PAUSE: The Immersive Place of Poetry Film is a collection of eight poetry films and an immersive experience. It grew from a desire to experiment with poetry in multimodal space, and more specifically to explore how the medium could act as a form of place writing. It was developed through periods of fieldwork in the West Midlands of England, and responded to a series of locations that were loosely ‘liminal’ (borderlands, edgelands, footpaths, abandoned spaces and places of transience).

The collection incorporates 360-degree footage, field recordings and written field notes. The theme of ‘pause’ examines how experience and attachment can deepen through slowing and stillness. Presented at the Birmingham Literature Festival 2023 with the support of Writing West Midlands – as curtain raiser screenings, a pop-up Immersive Poetry Pod, and hybrid options available online (a Virtual Gallery and an ArcGIS StoryMap). Knowing about these spaces of engagement in advance shaped the creative development of work.

Click the arrows at the bottom of the page to navigate through the films in the collection. The immersive elements and a recap of the films are shown at the end.

Further details of the development and presentation of the collection are available in the critical dissertation for this research project, available below.