Exhibits from the Maritime Museum & the City
From 2020 - 2021, poet and medievalist researcher Becca Drake was poet-in-residence at the Maritime Museum, Hull. She explored the museum collections through poetry, asking how various objects are connected to the maritime landscapes of Hull and the Humber estuary, both in the present and in the Middle Ages.
Where does nature end and the museum begin? How does a museum construct new landscapes of the past? And how can we use creative writing to construct these landscapes in ways that invite us in?
The poems on this page are taken from Exhibits from the Maritime Museum & the City, a letterpress pamphlet published by Thin Ice Press in 2023, funded by the Hull, Yorkshire's Maritime City Project. These poems were written during Becca's poetry residency, and the pamphlet is intended as an alternative creative guide to the Maritime Museum. They are made available on this website so that you can use them to explore the objects and landscapes of maritime Hull for yourself, and perhaps be encouraged to write your own creative response to the objects and landscapes of the museum.
You are invited to read these poems as a way of exploring the historical landscapes of maritime Hull. The poems in this pamphlet explore the objects, landscapes and buildings of Hull and the Humber estuary such as Prince's Quay, Bullnose Point, Spurn Lighthouse and Spurn Head.
Some of these poems seek to resurface Hull and the Humber's medieval maritime history and environments, bringing fragments of historic landscapes to the surface so that we can step foot in medieval landscapes and our present day landscapes at the same time. Late-medieval Hull was an important port, trading with France, Germany, the Lowlands and even Iceland. The sea played an important role of bringing places and people together. Nevertheless, little tangible evidence survives of Hull’s medieval maritime past. These poems seek to bridge this gap through a combination of imagination drawing on medieval textual sources and forms.
On this page, you can see scans of the original letterpress pages of the pamphlet. A complete .pdf of the scanned version of Exhibits is available to download freely via this link. You can also head to the Hull Maritime Museum to get a physical copy, or you can find a copy in your local library in the Hull area.
Where does nature end and the museum begin? How does a museum construct new landscapes of the past? And how can we use creative writing to construct these landscapes in ways that invite us in?
The poems on this page are taken from Exhibits from the Maritime Museum & the City, a letterpress pamphlet published by Thin Ice Press in 2023, funded by the Hull, Yorkshire's Maritime City Project. These poems were written during Becca's poetry residency, and the pamphlet is intended as an alternative creative guide to the Maritime Museum. They are made available on this website so that you can use them to explore the objects and landscapes of maritime Hull for yourself, and perhaps be encouraged to write your own creative response to the objects and landscapes of the museum.
You are invited to read these poems as a way of exploring the historical landscapes of maritime Hull. The poems in this pamphlet explore the objects, landscapes and buildings of Hull and the Humber estuary such as Prince's Quay, Bullnose Point, Spurn Lighthouse and Spurn Head.
Some of these poems seek to resurface Hull and the Humber's medieval maritime history and environments, bringing fragments of historic landscapes to the surface so that we can step foot in medieval landscapes and our present day landscapes at the same time. Late-medieval Hull was an important port, trading with France, Germany, the Lowlands and even Iceland. The sea played an important role of bringing places and people together. Nevertheless, little tangible evidence survives of Hull’s medieval maritime past. These poems seek to bridge this gap through a combination of imagination drawing on medieval textual sources and forms.
On this page, you can see scans of the original letterpress pages of the pamphlet. A complete .pdf of the scanned version of Exhibits is available to download freely via this link. You can also head to the Hull Maritime Museum to get a physical copy, or you can find a copy in your local library in the Hull area.
Additional resources are available to help you explore the Hull Maritime Museum using these poems as an alternative guide. See the 'Resources' tab in menu. Becca also wrote a series of blogs documenting her residency, which you can read under 'Blogs'. Finally, you can access videos of some of these poems being read aloud under 'Videos'.
Poems
Title Page of Exhibits by Becca Drake
Exhibits from the Maritime Museum & The City
Becca Drake
Becca Drake
Pages 4 - 5 of Exhibits by Becca Drake.
|
The Museum
In passing this is aquarium light, a question of fish, bones and shadows silvering casements in silt, of letters pooling the page. |
The City,
where octopus limbs, undulating, grow up from mud where salt-gnawed branches claw at the lock where Zimmer frame & breathless plastic lung form imprints swept away. |
Pages 6 -7 of Exhibits by Becca Drake.
