An interactive poetry tour of University College, Oxford – 1 November 2024

How can reading poems aloud within Univ’s landscape, juxtaposing the disciplines of poetry, architecture and performance, help us see the space and time-span of our College eco-system with fresh eyes?

This year’s tour kicked off with us paying tribute to the kitchen staff who keep the Univ community so well-fuelled from morning to night. By way of expressing our thanks, we serenaded the catering crew with Pablo Neruda’s Kitchen Symphony, which promptly turned into a joint orchestral performance with the kitchen staff spontaneously grabbing kitchen utensils and improvising a hilarious percussion accompaniment.

This was the first year that our Lodge staff joined us, and who could forget Bernard Chylinksi, one of our dauntless porters, standing beneath the main tower of Main Quad at twilight, reciting Wislawa Symborska’s poem Photograph from September 11 (in both Polish and English), describing a body falling from the towers of the World Trade Center? Or the rousing revised reading of our College Grace in the Hall by Old Member (OM) Don Stickland (1963, Physics)?

This year, as with the year before, we spent a significant part of the tour in the Chapel, reading poems of war and peace. We read poems by AE Housman, Stephen Spender, Ungaretti (in both English and the original Italian, thanks to scientist-poet Chiara Focacci). OM David Sprigings (1974, Medicine) graced us with an arresting rendition of Edward Thomas’ poem Adlestrop, capturing that moment of bittersweet peace before the chaotic horror of war, and Domestic Bursary staff Liza Raichynets held us enthralled with her lyrical rendition of Psalm 87 in her native Ukranian.

Each year the tour seems to take on a character of its own, and while the 2023 tour participants tended to focus on politics and satire, this year’s tour had a quieter, more Surrealist tone. Head Librarian Elizabeth Adams read Oscar Wilde’s poem Sphinx at the Shelley Memorial, about the strangeness of bodies, while OM and former JCR President Newt Bailey (1985, Physics), nominated the staircases of 90/91 High Street as a reading location, given the seeming paradox of their angles and architecture. The original house built here in 1625 has been duly folded into Univ as the College has grown and coalesced around the original beams and stairs, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries flexing and twisting around the original house in an Escher-like hallucination. What better place to read poems such as T. S. Eliot’s poems of Time turning in on itself, or Vidyan Ravinthiran’s poem Uncanny Valley (the latter read by OM Alison Pindar (1991, English)? The sense of Time folding in on itself in strange origamis continued as we ended the tour, OM Helen Watkins (1982, Philosophy and Politics) reading a poem by her daughter OM Emma Teichmann (2006, PPE) written when she was 14 years old, while both Dr James Kempton (Merton SCR) and Professor Tamsin Mather (Univ SCR) regaled us with poems of scientists overturning the way we look at the world, just as Emeritus Fellow Alexander Murray noted that, without realizing it, we had ended the tour in the exact room in which Shelley was asked to defend his revolutionary views.

The second year of the Univ Poetry Tour saw our numbers expanded, with the welcome addition of several Old Members, many enthusiastic Freshers, and even visitors from outside Univ. It is a year that saw us add further languages to the tour, from Ancient Greek to Polish, Italian, and Ukranian. And it saw us digging even deeper into an exploration of how poetry, when read aloud in public spaces, offers us unique levers for rethinking the space-time fabric of Univ’s kaleidoscoping landscape.

Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology) is College Poet Laureate and Interdisciplinary Catalyst

Published: 10 December 2024

Explore Univ on social media