activity into a class poem. And the Dinosaur egg activity is also now written up. Hopefully a member of staff is going to take a look at some of the design elements because that's really not my strong suit!

Dominic and I have been working hard on the script - which is now a script - with words and staging and everything. We had a really productive rehearsal session on Tuesday. I think I've got away without jokes - although there's a new dinosaur poem about Stan the T,Rex, which is fun, if not actually funny (I think it's funny, mind you, but that's not a guarantee of much!)

My next job is to make an axe so that I can brandish it during the Worsley Man poem about a man who was murdered, probably sacrificed sometime in the 2nd century AD and spent the next couple of thousand years pickling in a Salford bog. It'll be made of foam rubber and spray paint so no children should be harmed during said brandishing.

I also need to find music - I'm having music! Something exciting to start things off with a journeying theme and something electronic for the meteorite poem. It seems strange to accompany the 'oldest thing you'll ever see' with such modern sounds - but of course we do receive radio waves from space - check out this video from NASA with the sounds of space. Again, so cool I'm decidedly uncool about it.

Week 26

The show is starting to take shape. Here's the map of the poems showing the different themes and working out the transitions between each one.

Between the six poems there are 5 opportunities for other objects. Beside the quilt these are taken from a museum project in which the children chose their top 10. The ones I've decided to use are: The Chameleon (who lives in Madagascar like the Golden Mantella) and who at the museum occupies the next door tank); the Wolf (who forms part of The Nature Discovery section which houses a fairy tale collection of  animals - and a giant ant - to entice younger visitors) Stan the T. Rex, and a mummy case.

Although these five objects don't have poems they give opportunities for discussion, poetry games and story telling. I'm working on a story about a wolf and a boy who travels to find him, based on a Native American story

Then I need to think up some jokes....

Week 24 and 25

Photo: Manchester Museum on flickr

"Follow the poems. They have the answer." Well of course they do, but it took my friend Christine, writing from her hospital bed to show me the way out of my quandary - even though it perhaps was not her job to fix my problems just at that moment.

And she was right. Six of the poems fit immediately together - they are the voices of objects talking about different kinds of journeys - the Benin tusk, the Meteorite, The Death's Head Hawk Moth, Worsley Man, Hermes and the Golden Mantella Frog. Dominic also suggested that we use "Who are these souls at my breakfast table" - a poem that looks at all the people involved in making the food that we eat - as an opener.

It occured to me that all these poems answer the question "Where do you come from?" as well as "How did you get here?" Thats a good unifying principle for starters.

I have a couple more jobs, as well as a little more editing work. One is to do a mapping exercise looking at the connection between the poems. I like this sort of thing - paper, post-its and coloured pens, maybe even fancy tape, spread all over the floor.

The second job is to look for other things in the museum which haven't got poems but still have connections and form part of the narrative. Dominic suggested that the quilt with all the quotes from immigrants might have this role. The found pantoum I wrote may well be a little grown up and, as the phrases repeat with the strange claustrophobia of the pantoum, too difficult to hear.

There's also another poem on the way. On Friday I spent some time talking about buckles with Bryan Sitch the archeology curator, which was fascinating. One of the things we talked about was how ornamental and bejewelled brooches marked out people's status. He told me about sumptuary laws preventing people of lower status from wearing certain things even though they might have made the money. Here's one: "no knight under the estate of a lord, esquire or gentleman , nor any other person, shall wear any shoes or boots having spikes or points which exceed the length of two inches, under the forfeiture of forty pence." Anyone who's ever been stopped for driving too nice a car will know what that's about!

What's really nice about this is that it's almost the anti-migration poem, in that all the other poems have been looking at the journeys of things - but this one's about one of the forces that stops flow and movement - in this case social mobility. This is how people are pinned in their place.

So we didn't quite manage Buckles and Butterflies. But we have got Brooches and Moths. And then no more poems!

Week 22 and 23

Photo: Manchester Evening News.

