Power comes from risking ourselves in creation.

Anna Dickie adapts Dorothy Baird's poem "Currie"

Dear community,

Snow daze and school’s out. This week has seen a real wave of Universities being Occupied across the UK – part of the anti-cut movement to guard the social wage. The questions and debates raised by the union between workers and youth are reminders of idealism, optimism and motivated by social justice to bring about dialogue and engagement to a slumbering populace drugged by mass media, anxious about complicity, all the while forgetting the real power latent within each of us.

The snow wipes out old roads and our feet carve out new paths. We delight in the snow as if a return to innocence and in awe the accumulative effect of each tiny snowflake gathers into powerful 10 inch high snowbanks disrupting business as usual, complacent routines and nightmare slumbers. I thank Stan Reeves, Tollcross Community Center for the following quote:
Power comes from risking ourselves in creation.
Ourselves, the least practiced habit of being as a collective, come risk and be with us in this momentous time and get involved.

Updates from thiscollection:

Film workshops 17th January 2011
We are in negotiations with Tollcross Community Center’s Adult Learning Project to hold more public 1 day workshops for film making in Jan – March 2011. We have joining us Austin Muirhead from the very exotic Gulf Islands Film and Television School , Galiano Island, British Columbia where cult documentary filmmakers like Jennifer Abbott ( The Corporation) and Brett Gaylor (RiP!A Remix Manifesto) have affiliations. With Austin’s help we hope to complete the last of our 50 unadapted poems. YES we have only 50 LEFT!
If we cannot secure the space, we are looking for folk who may wish to host workshops in their postcode for their community? All we need is a space for 15-20 folk, access to power outlets and hot drinks for a full day. Let us know if there are public spaces near you which could host us for no to low cost. If you would like to join us as shoot mentors or contribute to the filmmaking class please get in touch: film[at]thiscollection.org

Showtime
Our showcase in May 2011 in The Glue Factory is still in the works so if you are up for participating and have submitted a poem or a film you are welcome to help co-curate the space and the week long program: poetry readings, panel discussions, creative writing workshops, on site performances, please do get in touch. We aim to show ALL the films we could not show in our previous showcases so please bring your talent, ideas and submissions to the fore. DEADLINE end MARCH 2011

We are also planning for a St Andrews invasion and will keep all posted once details have been confirmed.

Full house at Utter! the Edinburgh PBH Free Fringe

In other words… why we do what we do.

Special thanks to Justin Vitello for this link. If you can spare the time to watch this ted talk we hope you will find how thiscollection came into being and if you are moved get in touch with us to get involved, really get stuck in and help us out, we are far from perfect but we know with your voice we can truly flourish. Whether you’d like to host a filmpoem party in your street, organise a mini festival and invite poets round, help improve the site, know of a hstorical fact one of the poems have triggered, host a filmmaking workshop, wish to act or crew in someone’s fiilmpoem or just start a conversation to turn “the lonely city” into a street of smiles or a shared secret. Please feel free to initiate some kind of wonderful with these humble words and places by leaving comments on poems that interest you or here on this blog or on our fb page, we’re all ears and look forward to your thoughts and ideas. We are poets, film artists, digital dinosaurs riding the cyber tsunami age on chopsticks all with the intention to remind the by now obese consumers of culture that poetry is potent and the age of experimentation is upon us – seize the day and only connect.
Stefa

