Rehomed, Renamed
As part of the 2024 Summer School, Newcastle University's Writing Poetry MA students were poets-in-residence at the Great North Museum Hancock. Around the museum you can find poems written by the students during the Summer School.
The professional writing residency with the GNM:H encouraged new ways to engage with the museum’s collections, history, and modern cultural presence. It allowed the students to explore new perspectives to the way they approach writing.
Further information about the Writing Poetry MA can be found on the Newcastle University website.
Writing Poetry MA | Postgraduate | Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)
Dionysus Limerick
There was a Greek god Dionysus
who yearned to be worshipped without fuss
but fans off their faces
in wild remote places,
ritual madness, t’was ever thus.
by Elaine Cusack
This limerick was inspired by the marble head of Dionysus in the GNM. I hope readers will smile at my valiant attempt to shoehorn the second line into the poetic form. The result is a top heavy limerick about my favourite Greek god. I don’t think he’d mind and I can’t imagine his worshippers will notice.
Incision to Hades
Suppose the poet sets his head back to the wall longing
for the lucidly infinite suppose
the infinite is constructed by many men’s hands
many men’s hearts other
than the poet’s
and as it tends to happen always
it is only the men who get the privilege of this
construction
suppose in a lightless corner in a dark
museum
everything that was meant to be gone is gone
fast as a shark’s outline
thinning the soul’s search for
a different turn in the great
untamed
each soul ripples
reflects
duplicates
multiplicities of turn for the flicker
of a TV screen
the poet lays his soul to the floor
walks out
a hundred feet to the exit.
Suppose you climb two flights of stairs to the first floor
two men naked frozen behind a long glass and
one half of the soul stands to the front - fore fighting
the other half at back
a vapour of the land before the first heart was
broken
a breath never to swoon again.
Sitron Panopoulos
Inspired by the sculpture of the two naked men fighting in the Greek section of the Great North Museum. Poet examines the potency of earth memory, the power of longing and the comfortability of staying within it.
Sitron Panopoulos is a Greek born poet living in London
His work has appeared in anthologies for Toothgrinder, Carnival and New River press.