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Morningside welcomes Distinguished Visitor Simon Armitage

2017年1020日

   

Last week, Morningside College welcomed Oxford Professor of Poetry, Simon Armitage, as our  Distinguished Visitor. Armitage is a celebrated poet, broadcaster, and playwright that has received, amongst other awards, a PEN Poetry in Translation Prize and an Ivor Novello Award. He was awarded a C.B.E. for services to British poetry in 2010. Armitage recently published his eleventh collection of poetry, The Unaccompanied, which was featured as Morningside’s Book of the Month for October.

Armitage gave talks to students that highlighted the diversity of his craft, including his poetry and song lyric writing and his translation work. On Wednesday evening, Armitage gave a dinner talk to Morningside students on the overlap between poetry and song writing, focusing on Bob Dylan’s controversial win of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a poet and song writer himself, Armitage noted that while song-writing, particularly of folk music, can be both powerful and influential, it falls shorts when judged against the criteria used to judge poetry.

For his public lecture, Armitage explored ‘taking poetry beyond the page’. He spoke on the varied opportunities he had been given to write poetry that would not end up on a page. This included a series of poems on water that were later carved into stones at the edge of the Pennine Way trail in England, as well as adaptations of famous tales, such as the Iliad, for radio broadcast. Armitage told students that he relishes these opportunities as they push him and his craft out of his comfort zone.

Finally, students had the pleasure of welcoming Armitage as a lecturer in Morningside’s first-year general education course: Current Dilemmas and their Histories. Armitage spoke on the “damned if he does, dead if he doesn’t” literary quandary of Sir Gawain in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, a medieval knight’s tale that Armitage translated into modern English. Afterwards, Sir James Mirrlees welcomed Armitage and first-year students for Master’s Tea.

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