Transcript of audio recording above.

Hello, for people who don’t know me, I’m alice hiller.   It’s a real pleasure to welcome you to these Voicing our Silences spaces.  Recorded initially over the months of lockdown, they’re free poetry videos and podcasts, which combine performance with interviews and writing-prompts.  You don’t need to be a poet to use them.  They have been put together to support people speaking from the silenced places in their own lives, by telling their stories more freely.  We hope they will additionally help us all become more generous and understanding listeners. 

The creators of the Voicing our Silences  project are a group of poets who have been working collectively for a little over three years.  We began as the Covent Garden Stanza of the Poetry Society.  Until the pandemic, we met twice a month in the foyer of a public space by the Thames in London.  We’re currently connecting online.

When we meet, we give feedback on work in progress, and also discuss new work by other poets.  We also compare notes on the problems we face ‘saying the difficult thing’ in our work, celebrate each others’ successes, and generally try to be there,  in the best traditions of friendship and solidarity. Our intention is to make the new and expand the possible, through acts of shared community. 

Each of the pages on this website has been put together by two of our poets, whose faces you will see on the link.  There’s also a brief introduction from me, giving the background.  Within the recorded hour, they perform their poems, speak to each other about their work, and set writing prompts for the audience to follow in real time. As I mentioned previously, you don’t have to be a poet to use them. They can be taken more loosely as a way of getting your own words on the page – or simply out of your head. 

The recordings are available as a captioned video or podcast.  We hope they’ll  help you go deep with the idea of speaking your truth – and through this generate new spaces  in your own lives. There are also links to the poets’ social networks, so you can follow what they are up to, connect with their work and buy their books.

Because Voicing our Silences is a DIY project, without funding, the tech and spec are unapologetically homemade and low-fi – in the best indie and zine traditions.  What I hope will come across is the passion we have for our work, and our creative collaborations, which have supported the poems’ entries into the world.  We also want to convey something of the warmth and friendships which are integral to our project. These can be critical when working with complex, risky materials, but also just in keeping going and having a sense of belonging as a human being. 

Speaking about his own recent Small Axe and Year 3 film and installation projects, which draw on his Black and British experiences, artist and Oscar winning filmmaker Steve McQueen told journalist Gary Younge in Tate etc. about their necessity – and difficulty. 

Described as “love letters to Black resilience and triumph in London’s West Indian community” on the BBC website, Small Axe records lives  which were pushed to the margins of our communal narratives for many decades.  By photographing every child in that age group in London, Year 3 gives visual witness to children’s lives on a scale never undertaken before. McQueen also reflected what realising these projects meant to him:

McQueen’s words bring out what it can mean to find a form of expression for something which has resisted articulation.  Creatively, and personally,  our own workshop members have faced comparable risks in making their own work.  

The Voicing our Silences poems respond to topics including racism, the aftershocks of genocide,  queerness, grooming and sexual abuse, mental health challenges, migration, illness, misogyny and prostitution – alongside raving, love, nurture, redemption, healing, feminism, activism and community.  We have the good stuff too.  Safeguarding warnings are in place where necessary.

At the time of recording this introduction, Voicing our Silences featured poets include Romalyn Ante and Rachel Lewis, Arji Manuelpillai and Maia Elsner, Kostya Tsolákis and Joanna Ingham, Chaucer Cameron and Jeffery Sugarman, Natalie Whittaker and Sarah Grout, Julie Irigaray, Isabelle Baafi and myself – with more to follow.

While many of us have been subjected to acts of denial and exclusion, as people and as creative makers, collectively we are resisting and coming through this.  I believe that as light moves alongside darkness, so silence can also become the partner of sound.  In this way, Voicing our Silences aims also to create spaces of quietness within which we can listen to each other respectfully, and generatively – as people and as artists.  We hope you’ll enjoy and be nourished by them, and feel more able to speak up and out, as and when you need to – whether in the life you live, or the arts you make. 

Strength in adversity: on living beyond being groomed and sexually abused in childhood.

By way of sharing my own direct experience of working with voicing an area of silence in my life, I have included a podcast of a recording I made for the ‘What We Read Now’ series hosted by Jennifer Wong. The overall theme of the episode was strength.  I structured my segment around the idea of strength in adversity, and specifically the strength that children require in order to keep going when they are being groomed and sexually abused, as I was as a child.   The podcast combines poems from my forthcoming collection, bird of winter, with prose segments explaining their background and context.  I conclude by exploring the strength that community and articulation can give us all to help heal and live positively beyond traumatic experiences. 

If you would like to watch the whole What We Read Now episode, which includes readings by Serge Neptune and Tolu Agbelusi, with questions from the audiences, the video is here:

If you need help with any of the topics raised, the Mind website is a good place to find links to support groups and helplines.