Josef Minta

Poet. First performed as part of ISWAS International Storytelling Festival 2024. Part of Manchester Histories Festival 2024.

Josef Minta is an artist, poet and workshop facilitator from Bury and a Manchester Metropolitan University Alumni gaining a PGCE back in 2013. Josef’s poetry is focused on finding and exploring hidden histories and voices and taking the opportunity to explore the individual experience in relation to specific geographies. Josef works by immersing myself in the history and detail of a place while also exploring it in person and soaking up the sounds, sights and stories which are there to find. 
These three poems “Yesterday”, “Today” and “Tomorrow” are the result of historical research, site and archive visits and dreaming in an attempt to give a flavour of the rich history of MMU at the 200th anniversary but also its status as an integral part of the current eco-system of Manchester and its future place as it continues to grow with the city it inhabits and shapes.
  • Josef Minter reading poetry. A man in a blue shirt standing up in front of a sign Manchester Central Library
  • Three bricks on stands in a art gallery setting with a man taking a photograph of the art.
    Josef Minta artists sitting in a chair with his hand up.
Woven through the poems are links and references to the hidden histories and untold stories that are an inevitable part of an institution which has existed in multiple forms for so long, examinations of the architecture of the MMU estate and how it sits in the wider context of a city which is ever-changing and the central ideas of learning and knowledge which are an integral part of the universities’ mission.
The artist would like to invite you to read and then walk the city campus site to get a true sense of the connection between the words and places, the people and the history, then and the now

YESTERDAY. 

 It started, 

As whispered words, an incantation: 

Benzie. 

Cavendish.  

Dalton. 

Grosvenor. 

Manton. 

All Saints. 

A dream, 

that out of darkness, 

And the weighted clouds of soot, 

From Blake’s dark satanic mills, 

A lifeline and a future was possible. 

Where hard-working hands, 

Could be allied, 

With infinitely malleable minds 

To imagine the future. 

Wrest it into being. 

The spark was lit. 

And while the great and good carried it forward, 

there was blood at the start- still unaccounted for, 

debts and reparations unpaid, 

slave names lost to time, 

a history that’s screaming to be written. 

An account, 

outstanding. 

Later, 

Art took the lead. 

Skill and genius, 

Learning by doing, 

Being, 

a route forward, 

Out of poverty and ignorance,
Time saw merging and cross-pollination, cooperation, and conquest, 

Reaching out into the suburbs. 

The fragments adding to the whole. 

Courses for all horses, 

The latest, the newest alongside the historical and essential.  

And at the centre of everything 

teachers, librarians, 

technicians, cleaners cooks, 

The people made the university. 

Some, 

acknowledged with plaques and plaudits, 

but so many others who simply make this place their life, 

along with the students, 

blurred faces in archive photos , 

who would get lost here,  

or find the places they held dear, 

as sanctuary and progress, 

no longer exist. 

I know. 

At Didsbury this old dog learnt new tricks, 

Many lives were lived, 

While learning to be. 

Benzie. 

Cavendish. 

Dalton. 

Grosvenor. 

Manton. 

All Saints. 

Hollings. 

Exterior as important as interior, 

Towers raised in the white heat of technology,  

Could be a beacon to the future, 

Without obliterating the past. 

Only Manchester could have a toast rack! 

Rising high from suburban splendour, 

A slice of the city, 

Popping up provocatively: 

“Use your loaf son, it’s an essay in modernism”. 

Which also made the brutalist, 

most beautiful. 

Bridges in the sky and theatres underground, 

this palpable idea of progress embodied in the buildings. 

Names that overtime have become shorthand for invention, 

whispered by St Augustine, in prayers: 

Benzie. 

Cavendish.  

Dalton. 

Grosvenor. 

Manton. 

All Saints? 

But with pasts. 

The cost of progress not yet fully accounted for, 

a city changed and warped by the rise of a complex of walled off institutions. 

That are of here yet separate. 

That rub up against the city, 

like a sometimes-unwelcome fellow commuter on a steamy bus down Oxford Road, 

or a sheet of sandpaper on your record shelf. 

That exist sometimes in a vacuum of privilege and exclusivity. 

Alongside,  

Poverty, 

of opportunity, 

of access, 

of ownership. 

A city within a city. 

Towers which in one light might seem ivory white, 

Are at other times houses of light, 

Welcoming lost ships into safe harbours, 

Guiding us to a different and more beautiful tomorrow.  

