After the Launch, the Voyage!

Reading from The Sleeping Place at the final launch

The series of launch events of The Sleeping Place (out now from Guillemot Press) culminated with an amazing event at Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford, where I was joined by fellow poets Ruth Wiggins and Nancy Campbell, and artist-archaeologist Rose Ferraby. The tickets for this event sold out and so we had the pleasure of reading to a packed room. And just as I had hoped, the poetry readings were complemented by a talk on her creative process by Rose, and an inspiring discussion with the audience on the important role of poetry/creative responses within the archaeological record.

Ruth Wiggins, Nancy Campbell, Susie Campbell, Rose Ferraby at Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford.

The Sleeping Place is well and truly ‘launched’! But after a launch, comes the voyage. Publishing is, for me, an opportunity to build a creative dialogue around the work and to engage in exploratory conversations. And so the launch is a prelude to the book finding its way to readers and to develop that conversation. Reviews and readers’ comments are therefore not just for publicising the book, but more importantly, they are about opening up the book to different readings and layers of meaning, keeping it open and unfinished, remade by each new reader.

Reviews

I am extremely grateful to those generous reviewers who have taken the trouble to read and comment on The Sleeping Place. I believe there are a few reviews still in the pipeline, but I was thrilled to see Stephen Sunderland’s insightful review for Mercurius Magazine here: https://www.mercurius.one/home/sn5ox3aktret1bfa9jhw62vhu4wf67

Stephen’s review was the first to appear and so I am particularly grateful to him and to Richard Capener, Reviews Editor. Another generous and perceptive review appeared in Long Poem Magazine by Anna Reckin. By lovely coincidence, Anna paired The Sleeping Place with Ruth Wiggins’ The Lost Book of Barkynge and explored the different approaches we each take to the deconstructions and reconstructions of history. Anna’s review is here: https://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/reviews/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place-guillemot-2023-ruth-wiggins-the-lost-book-of-barkynge-shearsman-2023/

I was also inspired by Anna’s words to collage them with this image of chalk flints, so restless in The Sleeping Place, used to patch a pot-hole in the lane leading to the burial site.

Sealey Challenge

August saw many people embark on the Sealey Challenge to read a poetry book a day for the month, many focusing on the work of poets often overlooked by the mainstream. From their social media posts, I have compiled a wonderful reading list of recommendations and exciting finds. I was thrilled that a number of people included The Sleeping Place in their Sealey Challenge list, too many to list here, but I want to make a special thank you to Amanda Earl who kept up the challenge and read The Sleeping Place despite being admitted to hospital, and to Robert Frede Kenter whose poetic response inspired me to make this:

Susie Campbell, ‘The Sleeping Place’ (Guillemot, 2023) : Ruth Wiggins, ‘The Lost Book of Barkynge’ (Shearsman, 2023)

What next?

The conversations continue! I am looking forward to a number of events over the Autumn and Winter (Oxford, Reading and York) where I will be reading from The Sleeping Place. I have the great pleasure of working with Ruth Wiggins on a collaborative essay on ‘archival poetics’, and although I didn’t know Anna Reckin at all before her review, I now have an exciting opportunity to work on a collaborative performance with her. I have been invited to join PLaCE International, a member-owned research collective, which I hope will be a great forum for further discussion. My member page is here: https://www.placeinternational.co.uk/post/susie-campbell

and a featured conversation with me about ‘deep mapping’ and archaeological poetics in my work is here: https://www.placeinternational.co.uk/post/another-sense-of-deep-mapping-susie-campbell-s-the-sleeping-place

I am thrilled to say that The Sleeping Place is now into its second print run. Thank you to everyone who has supported this book. Copies available here but the second print run was only a small one and so it may be worth grabbing a copy now if you are planning to buy one: https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place

And finally, of course this blog is a great space for conversation and so thank you to all who read and share these posts. I leave you with this pertinent image of Bronze Age cordage – such strength once these fragile pieces are wound together!

Picture of cord made by a volunteer demonstrating prehistoric wild cordage at my recent visit to Butser Ancient Farm, August, 2023.

Live Launch in Oxford, Reviews and an Interview: a busy few weeks for The Sleeping Place

I had planned to write a series of blogposts in the lead up to this Sunday’s Oxford launch of THE SLEEPING PLACE but there have been so many other exciting things happening, I am collecting everything together here in one post.

This Sunday, 30th July, is the culmination of a series of live launches of THE SLEEPING PLACE (out now from Guillemot Press here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place)

This special event in Oxford is hosted by Blackwell’s Bookshop (on Broad Street) and features artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby, and poets Nancy Campbell and Ruth Wiggins. I am so looking forward to meeting many friends in person and to inviting the audience to join in a discussion of poetry, archaeology and the landscape. Details and tickets (free) here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unearthing-stones-and-stories-on-poetry-archaeology-and-landscape-tickets-651948073237?fbclid=IwAR2j9mIdYhV54RwUxa5LyJ6wmLTGzp5BQC3AdTZWp7rVU8WsxIkBvZ_duVM

Join us for a celebration of the role of poetry in our encounters with place and the past. 

• Does art and literature have a role within the archaeological record?
• How can poetry expand the ways in which we imagine the historical landscape? 