I'd like to stop now please. I've had a great time and I've written lots of poems I'm pleased with. I've done the stuff that's for me, and I've now got the difficult job of forming that into something for other people. To be honest, I'm feeling slightly clueless!

The next job is to somehow make the poems into a narrative. I'm thinking it ought to be a series of conversations with the objects, but beyond that it's hard to see. Then I'm going to be working on performance skills with Dominic - which will be pushing at the edges of my comfort zone.

I also need to create a teachers' pack around the show. I've already got a few ideas for activities but I need to work out how to write them - and then they've all got to be cross-referenced against the national curriculum. Oh Joy!

In the meantime I've been catching up on admin - making sure the midpoint evaluations are written up and seeing what photographs we already have and fighting with Powerpoint to make a visual representation of the Nonsense Verse activity.

So I've gone from feeling quite smug to feeling as if I've hit a brick wall. The real work starts here! So I'm sorry I've no exciting news for you this week. But here's a pretty picture of the museum.

Week 21

It's all coming together. There are 11 poems now and this weekend I've redrafted the meteorite poem and tried out a found pantoum based on this lovely quilt. I'm also working on the Hermes poem (again!) and hope to write one about buckles - even though the butterflies lost out to the Death's Head Hawkmoth in the end.

We've also got the trading words activity finished and the visitor's poemlet activity is almost ready for the blog.

We're looking at doing one more workshop for the museum - this will be a family workshop, encouraging people to write nonsense poems inspired by the exhibits and based on my Dinosaur Egg poem, hopefully alongside a film of me performing the poem - I'll be talking to Jason Wingard next week about the filming.

The plan is to get all the poems written by the time I see Dominic next on the 21st June.

Then what we have to figure out is how to connect all those poems together into a narrative that can form the basis of a show. Dominic's determined there will be jokes, which will be interesting. I'm not a natural comic - except by accident! I'm really hoping Dominic has some bright ideas, or at least some smart questions - because right now I'm struggling to imagine it.

But then, that's the nature of the creative process. You start with something you can't imagine. You think and you talk and you dream and you put some words on paper and you mess with them and you think and talk and dream some more and eventually something exists, not in the imagination, but in reality. It still scares me. Every single time.

The best thing I did when I planned this project is to bring together some really good people to work with. Dominic's been incredibly supportive and not afraid to push me to do better and to ask difficult questions. Cat and Debbie have been there to talk to every week and to help shape the workshops into something that works for the museum. The curators have shown me things and answered my questions. Jennie showed me the Dinosaur egg and her enthusiasm helped lead to the poem, which was really the one that got me on the right track. And soon I'll be meeting with Tania to discuss how we extend the show into a fuller educational experience.

We're half way through the 10 month project now - and it feels like we're where we should be. There are plenty of challenges ahead, but it's very exciting and I think we're going to end up with something pretty good.

Week 20

Photo: Wikipedia

Suddenly I have 8 poems! Partly this is because the one about the Dinosaur Egg got split into two poems, one about the egg and one about dinosaur growth - but, like my mother, I'm never one to walk past a BOGOF! The one about the meteorite still needs to find the right tone, but the others are there but for a few lines highlighted in yellow.

So far we have poems about - the meteorite, the Benin Tusk, dinosaur eggs, trade, where our food comes from, and the Golden Mantella frog.

And hopefully soon there will at last be a Butterfly Poem, and a Buckles one! Then I've got this phrase that I jotted down in my book some weeks ago "a museum in a machine for travelling time and space". I think there's a poem in there somewhere - perhaps one that introduces the whole set. There's also a fragment of a Paper Birds poem. Then I'd still like to come back to Hermes who seems to have wandered off. He's always was a tricky character and, it seems, a God who really doesn't want to be pinned down (unlike the butterflies maybe....)

On Friday I went to see Phil from the Entomology Department. I had a great time looking at different specimens. So far I have interpreted the theme of migration very widely, but I wanted to write a poem that looked at migration in a more expected way - the way most of us, especially those of us with a biological bent might understand it. I also wanted to try for a Butterfly poem - seeing as the project is called Buckles and Butterflies!

