residencies - imperial war museum

"A contemporary poet who writes and speaks passionately
and searchingly about the social impacts of war" -    Imperial War Museum

 
Multicaptions / LiterARTure *  

During 1999, supported by the Poetry Society's Poetry Places scheme, Mario Petrucci became the first ever poet in residence at the Imperial War Museum. One of the fruits of this project, Search and Create, is a type of poetry hunt for all visitors (though it is designed to be of particular interest to schools). It can be found (after some searching!) at the Lambeth Road site. These poems are designed to multiply and expand the context of the artefact, to facilitate a much wider range of viewer response. Petrucci has termed this concept 'Multicaptioning'; it forms a keystone of his efforts to develop a textual-visual 'literARTure' in Museums and other public spaces. The poem Negatives, written by Mario during his very first day at the Museum whilst being 'inducted' through the photographic archives, subsequently won the prestigious Bridport Prize. He is now the Museum's official Literacy Consultant, busy inventing Multicaptions at the Cabinet War Rooms (and IWM North) to generate new kinds of visitor/family response.

CLICK HERE. . . for Mario's site-specific poems at IWM North (for education and for adults). "Petrucci's poems deal with the emotional condition of war, the suffering...   The effect of these tiny poems placed next to enormous pieces of metal is powerful.   Placed in intriguing places, like the treasure at the end of a hunt, these poems achieve something more complex than the pleasure derived from finding what one is already searching for.   They produce an atmosphere of disquiet."   Jane Rendell, Art & Architecture (2006). * LiterARTure: principles of visual art embedded in the text and its creation - or - literature/text contextualising and framing an artefact.

'Dock to Daylight' game for children at the Cabinet War Rooms. CLICK HERE to play the 'Dock to Daylight' game!

Poetry Hunt

 
The Residency

Click here to read an article on Mario's residency in Poetry News

 
'After Auschwitz it is barbaric to write poetry' - Theodor Adorno.

'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it' - George Santayana.

 
I am reliably told I have raised eyebrows at the Museum by NOT merely musing in corridors. I attempt to make inputs to the exhibit space which are linguistically exciting, and to initiate new literacy projects which will engage and delight all visitors regardless of age: it is important for the principle of a residency to survive its first resident!

The Poetry Hunt at the Imperial War Museum ('Search and Create') 'involves poems hidden provocatively among the artefacts. In designing the poems, I wanted texts that were varied, accessible, challenging yet fun, and able to shoulder a wide range of language-based activities. Each piece had to relate imaginatively to its exhibit, able to "draw out" (educare) a creative and empathetic response, particularly from children; and yet the poems had to maintain an authentic and novel presence in their own right. Poems were sited so that their discovery generated unusual postures (crouching, peering, etc), bringing a fresh and suggestive physicality to their reading. In every sense, then, I was at full stretch: how could a 'concrete' poem, consisting of a deranged 'sideways' couplet, embellish or subvert a fully-fledged Exocet missile? And why should it? As part of a generation which experiences the horror and fascination of war mostly through the cellophane of media representation, I was acutely aware of Seamus Heaney's advice not to "rampage permissively" in other people's tragedies.

But multiple constraints are also multiplied opportunities, and while I wandered (palely loitering?) around the Museum balconies long after the public had been ushered out, poems did begin to suggest themselves, along with some unusual (if not unique) contexts. 'Trench', for example, involves a telescopic sight, down which - invariably - children cannot resist looking. When they do, they read a poem on a distant pillar, fixed at about head height on a flight of stairs continually used by visitors. Here, the substance of the poem has been extended into the optical system of the telescopic sight, a move designed to both frame and modify the way the text is read. This telescopic situation becomes heightened through certain formal aspects of the poem, with the language conditioned by the new space. For instance, the hard end-rhymes emphasise a sniper-like scanning of the eye, while the familiar child-like naïvety of the opening lines (reminiscent of 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star') suggests vulnerability together with an ironic sense of the morbidly sinister 'game' the soldiers are playing. These textual factors combine with the physical action of 'sighting the poem' to generate a matrix for reception far more resonant than that of the page alone. This kind of matrix is especially crucial in an environment where children are (perhaps understandably) not encouraged to touch.

Key moments? A five-year-old's cry: "Look Ma, a poem!" The moonlit all-nighter spent alone in the Museum's galleries. British Airways making a video of the poems for its long-haul flights; the Public Art Journal featuring the Hunt as a novel concept in (what I was able to coin as) 'synaesthetic' captioning [see 'Synaesthetic Space' in Public Art Journal, October 1999]. Handling Isaac Rosenberg's grubby trench-scribblings, which left me appalled and speechless. Perhaps most powerful of all: an ordinary soldier's letter to his daughter, desperate to cram an entire fatherhood into its few tightly-scrawled pages.

Not all of my discoveries were text-based, however. I also uncovered in the archives, unexpectedly, a cartoon in the autograph book of a POW named Anckorn (1943). It is a Ronald Searle self-portrait! A rather fuzzy Ronald is being cajoled in a typically Sargeant-Majorish way to damned-well get a haircut. It was a gift to Anckorn - a light moment in a catalogue of frustration and deprivation. This cartoon, with its direct charm and truth, became a touchstone for my introduction at the Museum of an evening celebrating the publication of a new book by Previous Parrot Press. A selection of Searle's drawings, accompanied by Simon Rae's sonnets-in-response, were collected into 'The Face Of War'. There is something incorrigible about Searle - he manages to quarry wit and style from humanity even in the context of its most base statistics. Meanwhile, Rae succeeds in holding a revealingly dark light to those drawings. I feel I have shared something of the edificial quality of Rae's challenge - in my case, by trying (for instance) to get that deranged couplet to square up to its missile!

Scholarship aside, I have experienced a peculiar combination of adrenalin and humility in being able to bring out some of the archive material into the Museum space in suggestive and educational contexts. Through my writing and teaching I have also variously supported the new Holocaust wing, special exhibitions such as 'Bomb to the Beatles', and a number of Edexcel courses for teachers. Not least, in encouraging children to "Search and Create" - that is, to look for poems hidden among the exhibits in radical ways - I believe the Museum experience has been augmented and enriched.

But where does that leave us, with respect to Adorno? Sidney Keyes, the brilliant young poet tragically killed in 1943, talks about our century's "Death Wish". 27 million Russians. 6 million Jews. And all the others. I sincerely hope my work at the Museum is a tangible challenge to Adorno in reasserting the enduring need, in humility and humanity, for war poetry. Santayana's is a linguistic as well as philosophical truth. Which means that every age needs its poets to see and to re-member; or at least to act as mitigators against what Robert Minhinnick calls "our amnesiac selves".  
 
 

IWM North, Manchester