Mametz Wood by D. Di Gregorio & A. Gallego

Work done by D. Di Gregorio & A. Gallego

Project Work: 100 Years of Memory: Centenary of World War I

As part of the project the students of L & C II, 2014 recreated a poem by Owen Sheers, Mametz Wood.

I wrote this next poem, 'Mametz Wood', when I went to the Somme battlefield to make a short film about two Welsh writers who had fought at this place. The two writers were called David Jones and Wyn Griffith, and they wrote very very different accounts of this dreadful battle, but it was a strange battle because there seemed to be lots of poets present: it was also where Robert Graves was wounded; Siegfried Sassoon actually watched the battle, so it's a battlefield of the Somme that appears again and again in memoirs of poets and actually in their poetry, and I really wrote this because while I was there they uncovered a shallow grave of twenty Allied soldiers who had been buried very very quickly but whoever had buried them had taken the time to actually link their arms, arm-in-arm, and when I saw a photograph of this grave I just knew that it was one of those images that had burned itself onto my mind and I knew that I would want to write about it eventually. As it happens I did, but the poem took a long time to surface very much in the same way that those elements of the battle are still surfacing through the fields eighty-five years later. - 

Listen to the poet talking about why he wrote the poem and his reading of it.

http://www.poetryarchive.org/

Work done by

Poetry

OK, I admit for many poetry is "boring, unintelligible, nonsense"...yes, and you might be right! Partly this has been caused by us teachers with our mania for looking for the"MEANING" or worse still..."THE POET´S INTENTION"(intention that sometimes not even the poet knows!) We are such killjoys! Because that is what poetry is about...joy! The joy of reading something that we would have liked to say, the joy of discovering someone akin to us, or just the joy of the miracle of words, the same words that we use everyday can produce magic by a skilled/gifted/inspired pen. So how can we go about poetry? First, relax, read with your mind and all the senses open, forget about meanings, look for the"punch"...What is that? The assault to your mind and senses...the way a word or two keeps coming to your mind...the awareness that you would have wanted to say that...the recognition of words that make you happy, even if it`s for a moment or sympathy for a feeling you share. I invite you to listen to two poems by one of the most important and influential poets of the 20th century, the Irish William Butler Yeats, Nobel prize winner and recognised figure of the times...His poems are everlasting...


Two versions of "Second Coming" from Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1920

And a modern one with exquisite music...



Or a surprising version of "Mother of God", from The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)recited by Bono from Irish band U2:

World War I & The War Poets

The Web provides us with good resources to study about WWI.

PPPs about the WWI: Reality of war,WWI,WWI(2),WWI(3).

Photo Archives: WWI Image Archives; Trenches on the Web

WWI timeline

About the War Poets:

PPP , click here to download: Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke

Manuscript of "Dulce et Decorum est"

About Owen´s poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" and here. Audio of the poem, here.

Jessie Pope´s "The Call"

A slideshow with audio of the poem