To be honest I wasn't really sure if butterflies did migrate - sometimes the facts really do get in the way - so I was relieved when Phil handed me a paper about Monarch butterflies and proceeded to pull out case after case of lovely insects.

Monarch butterflies are particularly interesting as they breed as they migrate from South America to North America - it takes 4 generations for them to get there. The last generation doesn't fully mature sexually until they've got back to South America and over-wintered in a torpor(always an attractive prospect) and are ready to fly North again. Sometimes they arrive in Britain by accident. I did think that The Accidental Migrant would make a good title for a poem.

But I was also fascinated by the Red Admiral. Like many of us this is a butterfly that's very familiar to me, and I hadn't realised it was a migrant from Southern Europe - although as our winters get warmer some of them are surviving over here. It feeds on nettles which is why it's so often seen near rough ground. We see them on our walks though not as often as I used to do as a child - and a quick google confirms that their numbers have dropped though they're not yet endangered. I remember they used to fly into our classroom at primary school on summer days when the windows were open.

Cabbage whites are also migrants. I've been disappointed not to see any caterpillars this year despite growing cabbages, but perhaps that's because the slugs got there first!

The Death's Head Hawkmoth is also a migrant from Southern Europe. I'm rather taken with them even though they're not butterflies, mostly because they're big, furry and squeak and I have a bad habit of anthropomorphising! They're supposed to be bad luck because of the skull on their backs (actually I think it looks more like the ghosts from Pacman) but having learned about the incredible journey they make from Spain and Italy I'm wondering if they're actually pretty lucky.

So that's my dilemma this week. Do I go for the Red Admiral, a butterfly children are likely to see and recognise, or abandon the idea of having a butterfly poem and write about the Deaths Head Hawkmoth with all its drama. We'll see.....

Week 18 and 19

Image: https://frogblogmanchester.com/about/golden-mantella/

It's another two-week blog. I've been pre-occupied with family dramas and broken boilers. Turns out the prosaic isn't bad for poetry though. I've worked on four poems, even though I've been swearing at the builders next door who are building a loft extension next to the loft extension I have as my study.

I've finished the poem about Worsley Man and a rather whimsical poem about Dinosaur Eggs and I've drafted a poem about the Golden Mantella. I must remember to stop typing Mantilla, it's not like a Spanish shawl at all, it's a delightful, tiny and, sadly, critically endangered frog from Madagascar. I also have a frog joke, thanks to Jennie. If someone reads my frog poem they'll be able to say "reddit, reddit" (geddit?).

I've also been working on a poetry blog for the museum's website and a poem about trade. It was originally supposed to be in Hermes' voice. Not sure I've been able to manage that yet. In fact at the moment Hermes seems to be disappearing from the whole show. Not yet sure whether or not I can work him back in - but I'm just going to keep writing for now and deal with that later.

I've also come to a decision about the Benin poem. I'm not going to write about the Warri Kingdom - the more research I've done, the more complicated it gets, and it seems that the journey of the prince of Benin to 'found' the Warri kingdom might not be something all groups celebrate equally. Also, I've realised I want each poem to relate to a key object in the museum. So I'm going back to the Benin tusk and that story of exile and loss. So I've also got notes for a poem about that.

Now that I've switched from writing about the Strawberry Poison Dart from to the Golden Mantella, who is more endangered and possibly even cuter, I've identified another challenge. I can't find a Golden Mantella toy. Come to that a knitted Worsley Man is probably not an option. Neither am I going to carve a Benin tusk from polystyrene! I'm not going to be able to find 'things' for everything in the poems. I'm going to need images, and decent ones at that. But while I'm probably going to be able to put things on the laptop and have access to projectors in schools and other venues, what I really don't want is a powerpoint slide show. Or if I do, I'm going to have to up my powerpoint skills to produce something a bit more exciting.

Week 17

It's been a week for discovering people.

