~ Poet: Sheree Mack ~
haar by Sheree Mack
A film by Judith Dekker, who notes in the description at Vimeo that it was
Made as a part of my residency in Dunbar, Scotland for North Light.
This footage was shot during my time there, most of it even on my first evening. Dunbar has a working harbour which brings movement and sounds. But there are moments when there’s a stillness. I asked fellow resident and poet Sheree Mack if she had words for those times and she did. Her words compliment the images and Luca Nasciuti created another great soundtrack.
Haar is a Scots word which translates in English to “coastal fog.” In Dekker’s native Dutch, it can mean “her” or “hair.”
Sheree Mack writes about her own time in Dunbar in a post at her great new blog, adrift in the wilderness. She also kept a blog during her residency: Walking Our Way Home.
Every Memory by Sheree Mack
http://vimeo.com/55172122
This is #6 in Alastair Cook‘s Absent Voices series “celebrating the legacy of the Greenock Sugar Sheds, vast Category A listed hulking relics of the sugar trade, a dark and sweet slice of Scots history.” Sheree Mack reads her poem as part of a soundtrack by Luca Nasciuti, with cinematography by Swoon (Mark Neys). This is one of several filmpoem collaborations between Cook and Neys, and you can catch both men along with Nasciuti live in London tomorrow night, February 16, as part of the London Poetry Systems anniversary bash.
Alastair Cook, Mark Neys and Luca Nasciuti are also all directors — along with yours truly — of the first Filmpoem Festival to be held in Dunbar, Scotland in early August. We’ve just posted the call.
Twenty Second Filmpoem: 20 poets, 20 seconds each
Alastair Cook‘s 22nd filmpoem is both playful and profound, a lovely demonstration of the magic that can happen when poets write ekphrastically in response to film clips.
Twenty Second Filmpoem (the 22nd Filmpoem) is twenty 20 second Filmpoems; it was conceived when I was asked to do a pecha-kucha.org night. An interesting concept, you present 20 slides for 20 seconds; I thought I’d do something a little different, actually create some work for the event. I commissioned 20 writers, all listed below, to write flash fiction against some 1960s found footage I’d edited. It’s ambitious and inevitably some bits work much better than others, but for me it is imperative to push this a little, to leave my comfort zone. And invariable, all the writing is superb, and for that I am thankful.
I also took the opportunity of using Vladimir Kryutchev’s binaural field recordings, for which I thank him. His amazing binaural map of Sergiyev Posad in Russia is here: oontz.ru/en
See the rest of the description on Vimeo to read all 20 short poems. The poets are: Andrew McCallum Crawford, Mary McDonough Clark, Al Innes, Guinevere Glasfurd-Brown, Elspeth Murray, Janette Ayachi, Jane McCance, Donna Campbell, Ewan Morrison, Angela Readman, Gérard Rudolf, Zoe Venditozzi, Jo Bell, Sally Evans, Pippa Little, Tony Williams, Robert Peake, Stevie Ronnie, Sheree Mack and Emily Dodd. Dodd blogged about her part in the production. A couple of excerpts:
I received a link with a password for my film, it was number twenty (password twenty). The film was 1960s found footage and it was beautiful. Alastair had edited it to tell a 1 minute story.
I watched a woman in a white dress on her wedding day. She kept looking at the Best Man. I wrote my initial thoughts down and came back to watch it again, two days later.
My brief was to respond with a piece of flash fiction that could be read aloud within 10 seconds. Alastair wanted it to be short, two or three lines maximum, he said just a haiku in length.
[…]
When I was first commissioned I’d thought along the same lines as the bride… is this really me?
- What if I watch the film and have no emotional response?
- What if I can’t do flash fiction?
- What if my piece ruins the whole presentation?
And all of this ran through my head while waiting for a response from Alastair.
Thankfully, I had this reply within a couple of minutes:
No it’s bloody perfect x Baci x
