Our experience of the ‘natural’ world is often mediated by framing devices or contexts that shape our sense of what is valuable. This exercise uses the metaphor of the museum to explore how our culture shapes what we consider to be valuable and how we tell the story of different kinds of environments.
Museums are both expressions of power and politics. Often they contain objects taken or stolen from other cultures. There have been many changes in the way museums tell the story of their collections over the past few years. It is more likely that you will hear the voices and perspectives of the cultures from which the objects have come.
RIVER MUSEUM
This exercise encourages participants to think through the different elements of an exhibition that might be used to tell the story of a river differently. The contrast between the orderliness of a museum and the chaotic, fluid dynamics of a river, offers the writer a productive tension. How to get the river into a museum? Perhaps this can only be done in the fictional space of a poem.
The writing process will explore the form and tone of
the museum label, display techniques or other systems involved in creating an ‘immersive’ experience. These might be folded into a longer sequence of poems exploring different aspects of the fictional river exhibition.
RESEARCH
BACKGROUND READING
Natalie Diaz. ‘Exhibits from The American Water Museum’, Post-Colonial Love Poem. Faber & Faber, London 2020.
FIRST STEPS
(1) Make a list of things and processes curators use to display an object or artwork in a museum: lighting, labels, display cases, performances, sound, interactive displays etc.
(2) Now make a list of all the other ways a museum may ‘sell’ an exhibition: through merchandise, advertising, the restaurant, signage etc.
(3) Make a list of the aspects of the river you might explore through the exhibition. This can include its physical and cultural significance. Given this is a fictional exhibition, do not feel limited to the practicalities of the museum space. Anything is possible in this museum.
Select one thing from each of the lists you made during First Steps. Now explore how to solve the challenge of combining all three components in an imaginary museum display. For instance, how would you create an immersive experience about being a fish in a polluted river? Or what kind of donation box would be suitable for a museum about pollution? Or how would you put the river in a cabinet and light it? Remember, in a poem you can do the impossible.
COMPOSING YOUR POEM
Once you have made some notes, write a museum label describing how to interact with each exhibit or element of the museum experience; or give an audio description of the exhibit. You might like to look at Natalie Diaz’s poem ‘Exhibits from The American Water Museum’ to see how it’s possible to introduce a note of subversion into your museum. Think about the kinds of voices museums use to talk to their visitors.
Are they instructive, thoughtful, bossy, playful? Use these when you make your writing.
Do this until you have used up all the things on your list. Once you have your descriptions and labels, think about how you might order, or disorder them, to suit your museum poem. For instance, do the exhibits run in sequence from beginning to end? Or do they suggest a different way of walking around this museum. Remember, you don’t have to explain the connection between these different pieces of writing: your reader will make their own connections as they wander through your museum poem.
Red River: Listening to a Polluted River was devised and led by Dr John Wedgwood Clarke, Associate Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
These resources have been developed in collaboration with Field Notes CIC. They may be freely used, reproduced and adapted for the purposes of free education/workshops provided the credits above are included.