I forgot to take a picture at the museum -
so this one's from the Natural History Museum website. 

On Wednesday I was persuaded to put my antisocial tendencies ('but I'd rather watch netflix with my cat') and go out to see Denis Jones  do a gig at the Old Granada Studios. Denis was of course great, but so was the company.

My friend Sian and I got chatting to Jenny who was rehearsing with the fabulous She choir , Jenny it turned out worked at the museum and is keen on blogging and minerals. I'm hoping to be able to connect up this blog with the Museum Blog that Jenny runs and to talk to Jenny a lot about rocks and minerals.

So today I had a good meeting with Debbie (Cat it turns out is stranded in Lumb Bank. Good for her!) and we ran through the improvements we need to make to the trading activity in the money gallery.

Then I went outside to enjoy the rain in the Rutherford Garden and got chatting to a really nice woman who was with a party of school children from Finland spending the week in Manchester. They were from Tampere, the 'Manchester of Finland'. She said the cold felt like home even if the rain didn't and I told her people were getting sunburned last week. She said that their children started school two years later - and I asked her was it true that they then learned their reading more quickly and more happily and she said yes.

Then I went to find Jenny, who introduced me to a dinosaur egg. It's not that big compared to a dinosaur. They grow a lot! Turns out that reptiles don't really stop growing in the way that mammals do - which is why you get some big old crocodiles.

So, is growing a kind of migration? I'm having to think about that - but I'm writing a poem about dinosaur eggs anyway.

Weeks 14-16

I've been in Barcelona, being unexpectedly unimpressed by Gaudi. However sitting in Parc Guell on the final morning watching the parrots pick the blossom off the cherry trees I managed to crack a problem that had been bugging me all week. How could I fit the story of Worsley Man into a narrative about journeys?

I'd originally wanted to include Lindow man in the series - partly due to a plea by Dominic for the inclusion of more human beings. I remember LIndow man being unearthed when I was a teenager. At the time we'd believed he was a traveller that had been mugged. Someone even wrote a letter to the paper complaining about his being sent to the Natural History museum in London rather than staying in Manchester. It was signed Pete Marsh. "I don't want to go to London. Last time I tried to go there I got robbed and garrotted." I paraphrase.

But over time it seems to have become more or less certain that Pete Marsh like many other 'bog bodies' was some sort of ritual killing, probably a sacrifice, right under the noses of the Romans who had banned such sacrifices. There's even evidence from finger nails and beard and bones and teeth that suggest that these human sacrifices were well-born and healthy and possibly either volunteered or were raised for sacrifice.

This is all so other, so incomprehensible that I realised the incredible jouney that Worsley Man and Lindow man have made. They have come to us from another time, from a civilisation with very little recorded history. Worsley Man is a time traveller. As are we all. We wait and time moves around us, like watching a moving train as we sit in a stationary train. Only Worsley Man has waited nearly two thousand years as time moves around him.

Now he, or his replica, sits in a case in the archaelogy section while people walk past on the way to see the mummies. I like him better than the mummies. I look at his face and wonder if that's the face of a man waiting patiently and trustingly to be killed.

Week 12 and 13

It's not that not much has been happening, it's that most of the stuff that's been happening has been somewhere in the recesses of my mind - and it's not pretty in there.

Dominic and I trialled the first section of the Hermes show at Stanley Grove Junior school. It was great fun - and I remembered all the words. The children had lots of interesting questions which was great - one of the things poetry should do is make people think. 

One of the things I did many years ago when I had a role as science co-ordinator for Creative Partnerships is take a load of scientist, artist and educators out to dinner to talk (at the Wapping Project, now I think closed - which housed the hydraulics lift the curtains of London's theatreland) I seem to remember we argued a lot about metaphor but one of the things we agreed on was the importance of questions. We came up with a little aphorism - the reward for asking questions, is not answers, it is more questions. Or something like that. As a science educator I believe that if you can keep children's ability to ask questions alive, they will learn beyond your expectations. #

The questions also gave me a direction to go with the writing. It's also given me a lot to think about around the Hermes character and the theatrics of the piece - which is a completely new area for me. 

