PROJECT BACKGROUND

My first experience of poetry film was in a viewing pod at the National Library of Scotland. I sat in an armchair and picked out film after film from a Margaret Tait retrospective. It was poetry that moved and danced and growled and sang and was proudly fragmented. It evoked visceral and abstracted connections to place through rural landscapes, seascapes, and communities of Orkney. It made me consider how multimedia and digital technologies could extend the environment for a poem, and could potentially broaden the accessibility and appeal for wider audiences too.

The PAUSE collection grew from this desire to experiment with poetry in multimodal space, and more specifically to explore how the medium could act as a form of place writing. As part of this research project, I carried out periods of fieldwork in the West Midlands region of England, and responded to a series of locations that were loosely ‘liminal’ (borderlands, edgelands, footpaths, abandoned spaces and places of transience). I gathered audiovisuals on handheld sound recorders, digital videocameras, a smart phone and 360-degree sound and video devices. I made field notes and jotted down scraps of writing. And then I brought all of these elements into the editing suite and reimagined each place with distance and space for contemplation. I considered how taking the time to pause can deepen our experience of place.

Thanks to the support of Writing West Midlands, I was given the opportunity to present the collection in a range of spaces at the Birmingham Literature Festival, in the role of Poetry Filmmaker in Residence. Knowing I would have the freedom to screen work as large screen projections and in the foyer space at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, I developed a collection of eight 2D films for presentation as curtain raiser screenings for literary events, and an immersive VR experience for festival attenders and passers-by to try out in a Pop-Up Poetry Pod. As a hybrid experience that could reach audiences who were unable to access the festival in person, I made the collection available online via a Virtual Gallery.

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