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 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 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.