So I've been doing some writing around the history of the solar system (the problem with these things is as you keep answering questions arising from questions, you find yourself going further and further back. I don't want to start at the Big Bang - I'll leave that to Stephen Hawking!) and today I've been to the museum for a tete a tete with my favourite meteorite, a big shiny, angular piece of iron that fell on Campo de Ciel in Argentina about 5000 years ago. I've developed a bit of an obsession with this meteorite, mostly because it's one of the things you can touch. It's older and from further away than anything I will ever touch and that fills me with wonder. All I have to do now is catch some of that wonder in a poem.....

Week 11

Another great day at the museum!

Debbie and I trialled the trading activity. In a nutshell the children win cards with words or objects as a reward for answering questions and then try to form sentences from the words - trading cards with each other or using money to buy more useful words. We talk a lot about value - in terms of the worth of things changing depending on how much someone wants things, and how many people want things, and how the value of a sentence depends on whether you think the best is the funniest or the weirdest or the truest. Or just the one you mates make up.

Because the task was so open-ended the children went about it in different ways. We had haggling and bidding wars, we had gentle persuasion. We had one child who bought my stock of cards to sell on at a profit. We had children reneging on deals and hoarding to stop other children getting the good words. I think it helped them think a lot about how money works and hopefully what's fair and isn't fair. (Can you stop children thinking about what's fair and isn't fair?!)

At some point I'm going to write a Hermes poem that signposts some of the interesting issues around trading and also to bring it back to thinking about the values that are attached to words.

But for now, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Also, this article about Benin came up in the Guardian, so I'm popping it here for later.

Week 10

Image Paul Cliff for Manchester Museum (flickr)

It's been a very exciting week. Dominic and I had a session on Monday working on my drafts (and eating vegan food). It was a very productive afternoon and we've got a draft ready to be unveiled at Stanley Grove school in a couple of weeks. Dominic's in for the day and I'm going along to perform at the assembly. Time to start to learn my script!

In the meantime the snakes have arrived. So I've a weekend spraying their tummies gold and attaching them to the staff. The belts have also arrived so I'll be fully costumed at Stanley Grove - obviously more important than knowing my words.... 

Today at the museum I've made notes for the poem about the meteorites and I've been gnawing away at the problem of what to make the final poem - the one about the future. I did wonder about a cockroach, but I don't want a post-apocalyptic future. I want these children to believe they can make a better future. 

As I've been wandering the museum thinking about the future I keep being drawn up to the top floor - which sort of makes sense - you'll remember last week I was looking at the sky through the windows. 

On that top floor is the aquaponics system - a closed, balanced aquatic system which uses fish poo to feed mint. Then there's a floor dedicated to the ideas of Wonder, Discover, Make and Share. I'm always drawn to the made things. I think our future is a made future. The living world is a triumph of organising forces over the forces of chaos. I think we have to be part of those organising forces. I think the time for just letting things happen will be after the earth has been cured of humans. In the meantime whether we see ourselves as part of nature or as the custodians of nature we have to work in harmony with it. 

So I wrote down 'harmony' and 'creation' and headed down the stairs through the Living Worlds gallery, asking myself again and again what's the symbol of the future. I passed the case labelled 'Peace' - the one full of origami birds, made I think by school children but I'll have to check that. It was one of the stops Dmitri and I made when we created a poetry film about migration. And there it was. Almost a full circle. An image of migration. The act of making, of co-operating, of imagining. Was the image of the future a paper bird? No, of course not. The future is a flock of paper birds. 

As I sat at the bus stop a while later I drafted the core of that final poem: 

The future's a blank piece of paper, 

the future is a word, 

the future's each fold,

each thought, each hand we hold, 

each plan we make, each prayer. 

The future's every dream we share, 

it's a flock of paper birds.

I think there's also a possibility of creating an activity round this where children write their dreams on paper and fold it into birds. I just have to learn how to fold a bird!

