Promoting poetry through public engagement

Jenny Lewis trained as a painter at the Ruskin School of Art and Ealing School of Art before reading English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She is a poet, playwright and children’s author and has had plays and poetry cycles performed at theatres across the UK including her verse drama, After Gilgamesh (for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford) published by Mulfran Press, 2011. She teaches poetry at Oxford University.

In May 2016 I won the Inaugural Warden’s Prize for Public Engagement in Doctoral Research at Goldsmiths. The award reflected the way my doctoral studies into Mesopotamian literature and my retelling of the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh (forthcoming from Carcanet Press as Gilgamesh Retold in 2018) were able to ‘engage the public with research that moves away from an old model of public understanding towards a more dynamic, two-way model of dialogue, collaboration and consultation’ (Research Councils UK, 2016).

As part of the public engagement aspect of my research I had presented two academic papers – the first on the use of metaphor in the erotic poetry of the 2,500 BC poet/priestess Enheduanna at the ‘Beyond the Sheets’ conference at Goldsmiths in 2014 and the second at the ‘Salvage’ conference at Wolverhampton University (2016) for which my presentation ‘Salvage or Sacrilege: re-visioning the Epic of Gilgamesh’ drew an unexpectedly large audience. These academic forays on their own would have been unremarkable. What tipped the scales in my favour was the four year, Arts Council-funded project I have been working on with the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh, ‘Writing Mesopotamia’. ‘Writing Mesopotamia’ is aimed at building bridges and fostering greater understanding between English and Arabic-speaking communities and takes its impetus directly from our own work; in Adnan’s case, extracts from his monumental, 550-page poem, Uruk’s Anthem, published in 1996 and in my case poems from Taking Mesopotamia (Oxford Poets/ Carcanet 2014), a play I wrote for Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, in 2011, After Gilgamesh (Mulfran Press 2012) and, currently, Gilgamesh Retold.

Jenny and Adnan Reading at Iraqi Embassy

As anyone who has ever sought an Arts Council grant knows, public engagement has long been a core requisite of arts funding with ‘tick boxes’ that reflect equalities and diversity criteria. It is no longer enough to reach small, predictable audiences of students and fellow poets through poetry readings at universities, festivals and book shops. The section on public engagement in the current Arts Council application form asks: Who will engage with this activity? Tell us about the target audiences or people taking part, and how they will engage with the activity. If the activity will not engage people immediately, e.g. some research and development activities, please tell us about who you anticipate will engage with your work in the longer term. This is followed by a further section asking how the artists, collaborators and participants in the activity (which would include volunteers, workshop participants etc.) will benefit. This then breaks down even further into smaller units and specific categories of age, race, gender, disability, sexual orientation and religious belief as per Equality and Human Rights Commission guidelines.

My initial, fairly modest aims, in 2013, were to raise money to pay for literal translations of Adnan’s and my poetry which we could then work on for bi-lingual publication and performance, primarily at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford where we gave a reading in March 2013 to mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by US and British troops, then at the British Museum in April 2014, where I performed the first extract of my Gilgamesh Retold – ‘Ninsun’s Prayer to the Sun God, Shamash’ with oud and chorus. The public engagement element at that stage was to run a series of creative writing workshops in the Ancient Near East Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and three day-long seminars with Powerpoint presentations on Mesopotamian history, culture and literature at the British Museum. In both cases, some tremendous poems were generated by students (ranging in age from 11-80) which were published as a pamphlet and performed at special events in the museums.

The Cast of Who can Climb the Sky? at the Ashmolean Museum

Later, as the project grew more complex and ambitious, the public engagement remit also increased, eventually resulting in a huge range of new creative work and activities that involved the public, including over 1000 lines of poetry translated to and from Arabic; creative writing workshops, seminars and readings at the Ashmolean Museum, Keats House, the National Archives, the Iraqi Cultural Centre and the Iraqi Embassy; a 1200 mile, five-city poetry tour of Morocco, taking in schools over a 12-day period; two visual art commissions and exhibitions from which an event was streamed live to Baghdad on Facebook and gained 3,000 ‘likes’ in the first half hour; four chapbooks in English and Arabic, published by Mulfran Press; the adaptation of original poetry into a song that has been viewed over 60,000 times on YouTube and Arabic websites and shown at many festivals, including the Berlin Festival of Poetry and Human Rights, 2014; a Poetry for Peace competition with Oxford schools and minority ethnic communities, run through the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with the winning poem being made into an acclaimed film poem by the Poetry Society and an anthology of ‘words against war’ by young people published by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; and a theatre piece with music and dance – Who Can Climb the Sky? performed at the Poesie-o-rama Festival, Malmo, Sweden in 2016 and the Ashmolean Mueum, Oxford in 2017. All these activities were featured on mine and Adnan’s websites, shared on our Facebook and Twitter accounts and uploaded to Storify.

What has to be assessed is whether funding gained through the addition of public engagement activities is worth the huge amount of time, energy and creativity they take up. In my case, it has been. For a start, working with visual artists, theatre directors, musicians and music producers has deepened my understanding of how text communicates differently through different art forms and media and how much more minimalist it needs to be when in conjunction with drawings and prints, theatre and dance. Secondly, I have become a more confident performer with a better grasp of how to project my voice and pace language on stage. Thirdly, our research into Mesopotamian culture for our seminars and creative writing workshops with schools and the public generally has given my work an added depth and authenticity. And lastly, connections made online via social media and the song have led to a huge number of new contacts and opportunities, including invitations to read at international festivals and the publication of my poem ‘Umm-Ulrabiain’ (from Taking Mesopotamia) in Arabic in a leading Iraqi journal based in Mosul to celebrate the recent re-taking of the city by Iraqi forces.

Umm-Ulrabiain

  for Ramez Ghazoul

in Mosul, when the hottest hours
made work and studying unbearable,
we slept on thin blankets in the large
hall, its porous marble surface sprayed
with water, as outside, in our copious
garden, birds fled to the veined shade
of pistachio trees to escape the sun
that scorched the lawns we played on,
made too hot to touch the taps that
hung with icicles in winter; it mellowed
only in the spring and autumn seasons
when my family picnicked in the fields
outside our city which is often called
Umm-Ulrabiain, or Mother of Two Springs.

A spin off of all this activity with the public is that, as well as making friends and, hopefully, influencing people, one sells more books. This is why I am writing this blog. I hope it helps!

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Jenny's collection Taking Mesopotamia is avaiable here.