The Monthly talks to poet, writer and academic, Shelley Tracey, about being a recipient of a Major Artist award – Part 2 – Poetry Film Making and the Creative Process

What are the key theoretical elements of this latest project?

It’s about what’s involved in the creative process. I think that poetry film-making slows down the creative process so that you can reflect on it in depth. In the course of making a poetry film, there’s a lot of decision making, a lot of choices to be made and lots of selections. For example, what colour palette should one use to emphasise a feeling of peace, or of uncertainty? Through making these decisions, you have some interesting insights into creativity and how that happens.

Some of the decisions you make are around the emotional impact which you want your film to have.  This can be created by the images, sound, all the layers which go to make up the film. This project is really a reflective process, allowing me to raise questions which I still won’t have the answers to by the end of the project, but they’re interesting questions about the production of poetry films and about creativity itself. It’s also made me think about film directors whose work I enjoy, like Tarkovsky’s films, where every frame is poetic.

And what would some of those questions be?

Well, for example, how do you develop the pace of the film? How does that reflect the rhythm and pace of the poem? What are the elements of the printed poem on the page which might be visualised when you are reading the poem, compared with the images which end up on the screen? How much of the text of the poem do you actually put onto the screen? Or do you just use voice-over, or is it a mixture of both?

And I have been wondering about, because it’s my particular interest, Japanese short form poetry and how does that work using film, what’s the best way to create poetry films based on these forms?

Have you been influenced by any particular work?

Yes. “My Red” by John Stevenson, his series of haiku poems, which works on absolutely every level for me. There is a narrative, even though the words themselves are sparse. The arrangement of the words on the screen is impressive, the way film and light is used in a very evocative way is impressive and I really admire the way he uses sound. That is what I would aspire to create but I have to be honest – I know I have a long way to go.

What is the timeline for this project?

It started officially on the 1st September this year (2025) and will end on the 31st August next year (2026). In terms of how that works out in practice, I am doing a presentation for a previous SIAP project that I was involved with, the Carer Writing project, and that will be at the National Association of Writers in Education Conference in November. I hope to have the Carer’s poetry film as part of that presentation.

With the other two poetry films, they will be based on my own poems and so I am exploring how poems are used in different ways to make poetry films. You can use poems you have written as they are in your films, or parts of them, or start with images and films and then create the poem.  I hope to learn many different approaches to making poetry films in the course of this project.