As part of our Magpie Speaking and Listening project for Secondary Schools we’re planning on including an element of poetry and wanted to link this with the museum visit. A call out to Manchester Museum staff and members of Poets on Fire online forum for poem suggestions met with an over-whelming response. Whilst we can’t use all these suggestions within our current project, I thought this would make a fantastic archive for potential future projects/visits/work… So here’s the list (in no particular order)… feel free to add to it with your comments! Please note I haven’t followed up on all these recommendations so please add your own links or corrections by commenting on this post.
Poems:
The Magic Box by Kit Wright
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ozymandias (also known as On A Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below) by Horace Smith
In a Museum by Thomas Hardy
Relic by Ted Hughes
The Old Curiosity Shop
The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford by James Fenton (features in a book by Suzanne Keane called Fragments of the World)
Fragments of the world also includes:
– Flea Market by John Fuller
– Poetry by Saadi Youssef
– The Treasure and the Dragon, a short extract from Beowulf
The Crystal Cabinet by William Blake
Ode to a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Winter Quarters by Pete Didsbury
The British Museum by Peter Didsbury in Scenes from a Long Sleep
The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)
The Room of Saints and Virgins by Jean Sprackland in her collection, Hard Water.
The Natural History Museum by Kate Clanchy published in her collection Samarkand.
Museum Piece by Richard Wilbur
The Dolls Museum in Berlin by Eavan Boland
Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
Subject by Kate Potts (about a medical museum in her t-l Pilot pamphlet)
The Jade Corridor by Richard Marggraf Turley in his Salt collection
Museum of the Forest by Matthew Francis
In the Wedding Museum in The Book of Love
Red Rackham’s Treasure by Lavinia Greenlaw
An Ovaltine Tin… by Paul Farley in Bum on Fire
The Sea Cabinet by Catriona O’Reilly
Natural History by Kate Bingham in Quicksand Beach
Into the Rothko Installation by Peter Redgrove
Musee des Beaux Arts by W H Auden
The British Museum Reading Room by Louis MacNeice
The Theological Museum by Paul Stubb from his 2005 Flambard collection of the same name
The Black Museum in David Harsent’s Selected
Fox in the National Museum of Wales by Robert Minhinnick
The Green-Handled Knife by Martyn Crucefix
Blogs:
Lindowmanchester.wordpress.com
Books:
Past Poetic Archaeology in the Poetry of W.B.Yeats and Seamus Heaney (2004) by Christine Finn
Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) by Kate Atkinson [fiction]
Selected by Lee Harwood includes a poem about his father and a museum
The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 by Jed Rasula
Recollections by Maureen Almond (produced during a residency at The Museum of Antiquities, Newcastle upon Tyne)
Other links:
A good search engine: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/search.htm…useum&x=39&y=11
A poetry competition: http://www.dlrcoco.ie/library/f02en.htm
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