Week 9

Things are starting to step up a notch. Debbie and I worked on the card game based around the living cultures and money galleries, which we're going to be trying out on a group of guinea kids in a couple of weeks.

And on Monday Dominic and I are going to be working on the draft of my Hermes verse ready to try something out on a local school the week after.

I also looked round the museum to contemplate what the future element of my set of poems might be. Mostly I was looking at the snowy sky through the glass roof and wondering if we needed some kind of Great Glass Elevator.

There's a shocking exhibit in the vivarium with lots of chopped down trees and no animals at all. That's one future. There's also on the other end of the same floor an aquaponics system - a closed system where bacteria digest fish poo into food for mint. It's all very peaceful and harmonious. That's a vision of the future too.

And in the money gallery there's an amazing machine that allows you to feel your way round virtual objects. Partly it's for visually impaired people - but it's also a different way of having other people experience objects, and a way of exploring objects theoretically from the other side of the world. It's a very strange experience, poking your way round a rather vicious looking pig skull and being able to feel how deep the holes are and which go right through and which don't. (There were all sorts of lovely vases but naturally I'd rather poke round a pig skull!) So a world in which we experience things differently and in which we are differently connected. That's a future too.

But the future is unscripted. It is territory to which the map is not yet drawn. It is a story which young people will write for themselves. I'd like to help them understand that. Without scaring the bejeezus out of them, or apologising too abjectly for the fact that we're handing a difficult present to them.

But on a lighter note there's a parcel waiting in the post office for me. I'm hoping it's rubber snakes - all the way from Hong Kong. Can snakes have a carbon footprint if they don't have feet?

Week 8

This has been a busy week, picking my way through the turmoil that's been created as the project starts to branch in different directions.

The answers to last weeks questions.

1. Hermes tells riddles. He also tells lies and plays with words. He's like a cross between the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland and Jack Nicholson's Joker. In my head he is anyway - making him appear in person might be slightly trickier!

2. I met with Debbie and Cat to discuss using the money gallery in the card game. When will I learn - those problems which bug you for hours can usually be solved in a few minutes of lively discussion. Or maybe that's only after they've bugged you for hours, I'm not sure. Anyway, the solution to how to bring the money into the game, might be to bring money into the game. Looks like we're going to buy lots of lovely gold and silver coins and allow children to buy words from each other as part of the game. (Political aside - is this what I want to teach them about capitalism? Actually yes, it's not money that's the problem it's neo-liberalism and this game has rules!).

3. I'm not thinking about Frogs yet, or the Benin empire. One thing at a time. I might still buy a toy one though, once I've finished this costume.

Ah, yes, the costume. I've been working on Hermes' costume. Here's his hat, sandals and staff.

There are a couple of yellow rubber snakes on their way from Hong Kong to add to the staff, along with 3 narrow belts, which seems to approximate how Ancient Greek women wore their toga's (he's a very gender-flexible god). I just need to get a white bed sheet for said toga and I already have a nice gold brooch in the shape of a snake.

Oh, and today, this from a charity shop. It's not very Greek but it's gold and it'll probably hold most of the props I need for the show. Hurray!

Week 7

Today I'm writing from home - they're having the windows done in the museum and Debbie and Cat have decided to keep a wide berth and I decided that I needed to catch up on thinking and writing.

Three things are taxing my brain.

1. Riddles. I think Hermes might be a riddler. I think it could work as a way of involving the children and as a basis for follow on workshops. I've been re-reading the Exeter Riddles to see if I can incorporate them. But there's not much overlap between their Anglo Saxon working world and the world of a Greek God. And they're really rude!!

But they've given me some food for thought. Double meanings, puns, visual clues, anagrams.


2. How to use the Money gallery in the card game I've created which uses objects from the Living Cultures and Manchester galleries. I've got a list of words like "reward" "contract" "exchange" "value". They're all quite abstract though. Maybe there's a way that this gallery provides Chance or Community Chest cards like monopoly. Or do we somehow work with a list of concrete nouns and a list of abstract nouns.