Anarchic Street Weaves

What is an artist? One who pursues with their whole mind body and soul some truth and shares this? One who delves deep into the reflective processes of the mind and the world we inhabit to activate and connect meaning with form? Gagging from these idealistic definitions? Something has happened to society that the aesthetic of the crude dollar and instrumental modes of entertainment each credit affords and we can easily lose sight of the simple pleasures our own senses and hands afford us.
In the month leading up to thiscollection’s foray into the free fringe, Rocio Jungenfeld was our artist friend. With simple wool and words from poets Vivien Jones, Anna Dickie, Lauren Pope, Priscilla Chueng-Nainby, Christine De Luca, Jessica Winch and Morgan Downie we brought moments of pause and reflection to very different scenes of Edinburgh with collaborations between site specific street weaves and poetry of the city.
Rocio’s amicable and charming manner has already won her many intriguing collaborators, her solo work is reflective and poignant and her spirit of becoming an artist is infectious and optimistic. She selected poems based in locations around Edinburgh that intrigued her, from her neighbourhood in Southside to the more exotic Aberlady. We then arranged a day where she could meet the poets and weave with them their words into life.
I learnt so much from participating in such intimate adaptations. Assumptions about art activating through regaining the lost convivial nature of collaborative creativity were reinforced, my institutional baggage as a producer in the filmmaking machine was also challenged as Rocio’s street weaves were anarchic and not strictly speaking permitted and seeking permission was antithetical to the process. As documenting the work was also a new challenge where talented filmmakers Charmaine Gilbert, Lucas Kao and Oliver Benton used to narrative form found themselves working on the fly responding to the art instead of directing it. Everyone’s comfort zone was challenged and it was such fertile learning ground for how we respond and how we make from nothing, something truly special which is the spirit of thiscollection.org.
Web clips of the weaves will trickle along covering discussions as far ranging from alternative education, pros and cons of publishing a work, is a work ever truly finished, debate over the value of art, controversy over heritage sites as sacred and holy or enlivened by art and our encounters with “cultural” policing.
We’d like to deeply thank the talented folk who chipped in and helped in the rain, rush and mad August days. Poets Vivien Jones, Anna Dickie, Lauren Pope, Priscilla Chueng-Nainby, Christine De Luca, Jessica Winch and Morgan Downie for reading from a range of your inspiring works and working on the weaves. Filmmakers: Charmaine Gilbert, Lucas Kao and Oliver Benton for their enthusiasm, artistry and openness to being open to the processes the situations blossomed into. For clips of the weaves in action, please visit our vimeo channel.
Rocio has a busy year ahead, so catch up with her on her blog and see her if you can at Hawick working with Alastair Cook in some magic in the borders 10-12th September 2010.

Collective endeavours

Dear thiscollection poets, artists and visitors,

The DIY efforts continue and this time we’re collaborating with Utterspokenword who is part of Peter Buckley Hill’s aka PBH award winning Free fringe which endeavours to keep the fringe free for creatives.

We’ve been really fortunate to be invited by Utter to showcase the films & poems – we will be making the most of this wonderful opportunity on 15th and 22nd August 2010 from 16.45 till 17.45 in the Banshee Labyrinth Cinema.

This August, thiscollection is teaming up with Alt Pixies, our fairy-esque promotion crew, and Rocio Jungenfeld, a weave artist who will give various venues in the burgh inspired by poems a metamorphosis.

Of course thiscollection, like the free fringe, is only as good as the collective’s contributions. If you’re keen to help Alt Pixies with their personalised PR campaign, please do email film[at]thiscollection.com to assist.
The campaign involves reading poetry on the Royal Mile, as pixies gift bookmark invitations with poetry lines from thiscollection and information about the showcases and the weaves to kindred spirits drawn by the poetry.

We look forward to another mad burst of wonder and sharing your creative efforts alongside award winning acts from the PBH free fringe. Spread the word and get involved.

Best wishes,
Claire & Stefa

Gallows-birds and Graveyards by Hayley Shields: No. 42 of this collection’s Top 100

Title: Gallows-birds and Graveyards
Author: Hayley Shields
Number: 42/100
Allocated postcode: EH1

Gallows-birds and Graveyards

On star absent nights,
stood in the car park,
the scalp of St Giles lost
in clouds, my own mind turns
to the dead beneath my feet.
John Knox shelters under bay 23,
sharing his resting place most nights
with the same blue van. God-knows
-Who remains slowly rotting
below me as I tell tales
of dead men. Tales of the damned,
of Resurrectionists and murderers.
Tales of the hanged – their end
marked by brass cobbles nearby.
I shuffle off, watch
tourists spit on a stone
heart for luck, for contempt;
still the bodies sleep
soundly, tucked in tightly
beneath a blanket of tarmac.