Come and hear Poems Aloud!

Elizabeth Andrews
Thursday 25 February 2016

Our student recitation competition, held in conjunction with StAnza Poetry Festival, will take place on Friday 4 March from 3.30pm – 4.30pm in the Main University Library. The event is free and everyone is welcome!
Poetry Recital winner close-up

Last year’s winner (pictured above) was Megan McFadyen-Mungall who recited ‘Too much time looking up’ by Lacey Roop.

The live recitation of Poems Aloud! will feature University of St Andrews students reciting a published poem to a panel of judges. The judges will be looking for impressive memorisation and performance that fits well with the chosen poems. For this year’s competition we have asked entrants to recite a poem by one of the headline poets from StAnza 2016 – and a couple of those poets will be included on the judging panel!
Here is a word from University Librarian John MacColl:

Poems Aloud! plays a distinctive part in StAnza, since it celebrates the poem as performance rather than connecting poems to their authors. The memorisation of whole poems is something of a forgotten art these days, when we make use of a large number of internet-based inventions which remove the need for us to use our memories. Students, of course, do have to memorise for exam purposes, and should therefore find the mastery of a short poem relatively easy. Memorisation is only part of the requirement, however; they also need to perform the poem in a way that does justice to its language and structure, and present their interpretation of its meaning.
With Poems Aloud!, the University Library hopes to play a small part in keeping alive the important tradition of memorisation and performance of those poems which have passed the test of publication. A poem memorised becomes a personal, and perhaps permanent possession, capable of bringing comfort and inspiration to its owner in difficult or momentous times.
The event takes place on the entrance level of the Main Library, in which normal-level conversation is allowed, and the rule of silence elsewhere in the building is suspended. On the afternoon of 4 March, therefore, students are quite explicitly allowed to perform good poems aloud in the Library, and we will award a prize of £100 to the best.

If you’d like to find out more about the event, please see the StAnza webpages. If you have any questions or comments, please email us: [email protected].
Photo by Lightbox Creative.
 

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