Univ Participatory Poetry Tour 2024
Friday, 1 November 2024, 4-6pm
University College, Oxford
All members of the College, friends and family are warmly invited to participate in a poetry tour of the College on Friday, 1 November, led by Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology), Univ’s Poet Laureate. Attendees are welcome to read aloud poems of their choosing, or simply to come along and listen.
The tour will start at 4pm sharp from the Lodge, will include hot drinks at the half-way interval, and finish with drinks in the Alington Room.
We aim to juxtapose poems within Univ’s landscape in ways that help us see new dimensions in either the poem or the landscape (or both). For example, last year we read Ozymandias in the Hall, as we gathered beneath the portraits of various senior statesmen, and we read Allen Ginsburg’s America outside the student rooms formerly occupied by the young Bill Clinton.
The themes for this year’s tour are:
1. Poems of War and Peace
2. Poems about Time, from the passage of time to distortions and illusions of time
3. Poems about Perception: different ways of looking, or measuring or imagining an object
4. Poems of politics
5. Free choice: any poem you wish!
If you would like to submit a poem to be read on the tour or would like to recite a poem on the tour, or nominate a location in College, please send your suggestions for consideration to pireeni.sundaralingam@univ.ox.ac.uk by Wednesday, 30 October. The only caveat is that we are not reading our own poems. The poems do not have to have been written by a Univ poet or linked to a particular location in College (although double marks if they are!).
Further reading
Read Pireeni’s article “Poetry, plaques and process: dialoguing with place and past” in the 2024 issue of The Martlet which mentions the inaugural poetry tour.
Please note that audio, photographs and video footage may be taken throughout our events. These may be used by the College for marketing and publicity in our publications, on our website and in social media or in any third party publication. Please contact the event organiser if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.