|
Mermaid
My maker held me in his arms. A meeting of land and sea beyond the wanting mouth. He stitched me at the neck. He twisted of fish tail and primate mask this skeleton of wires, stretched the net, stuffed me full of sailors' stories, and called me a body. A piece of land above a slip of sea. Did he wake one day, envision this elemental tearing, myth reborn, a monster, a grotesque? |
Eel Grass
Waving tower block. Subaquarium bottle-green. Gelatinous fingers, buried hands -- among skim silver fish in skeins. Humber's shadow. Fleeing sands. Wind-dragged. S c a t t e r i n g. A littoral littering. Pole-snagged plastic fluttering, taking flight. The city in a box. |
Pages 8 - 9 of Exhibits by Becca Drake.
|
Questions
I spy a flock of answers, folding in on themselves, sea-foaming, and back to the lodestone, soaring home, then out to question again. |
And Answers
At the docks is gulls' chorale of: STOCKFISH! STOKFISH! STOCKFFYSSHE! STOKFISSHE! And the calling screech of cars is: STOCKFISH! STOKFISH! STOCKFFYSSHE! STOKFISSHE! And the creaking slippered footsteps: STOCKFISH! STOKFISH! STOCKFFYSSHE! STOKFISSHE! |
Pages 10 - 11 of Exhibits by Becca Drake
|
40’ 3”’
Of balaena australis: half line by half line, bones meet, in metre obsolete --- in measured & sutured sounding words, which seek to work a whale. |
128 ft
Wind-dragged, the shadow catches fleeing sands from the lighthouse, darkened, where his evening stands. |
Pages 12 - 13 of Exhibits by Becca Drake
|
Teredo Navalis
absence wonder Infinite small wormed Unwanted indentations text. How I want These indrawn gasp waves, rasping against shingled shore. And th , if this a beach, and cal- ciferous mouths sea-gestated and spat gnawing earth a soft consume And consume , all is left behind glass. |
Lord Line Trawler Building
At the end of the line, the old Lord windows wide. This wizened hoarder folds shadows in his gap-tooth smile. They vine into letters, words, sentences, which parenthesize (crumbling brick), inscribe grass in wild-flowered ash, rewrite sea; shadows silt the walls with words. These unuttered cacophonies chafe catacombs from the old man's hardened shell and out he spits them, one by one, thieves off in the night licking his gap tooth's whistle from their fingers. |
Pages 14 - 15 of Exhibits by Becca Drake
|
Figurehead of H.M.S. Albion, 1842
Regarding the open sky, it might as well be ocean, she lies supine, her back against a crate, cresting concrete. This is her new prow, the smooth rock of the city her new sea, of which the keeled caress, her profile, forms keen incisors, rocks to scythe ocean floor. She could be petrified. Perhaps, the long days seeking over the seas have hardened her skin, which glints, salt-burnished like the shells of barnacles, withholding her worn and weathered heart. |
Figures of wood at Spurn Point, 2020
Leaning on the grog, lines of lives of women waiting a watch, those wives of the North Sea, stooped. Some fall, some crumble, some drown, and some stand tall, reeling around this finger of land the spool of hours between the tides. |
Pages 16 - 17 of Exhibits by Becca Drake
Findings
The following items are taken from the 1956 Catalogue of the Maritime Museum, Kingston Upon Hull.
'40' 3"'
25. Skeleton of young female Southern Right Whale, Balaena australis, 40' 3" long, captured off the southern coast of Long Island, New-York, USA, near the village of Wainscott.
'Figurehead'
250. Figurehead of HMS Albion, 1842 (exhibited outside)
'Questions'
277. Lodestone, which has the property of attracting iron. When suspended was used by mariners (primarily Chinese) to give a rough indication of magnetic north.
'Teredo Navalis'
427. Piece of wood, bored by Teredo navalis (a marine boring worm)
'Answers'
Incorporates found poetry based on The Customs Records of Hull, 1453, edited by Wendy Childs.
The following items are taken from the 1956 Catalogue of the Maritime Museum, Kingston Upon Hull.
'40' 3"'
25. Skeleton of young female Southern Right Whale, Balaena australis, 40' 3" long, captured off the southern coast of Long Island, New-York, USA, near the village of Wainscott.
'Figurehead'
250. Figurehead of HMS Albion, 1842 (exhibited outside)
'Questions'
277. Lodestone, which has the property of attracting iron. When suspended was used by mariners (primarily Chinese) to give a rough indication of magnetic north.
'Teredo Navalis'
427. Piece of wood, bored by Teredo navalis (a marine boring worm)
'Answers'
Incorporates found poetry based on The Customs Records of Hull, 1453, edited by Wendy Childs.
