The First Voice by Emma McGordon

I’ve just finished watching Emma McGordon’s unsettling video of ‘The First Voice’ (see above). Beyond some obviously exceptional individual lines such as ‘I was Billy Goat’s Gruff rough’ and ‘bone lonely’, it’s a great piece of writing and videomaking. It reminds me a bit of a short vid I made to accompany my pamphlet of ‘imagined emails’, The Terrors.

I think this notion of ‘voices’ is central to what you might term ‘place-making’ – that expression of space as social, true human geography or pyschogeography. The voices Emma conjures in her poem seem ghostly to me. The poet inhabits the place like a spectre, moving through the shadows (as she does, literally, towards the end of the video). It is a dissenter’s poem, a marginal force. The poem should tell an alternative narrative.

I’m sure we’ve all had those experiences of walking through a city at night and imagining voices whispering behind us, in dark corners, alleyways, the vacant spaces developers forgot. Are these voices pure fantasy or are they in any way real? Do we create reality when we create a poem. Or is this all just sub-Sinclairian bluff and waffle?

We all live in the universe – this we should not forget, but aside from that, we each have a simpler and more definite address: a country, a city, a street, a building, an apartment. The presence of so precise an address is the criterion by which original poetry is distinguished from the pretentious and the artificial.

A provocative place to start, perhaps; but a place to start nonetheless. That’s Russian Futurist poet Samuil Marshak, and it’s a quote that prefaced an anthology I recently edited, City State: New London Poetry. I find it hard to know what to say about place… it infects, and is the foundation for, so much of my work as a writer. There is one tradition of thinking – outdated, in my opinion – that discredits the importance of place in writing, privileging instead that which is ‘universal’… the writing of common, human experience that paradoxically transcends specific, grounded realities.

But I’m not convinced by this. Artists are limited beings, and that limit is where the interest lies. ‘The local is the only universal’, said the American Modernist William Carlos Williams (above, on the dog and bone), whose incredible long poem Paterson captures the character of his hometown in New Jersey, and is a must-read for anyone interested in place and poetry. The notion that a reader/listener would only be interested in experiences they can directly ‘relate to’ is an affront to their intelligence. I’m a pretty Londoncentric writer as this city is the place that infects me, but as a reader I’m interested in all sorts of different places and how artists configure them.

I thought I’d add some links to a few things I’ve seen recently which I thought might be of interest to the resident poets and people visiting the site.

Booktrust has their first poet in residence.  You can follow his journey at: http://www.booktrust.org.uk/show/feature/Home/Writer-in-residence

Poet Yemesi Blake wrote a piece on the creative art of blogging which is up on the Literature Training website:

http://www.literaturetraining.com/metadot/index.pl?id=40306&isa=DBRow&op=show&dbview_id=2323

Also, I just read this piece on the Guardian website about regional accents and I wondered if any of the writers had thought about poetry, place and dialect?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/mar/26/regional-dialect-british-english

Geraldine

I’ve just arrived back from Texas physically exhausted but utterly energised.  One of the reasons for this mental upbeatness is this photo  – it’s a scene from my notebook written in one of the many seminars I went to at the SXSW Interactive Festival.  It’s made me even more excited by the aims and potential of My Place Or Yours and creating online places to share to understand our work together.

It’s been a great week for digital innovation and literature at SXSWi.  The company Six to Start won best in show for their online project with Penguin – http://wetellstories.co.uk/ – Six writers commissioned to write digital fiction that could only be told online.

In the panel session Six to Start were hosting, I said how pleased I was that literature had been championed on this platform and that I would take this achievement back to the community I work with and celebrate.  So in writing this post I am keeping my promise.

It’s about connecting and collaboration.  During my time at SXSWi, I’ve learned more about the possibilities and potential of interactivity for performance poetry and also working with other interactive genres and specialisms who are asking themselves similar questions regarding audiences, infrastructure development and creative opportunities.

The delegation I was part of were asked to blog our experiences of the festival, and they certainly did.  The huge amount of blogging from the group was fantastic to read.  The posts included so many different approaches to style, opinion and analysis.  I won’t deny that blogging is a relatively new thing for me and it was great to be around people who were very comfortable with this way of working. It gave me more confidence to blog my thoughts and comment on others in a more immediate way – to think of the conversation and not the statement.

In light of this, I thought I’d share with you some of the conversations that have happened this week, here is a link -  http://www.ished.net/projects/sxsw/?page_id=2

I’d be interested to see what you think and how it might connect to you.

I’ve decided to post the little bits I’ve been writing as i’ve been in residence. Some of these were in a notebook, some text messages that i saved in my draft and some i recorded on my device very late at night when i was on the verge of falling alseep and i would suddenly have a line in my head. They may seem to make no sense at all but I’m hoping to rescue elements and turn them into something new.

Last Monday, Apples & Snakes held a training day. As part of the itinary I held a session exploring the glories of web 2.0 in particular blogging, Skype, information management tools (such as Google Docs and MyYahoo) and RSS. The main aim was to get everyone comfortable with using these tools. One of the exercises involved splitting up into four groups and analysing some blogs (ranging from great examples to award winningly awful) before writing a paragraph based on one of four questions about blogging and posting it onto here! To make life easier, I’ve collated the posts and compiled them below…

Training Group 1

The Purpose of Writing blogs…

Blogs are a very useful tool to get feedback on work if you are in a development stage. They are also useful in getting more exposure for a particular event or project. They foster audience interaction and investment in particular projects, and are a good source of dialogue for people who are far away from each other.  In less interesting cases, people seem to use blogs to publicise their own neuroses.

Do you have any thoughts on the purpose of blogs? How have they been helpful to you in the past? Leave a comment…

Training Group 2

Blog It Write!!!!!!!!

Keep it short.

Be aware of self-indulgence. There is a difference between expressing yourself and witless drivel.

People will connect to you if they feel you are talking to them personally.

Be aware of your audience – it is a dialogue not a monologue.

Before you write, think: is this for the public domain?!

If you use keywords people will be able to search for posts they have a personal interest in.

Blogs that work best often have a clear personality, differentiating them from more corporate or traditional website.

Leaving questions open so people can respond and enter into conversation is a good way to get people interacting rather than just reading – surveys & voting, videos, photos/visuals to comment on are other ways of engaging.

Linking (to other people’s blogs) is a good way to create a community, and good blog etiquette.  if you refer to something your audience might not know about using hyperlinks makes it accessible and stops people feeling alienated.

Training Group 3

Well, this picture says it all, doesn’t it?  Or does it?…

Pictures and videos as visual aids are a way for viewers to burrow into your experiences, new items and countless other happenings all over the world.

Here’s Chikodi, Russell and George from the Apples & Snakes team at a training day pondering the possibilities of the visual.  We all agreed that if you’re gonna post pictures make it relevant!  (Like, ahem, this one)…

Training Group 4

How to choose a blog topic

Here are a few things for you to bear in mind when tackling your first obstacle for posting a blog…

1. It needs to be relevant to the blog you’re adding to

2. Ideally interesting to others and to you yourself [something you're passionate about]

3. Write about what you know or what you wish to know about

4. Enjoy it!