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Documentary Poetics reprise: a film

My experimental poetry film 'Documentary Poetics reprise', commissioned by Máighréad Medbh for the Fingal Libraries Culture Night 2021 programme, premiered on 17 September.


Part of the digital event 'Oblique Techniques: Poetry of Present-Absent Place', my film appeared alongside contributions by Alice Lyons and Catherine Walsh and with short introductions from Máighréad Medbh. The brief was to make a home video of no longer than twenty minutes presenting (an aspect of) our own practice, with the unifying concept of "a notion of the contemporary as coupled with shifts in perception and concepts of space". Responding to a short list of phrases compiled by Medbh and taken from our recent books, was an additional option or constraint.

From the event description:

Fingal Libraries present three poets whose work explores the contemporary world in unusual ways. Documenting the moment in its various forms - public, private, elemental, intellectual, abstract and material - these poets use words, letters and phrases as material objects to surprise the reader with new meanings. Arrangements enact perception, movement and the process of thinking; art accompanies text. Call them experimental, avant-garde . . . or leave the categories and discover where the oblique leads.

'Documentary Poetics reprise' constitutes the final part of the event below - or you can view it on its own above and/or on my YouTube channel. It consists of my scrolling through a series of looped clips of predominantly amateur footage from public events, mediated several times and allowed to play simultaneously, while speaking passages from my book this is no longer entertainment. The footage is from events broadly taking place within the period the book documents (2014-17).

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