Cambridge University is linking up 10 leading poets with museums and collections across the university, with the writers each commissioned to produce a poem inspired by exhibits at their museum.

For instance, Jackie Kay has been posted to Cambridge art gallery Kettle's Yard, Jo Shapcott the Polar Museum, and Owen Sheers has been assigned the collections at the Fitzwilliam. Poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who invited each of the poets – also including Don Paterson, Daljit Nagra and Wales's national poet Gillian Clarke – to take part in the project,  said:  “They will be renaissance poets for Cambridge in the truest sense."

Each poet will spend two weeks at his or her institution, between January and March next year. The museums and collections include Cambridge University Library, matched with the poet Imtiaz Dharker, pictured, and where Newton's own copy of Principia Mathematica is held, the Museum of Zoology, matched with Clarke, which features animal specimens collected by Charles Darwin on the Beagle voyage, and Shapcott's residence the Polar Museum, home to Captain Scott's farewell letter to his wife.

Sean Borodale, whose first collection has just been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, said: "In a previous life I worked as a bronze caster in a London foundry, making large-scale works by contemporary artists – hence I find the prospect of exploring the plaster casts in the Museum of Classical Archaeology fascinating.”

An anthology of the 10 new poems will be published next March. The project also links Ann Gray with Cambridge University Botanic Garden, Matthew Hollis with the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Nagra with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Paterson with the Whipple Museum of the History of Science.