With the sound of hammer, striking a single bell.  

©Josef Minta 2024 

TODAY 

It started with a walk.  

Circling, feeling the weight of this place. 

Gravity, 

On the space time of Manchester. 

This atomic centre. 

Trying to find and trace a line back, 

To that big bang, 

That moment and that distant dream. 

A voice that whispered, 

Yes. 

Now. 

Today.  

What was the first sign? 

Anvil Street. 

Feeling the hand of the mechanics on my shoulder, 

Old little Ireland, 

Built. 

Vacated. 

Demolished. 

Forgotten. 

Before seeing the seated figure of Dalton, 

Surveying what?  I wonder from his eyes, 

In a box in a museum drawer. 

Touch the stone. 

Walk the perimeter. 

Copper green 

Verdigris to red brick 

Brown stone to concrete 

And miles of glass to the neon now. 

Bisected by the languid turn of the Mancunian way, 

Curved like a wing, 

Caught in a flight of motion. 

The story of stone. 

Tracing the same line from institute to college to poly to uni, 

In the rise of towers, 

Stacked up behind aspirational Roman columns, 

Where a dream of modern Africa was shaped, 

And shone bright, 

onto burnished orange as a facsimile sun- permanent against the usual pigeon grey which we grudgingly love as uniquely ours. 

Castles. 

Guarded by sometimes impenetrable walls that have risen and pushed , 

Forward with a city, 

And sometimes against. 

Where rising rent prices out the locals,
resentment can build,
towards those,
Who make Manchester their temporary home.

A transitory population.

Housed in manufactured villages.

Where other communities once lived, worked, played and thrived,
singular windows,

With bottles, stickers, slogans and songs, 

Unique lives, boxed up and ready, 

For some kind of awakening. 

Before leaving,  

With unknown solutions to impossible problems, 

Scattered, like a chaos of blossom which for a moment covers everything, 

Splashes of rare colour on the concrete. 

Those disparate atoms drawn,
To the centre.
The nucleus.
Adding to the whole.
Action- interaction_ to chain reaction.
The old buildings demolished and replaced,
The debt paid and carried,
repaid,
In a future reshaped,
By the voices that now
Say:
We are here and this is what we think,
this,
Is what the future can be.
The stone speaks when you listen
Telling unheard stories. 

©Josef Minta 2024 

TOMORROW  

It started with 

A book, 

A shelf, 

A dream, 

A story, 

yet to be told. 

Will you remake this world? 

Remodel 

Remould 

This book, on a shelf as yet unwritten, 

belongs to you. 

That somehow,  

You, 

Through graft, guile and imagination, 

wrought out of nothing into being. 

Dig. 

Discover. 

Light out of darkness. 

Form from some base material, 

it might feel a little like magic mercurial and ever shifting, 

In the un-yet activated synapses of your mind 

The nucleus of thoughts. 

That are competing with an onslaught of data, 

And demands, 

Deadlines and a lack of deadtimes in which to form, 

New and shining ideas. 

Precious as a vase 

and as radical as a rock, thrown 

to shatter the now. 

You. 

Will somehow bring this into being. 

This radical new movement, this revaluation of something forgotten. 

This knowledge. 

Hold it tight for so long it will make your hands and your mind ache before it finds a place 

On a shelf, 

In a building as yet unbuilt. 

Formless, like a cloud pinned to the sky, 

Which started with an idea that perhaps felt like it was going out of fashion. 

Libraries are important.  

A continuum of progress and a symbol of an ambition. 

A monument. 

That will alter the skyline of the city 

And the landscape of the mind. 

Glass and neon reaching into the too often greying Manchester skies 

To light the horizon  

As a guiding beacon to this, 

This thing called knowledge. 

As slippery to get hold of as Manchester rain 

Or that thin edge of summer,  

Reflected on the mirrored glass, 

That will house,  

Hold and cherish, 

Hopes for the future. 

On shelves not yet built. 

Perhaps your book will sit, 

Dusting, slowly destroying itself, 

The love that you poured into it 

Lost, 

For a long time. 

Its card unmarked. Until another soul, 

Fellow traveller, 

Will seek out your story to tell. 

Find themselves in it. 

And with you by their side, 

Save us all from ourselves. 

Because the answer is here, 

The solution to the puzzle of the future 

Is within you. 

Nestled spark to burning ember, 

Guiding light to flaming torch, 

bringing clarity, showing us the way 

Out of the darkness.  

©Josef Minta 2024