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.