Utility Pole by Fiona Tinwei Lam and Mary McDonald

Poet: | Nationality: | Filmmaker: ,

A very effective collaboration between two Canadian poetry filmmakers, Mary McDonald and Vancouver poetry laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam. Here’s the description from Vimeo:

Utility Pole is a poetry film collaboration between poet Fiona Tinwei Lam and poetry filmmaker Mary McDonald. Utility Pole explores the transformation of trees into the poles that hold our communications, the many branched network that connect us, as the trees have been severed from each other and their own living networks.

The soundscape is a binaural, 360 soundscape featuring a mix of urban forest sounds, with the sounds of technology today and the pointed call of Morse code, our earliest technologically enabled transatlantic communication. Morse code recording is from Freesound.org credits, Bryce835.

This was featured at the indispensable Poetry Film Live site. Go there to read the poet-filmmakers’ bios. As they note, the text of the poem appears in Tinwei Lam’s third collection, Odes & Laments.

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