3. Frogs. Specifically Strawberry poison dart frogs. He's my next candidate for a poem and a riddle from Hermes.

Look at him here, He's delightful. I can also buy a toy of him on Amazon. Oh dear.

Consquently I've eaten a lot and written very little. Never mind. Thinking is still work.

Week 6

This week I decided to track down a story of human migration that might fit into the show that I've found myself developing.

So, back to the Living Cultures gallery. This time I decided to watch some of those films. I'm one of those people that never watches films in galleries. Partly this is impatience - I like to experience things in my own time, and partly because I spend enough of life staring at a screen - when I go to a museum I want to stare through glass at stuff.

Anyway, the films were well worth watching. I heard about a man stabbed through the heart by a thrown Sudanese spear after a property dispute, I learned about Kente cloth and Mohawk beadwork. I also heard the tale of a prince of Benin who travelled with his people and founded the Kingdom of Warri.

There's a wonderful carved Elephant tusk which was dedicated to a Benin ruler or Oba who was exiled by the British in 1897, just about the same time as this tusk was taken as it happens. Exile's a word that always brings a chill to my heart. I remember Mobray in Richard 2.  "Now my tongue's use is to me no more than an unstringed viol or a harp.... What is they sentence then but speechless death, which robs my tongue from breathing native breath."

There's a lot of heartache behind the glass at a museum.

In the meantime I'm trying to find out more about this prince of Benin and the Kingdom of Warra. Sometimes people are better than Google, so I'm hoping to speak to a curator soon - and I'm really hoping I'll be able to get in touch with someone from that culture to hear their experiences and stories.

Week 5

It's been quite a week. Dominic Berry came to see me at the museum on Friday. Dominic's a talented and experienced writer of poetry for children and I've asked him to mentor me on this project. You should check out his webpage. Earlier in the week we'd both been to see http://louisethepoet.co.uk/'s show The Sleepover at Z Arts. It was great. Lots of chewy rhymes, physical theatre and humour. It really got me thinking.

Especially I started to think about making Hermes the star of the show. I started off thinking of making a big Hermes doll complete with gold sandals, winged helmet, staff and before I knew what was happening I was online shopping for gold sandals for me. I think I'm going to be Hermes. (Dominic's quite excited by the whole gender switching thing as well as the vegan carrot cake in the cafe!). 

Dominic's encouraged me to stick to four key poems within the Hermes narrative. I was all set to write twelve, and I still might, but only 4 will be central to the show. The others can be imported if required. We thought they should represent a journey in time. I was already keen on writing about the meteoroite (Oooh, yes, I bought a meteorite from ebay. It's only as large as my thumb nail but I keep touching it and thinking "That's come from outer space!" and "That might be older than the earth!") and the tree frog. The tree frog's interesting because not only is it that strange transition between land and see (and Hermes loves those boundaries) but because there's another story, about how we've impacted the world around us without even thinking about it (Palm oil, folks!). 

We talked about also having a human story - just yet I'm not sure what that is, and also a story of a future. I checked in my notebook and noticed that according to Aesop (who argues with Aesop!) Hermes was the ruler of the gate of prophetic dreams which fits beautifully.

We also went down to the dinosaurs to have a look round. Dominic's working on a work for children around Dinosaurs. I thought he should have a land, air and water dinosaur, but it turns out the air and water reptiles aren't actually dinosaurs. Which is a shame because they're cool. Actually it was mostly nautilus that charmed me. Guess I'm going to have to write about nautilus myself!

So we started to think about my poems in terms of the air (meteorite), water (frog) and land (human migration). I think the fourth might be fire. Have we a fiery future. I was talking to one of my pupils about the sun cooling into a red giant and the probability that the earth would get swallowed up. He told me that when his primary school teacher told his class about it, one little girl cried inconsolably. I don't want to have that effect on children. Personally I'm not all that bothered about what happens in 7 or 8 billion years. I guess Hermes might be though....