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?

Looking back at the Apples & Snakes archive, I noticed this recording of Emma performing a poem inspired by her work at a homeless hostel, at Apples & Snakes in Soho November 2007: