Author: More than a Dodo

Introducing Steven Matthews

As mentioned in a blog post a little while ago, we’ve launched Visions of Nature, a special programme of exhibitions, talks and workshops by artists and writers whose varied work celebrates the natural environment. Things will come and go throughout 2016 but one thread will weave throughout the season – our Poets in Residence.

We welcome three poets, who will work alongside staff in our collections and out in the Museum itself to gain inspiration for their writing: John Barnie, Steven Matthews, and Kelley Swain.

But as the poets begin exploring the possibilities of their residency, we’ve asked them each to introduce themselves. The final ‘hello’ comes from Steven Matthews.

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As a poet, I am particularly drawn by the interconnections we have with place, landscape, the shifting tides and weather, and their encapsulation in literature and art across history. My book Skying (Waterloo Press, 2012), for instance, comes back repeatedly to the work, and working practice, of the painter John Constable, who is a presiding spirit in the North Essex-Suffolk countryside near where I grew up.

‘Skying’ is Constable’s own word for the exhilaration of artistic creation – yet an acknowledgement also that creation of any kind is about ‘conquering difficulties’. I take it that those difficulties are to do with the medium, partly; the struggle with, in his case, the rendition of complex light and shadow, cloud-movements, perspectives across flat vistas of landscape, with oil paint as an awkward medium for capturing a moment in time.

For the poet, those difficulties are similarly with the medium – the struggle with words and form to capture the shifting moods inspired by landscape and family, the struggle to write directly and deeply about our relationships to the world when that world itself has become sensationally pixel-thin.

It is therefore a particular and a humbling thrill to be a poet-in-residence for what I see as the indoor-outdoor world of the ‘Visions of Nature’ project at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. The building itself, with its iron-arched interior courtyard roof, gives the impression of an exposed nature caught beneath changeable skies.

My first experiences of the collections have been of their overwhelming abundance and of their daunting history, from insects captured by Charles Darwin on his Beagle voyage, to a new find of an immense sea-dinosaur, a plesiosaur, which we were privileged to see being cleaned. I have seen thousands of beautiful butterflies, hundreds of miraculously-coloured marble slabs, eerie animals in spirit jars.

What strikes me so far most strongly, though, are the shapes and forms all around the museum. And the juxtapositions of these shapes, which force their own rhythms. The Gothic arches against the angled diamonds of the glass in the courtyard roof; the straight lines of the lovely old display cases against the whirls and whorls of ammonites and stone carvings of plants on columns.

I’m looking forward to the difficult task of trying to capture something of those juxtapositions, and of those exciting shapes and stories, in the architecture of new poems.

Introducing Kelley Swain

As part of our Visions of Nature programme, we will be joined by three poets in residence: John Barnie, Steven Matthews, and Kelley Swain. They will work alongside staff in our collections and out in the Museum itself to gain inspiration for their writing.

As the poets begin exploring the possibilities of their residency, we’ve asked them each to introduce themselves. Here we meet Kelley Swain, a poet, writer and editor, particularly in art-science crossover genres.

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My first collection of poetry grew out of spending my final year of university in the zoology and biology laboratories – even though I was completing a degree in English. Darwin’s Microscope was published by Flambard Press in 2009, two years after I graduated, and I was fortunate to take part in many ‘Darwin 200’ celebrations, events and readings.

This led me to fashion a niche as a ‘science poet’, and I spent four years volunteering as Poet-in-Residence at Cambridge University’s Whipple Museum of the History of Science, running public engagement events for the Cambridge Festival of Ideas and Cambridge Science Festival each year. Being affiliated with the Whipple also contributed to my first novel, Double the Stars (Cinnamon Press, 2014) about the Georgian astronomer Caroline Herschel.

For my next book, I immersed myself in the science of human anatomy, writing a verse drama, Opera di Cera, about the famous, life-sized anatomical wax Venus in the Florentine Museum of Physics and Natural History. The Museum opened in 1775, and the Venus, along with hundreds of other anatomical waxworks, are still in situ today, used as training tools for medical students, and serving as marvellous examples of artistic sculpture and the history of medicine. Opera di Cera won the Templar Poetry Prize in 2013, and was published in full by Valley Press in 2014. A long-term aim is for it to become a real opera, and I’ve met a marvellous composer who is keen to make this happen.

It was particularly significant to be invited as one of the Poets-in-Residence for Visions of Nature. I feel no more at home than in a Museum of Natural History, and after my time at Cambridge, it felt very special to be invited to get to know Oxford University better. The unique smells of the Museum’s Spirit Stores and specimen cabinets are – perhaps oddly – incredibly comforting and familiar, whispering of care, of travel, and of old knowledge patiently waiting to be unwrapped.

A good natural history museum is a microcosm of the world itself, and like Darwin preparing to set sail on the Beagle, I’m excited about the year ahead – what treasures will I find in the ship of this Museum of Natural History, and who will I meet along the way? I’m especially interested in botany, geology, cetaceans and cephalopods, but open to inspiration from any perspective.  Let’s set sail!

Introducing John Barnie

As mentioned in a blog post a little while ago, we’ve launched Visions of Nature, a special programme of exhibitions, talks and workshops by artists and writers whose varied work celebrates the natural environment. Things will come and go throughout 2016 but one thread will weave throughout the season – our Poets in Residence.

We welcome three poets, who will work alongside staff in our collections and out in the Museum itself to gain inspiration for their writing: John Barnie, Steven Matthews, and Kelley Swain. In the autumn, they will take part in a number of events and activities to present their work, and will be publishing a small anthology at the end of the year.

But as the poets begin exploring the possibilities of their residency, we’ve asked them each to introduce themselves. First up is John Barnie, poet and essayist from Abergavenny, Monmouthshire.

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I grew up in a small market town in the Usk valley at the edge of the Black Mountains, a place of rivers and streams, hill farms and upland moors, which shaped me both as a person and as a writer, for though I spent some twenty years living in cities, I was always drawn back to the only world in which I truly felt at home. It eventually became the deepest source for the kind of poetry I write.

I was educated in the Humanities but sometime in the 1980s it dawned on me that my ignorance of science was an appalling gap in my knowledge, and I spent many years reading around in evolutionary theory, palaeontology and especially palaeoanthropology which fascinated me, and continues to do so. Inevitably, this was very much the reading of an amateur, but it opened new ways of thinking for me about the evolution of humans and what that evolution means for our ability to solve the global crises we currently face. Understanding something of the history of life on Earth also gave me new perspectives on religion and its role in human affairs.

The opportunity to be a poet in residence at the Museum of Natural History is something I had never anticipated. Judging from my visits to the Museum so far, the experience is likely to lead me in new directions in my writing. It has been extremely interesting to go behind the scenes of the Museum’s public façade to get a sense of the extraordinary array of natural treasures that it holds, and even more so to be introduced by some of the scientists to their research — to follow the patient re-creation of a fossil sea-spider from a lagerstätte, for example, as a three-dimensional image on a computer, revealing the long-dead animal in the finest of detail.

Already my head is buzzing with images, impressions, and ideas, and I know that this is going to be an exciting year which may take me in directions I hadn’t previously thought possible.