There is a tradition of erecting plaques as a way of keeping our histories alive. Yet plaques – in their ponderous solidity, their concrete immutability (their “set-in-stoneness”) – are rarely designed in a way that allows for dynamic exchange with the ever-changing contexts of history, society, community… Might it be possible, instead, to design something more akin to a conversational process, something that celebrates the dialogue between history and ourselves, rather than history’s monolithic monologue?

As a cognitive scientist, poet and interdisciplinary artist, I’m intrigued by the ways in which storytelling, memories and histories intersect. Neurological processes such as state-dependent learning mean that our physical spaces often dictate the type of memories and stories we gather, and ultimately the nature of the histories we tell: they bear down on the types of conversations we end up having with the past. In an era of texts, tweets and fast dopamine hits, I’m curious to see how the act of reading aloud poems at specific sites may help us pause and pay attention, to reflect and perhaps even open up new questions. What happens when particular poems, each bearing their own distinct ideas and images, are juxtaposed against a particular historical site? Can poems help us bring a fresh perspective to certain places?

Conversely, can specific locations help us rethink classic poems? Can we playfully pit architecture, local histories and poetry against each other, creating a type of socio-architectural consonance, one that rejigs the way we pattern our stories across time and across space?

I’m delighted that our College Poetry Tour has become an interdisciplinary project, one that has grown and flourished thanks to the generous input of our College Archivist, our College Librarians and core members of Univ’s Percy Bysshe Shelley Poetry Society. Our inaugural tour brought together College members from every section of our College community, from 19 to 90 years of age, reading in four languages, gathering to remap and reimagine our College landscape.

Standing in the Fellows’ Garden (the former site of the laboratory in which Robert Hooke first isolated and named the cell), we read poems that explored shifts in perspective, with Matt Lin (2021, Classics and English) reading John Ashbery’s Portrait in a Convex Mirror and my own reading of Antony Dunn’s Ichneumon Wasp, exploring Darwin’s struggles with his spiritual beliefs as he worked on the theory of natural selection. Standing by the walls of Radcliffe Quad, we contemplated the fossilized shells embedded in the slabs of Headington limestone and read aloud poems of the sea (Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break and Masefield’s Sea-Fever: Rufus Jones (2022, History) along with Auden’s In Praise of Limestone, a poem in which the poet points to the close interconnections between landscape and the type of national character it creates.

The tour was an exercise in both reimagining and remembrance. We stood by the foot of the Old Library and read poems of poets who have been censored, and by doing so, paid tribute to Univ’s continued safeguarding of our access to knowledge (excerpts from Anna Akhmatova’s Burnt Notebooks: Elizabeth Adams, Head Librarian; excerpts from Enhuadana’s Sumerian poem Exaltation of Inana on being silenced, Baris Ozdemir, (2022, Middle Eastern Studies). We stood in the Chapel and read aloud the words of Univ’s young students who had left College to go to war (Ivor Sorley and C.S. Lewis to World War I, Stephen Spender to World War II) with particularly memorable readings by former Spender scholar Max Thomas (2022, Law), and Myfanwy Taylor-Bean (2021, English), the latter reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem written on the loss of her two sons, Mother and Poet: “One of them shot by the sea in the east/And one of them shot in the west by the sea.”

We walked through Univ and wove new stories into the mythology of College: President of the Shelley Society, Dylan Squires (2020, Engineering), talked about his feelings of dislocation on first coming to Univ from the north of England and read Imtiaz Dharker’s poem Living Space, while Old Member and award-winning poet Jenny Wong (1998, English) read her searing poem Arrival, exploring the homesickness felt by international students arriving to face Univ’s cold quads and its distinctive culinary landscape.

Centuries-old institutions like Univ illuminate how the stories of the past are not static but can grow and become ever more complex as they intersect and interact with the lives and ideas that follow. The Poetry Tour gave us an opportunity to be in conversation with specific moments in Univ’s past, interposing fresh twists to these stories. We stood in Helen’s Court, by the former rooms of a young international student and read lines from the poem that Maya Angelou would write, many years later, for his presidential inauguration, lines that we interleaved with Allen Ginsberg’s poem written years before (they begin: “America, I’ve given you all…”). We stood by the marble figure depicting Shelley’s body in death and read the lines that Mary Shelley placed in the mouth of Dr Frankenstein, expressing horror at the sight of the body lying on the slab before him. We stood outside the former rooms of C.S. Lewis and read the feverishly atheistic poems he’d written there as an undergraduate, long before he became a noted voice for Anglicanism. We read wayfaring poems by Tolkien, playfully claiming him for Univ’s history (our College Archivist notes that early in his career, Tolkien was a peripatetic tutor and taught the occasional Univ student; Merton’s Fellows were graciously amused to hear that we included Tolkien in our tour and several have already signed up for Univ’s 2024 poetry tour in Michaelmas term).
A poem’s original meaning refracts when we place it in landscape. Standing beneath the portraits in Hall, we read aloud the cautionary words of our very own Shelley, decrying the oppression of corrupt governments (England in 1819 and The Masque of Anarchy) and vilifying the hubris of statesmen (Ozymandias), which, in turn, paired rather delightfully with the tongue-in-cheek limerick of self-congratulation written by Clement Atlee (Old Member and former Prime Minister). Our Archivist tracked down not only the Atlee poem but also (OM) Christian Cole’s Zulu Wars with its critique of colonialism calling down to us from another century.

The rhythms of the Poetry Tour transformed from site to site as each participant stepped forward with their unique choice of poems: Elizabeth Adams shared a little-known war poem by Edward Stanley Robinson, taken from the Univ archives while College Archivist, Dr Robin Darwall-Smith, unearthed a variety of treasures, including a poem written by former Univ student Leonard Digges in 1623 included as part of the First Folio of Shakespeare. Shane Pledge, Univ’s Accommodation Manager, encapsulated the camaraderie of the tour, and our College community at large, with his choice of Muhammed Ali’s poem Friendship to launch us on our way whilst “Max” Z. Ren (2023, English) chose an extract from Eliot’s Little Gidding – on paradoxes and the cyclical nature of existence – to round off our tour in Logic Lane (“Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning”), perfectly capturing the aesthetics of the tour.

As College Poet Laureate, each of the projects that I’ll be pursuing at Univ over the next few years are explorations of memory and place-making. I’m excited that in creating the frame of the Univ Poetry Tour, so many members of Univ’s community could join me in this first “experiment”, an investigation that will hopefully deepen with each new version of this annual tour, a Univ poetry map, and a downloadable audio tour available at our Lodge. Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of the project is set to expand even further, thanks to the work of Dr Maxime Le Calve, a keen supporter from the Department of Anthropology/Humboldt University, who has been experimenting, in turn, with visual ways to elaborate the nature of the tour.

Our inaugural College Poetry Tour not only highlights the way that poetry has played a major role in Univ’s past and present but also allows us to see Univ’s landscape with fresh eyes. The Poetry Tour gives us a first-hand experience of how acts of storytelling lay down foundational parts of Univ’s identity, as a community of interconnecting lives, loves, and losses, and as an incubator, for acts of imagination that set the world on fire.

Pireeni Sundaralingam (1986, Experimental Psychology), Univ’s Poet Laureate

Illustrations by Dr Maxime Le Calve

Published: 16 July 2024

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