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.