Here’s what I have said about the event (apologies to you if you’ve already read the details in my previous post but a few new readers have joined since then!):

The audience is invited to join a conversation hosted by Rose to consider these questions, and to listen to poets Nancy, Ruth and Susie share some of their poetry and their experiences as poets. Rose will also be talking about her own art and archaeology practice. 

This event includes the Oxford launch of The Sleeping Place by Susie Campbell, which combines Susie’s poetry with Rose’s artwork to stage the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground. The book came out of Susie’s haunting discovery during lockdown that her family home was built on the site where this burial ground had been excavated in the 1920s. Rose’s layered and nuanced artwork responds to Susie’s highly wrought word patterns to resurrect some of the many histories hidden beneath the earth. 

Right from the start, Susie and Rose shared a vision of expanding the book into a bigger conversation about poetry and archaeology. They have invited their friends Nancy and Ruth, both acclaimed poets of place and landscape, to join them this conversation. Do come along and join in the discussion.

Who are we?

I am currently working on a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes. I have been published widely in UK and international poetry journals. My longer poetry publications include I return to you (Sampson Low, 2019), Tenter with artwork by Rose Ferraby (Guillemot Press, 2020) and Enclosures (Osmosis Press, 2021). As well as text poetry, I also make visual, sound and textile poetry. My most recent publication The Sleeping Place, another collaboration with Rose Ferraby, was published by Guillemot Press in April this year. Sunday’s event is the culmination of a series of live launches of this book. 

Rose Ferraby is an artist and archaeologist. She has been commissioned by the British Museum, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, and her writing has appeared on BBC Radio. She made the artwork for the recent British Museum Stonehenge exhibition, notably her film, installation and collages of Seahenge. .She is co-director of the Aldborough Roman Town Project and has recently presented a second series of archaeological reflections called ‘EarthWorks for the BBC Radio 3 series ‘The Essay’.

Nancy Campbell is a poet, non-fiction writer and publisher of artist’s books. Her first collection of poetry, Disko Bay, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. In 2020 Nancy received the Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for environmental writing for a decade-long response to the polar regions across non-fiction (The Library of Ice), poetry (Disko Bay) and artist’s books (How to Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic). The poems written during her two-year role as Canal Laureate for The Poetry Society were installed along the waterways where they could be seen projected on wharves at night, stencilled on towpaths, or engraved into fish gates; they are collected in the pamphlet Navigations. Another pamphlet, of prose poems, Uneasy Pieces, was published by Guillemot Press in 2022. Her latest book Thunderstone is a memoir of life after lockdown in an old Buccaneer caravan moored in a neglected woodland.

Ruth Wiggins is a British poet. She is based in London but is happiest in the great outdoors, something which profoundly informs her work. Her poetry, essays and articles have been published in the UK, Ireland and the US, and her recent, first full collection, The Lost Book of Barkynge (Shearsman, 2023) has been selected by The Telegraph as their Poetry Book of the Month. Ruth also has three pamphlets: Myrtle (Emma Press, 2016); a handful of string (Paekakariki, 2020); and Menalhyl (2023).

Many of you have been kindly reading and supporting this blog in the lead up to the publication of THE SLEEPING PLACE. If you’re in the Oxford area on Sunday, do come by and say hello!

Reviews and Interview

As well as the excitement of the launches, the past few weeks has seen the publication of some generous and thoughtful reviews of THE SLEEPING PLACE. I am particularly grateful to Stephen Sunderland (reviewer) and Richard Capener (reviews editor) for publishing this one in Mercurius Magazine: https://www.mercurius.one/home/sn5ox3aktret1bfa9jhw62vhu4wf67

The Mercurius review was swiftly followed by another insightful review by Anna Reckin for Long Poem Magazine. Again, I am hugely grateful to Anna and the editorial team at Long Poem Magazine. By chance, this review anticipated Sunday’s event by reviewing together THE SLEEPING PLACE with Ruth Wiggins’ new Shearsman Press book THE LOST BOOK OF BARKYNGE. https://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/reviews/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place-guillemot-2023-ruth-wiggins-the-lost-book-of-barkynge-shearsman-2023/

And finally, I had the huge honour of being interviewed by artist/academic Iain Biggs for the international forum PLaCE International (which Iain convenes with Professor Mary Modeen).

I talk at some length here about archaeology, poetry and deep mapping, and about the importance of not polarising the digital and non-digital as we need both kinds of engagements and creative practice. https://www.placeinternational.co.uk/post/another-sense-of-deep-mapping-susie-campbell-s-the-sleeping-place

And perhaps this is perhaps a good moment to say thank you again for supporting this blog.

Susie

July, 2023.

An Oxford celebration of THE SLEEPING PLACE

The final launch event of THE SLEEPING PLACE (out now from Guillemot Press) will be in the beautiful and atmospheric surroundings of Blackwell’s bookshop in Oxford. I will be writing a series of posts about this event and the other writers taking part but it is the culmination of the hopes shared by Rose Ferraby and myself to widen the book into a bigger conversation about poetry and archaeology. To that end, we are joined by wonderful poets of place Nancy Campbell and Ruth Wiggins, and hopefully, by some of you. Here are the event details:

Unearthing Stones and Stories: poetry, archaeology, and the landscape

Venue: Blackwell’s Bookshop

Oxford Broad Street

48-51 Broad Street

Oxford

OX1 3BQ

01865 792792 oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Date: 30 July 2023 2 – 3.30pm

Tickets (free) here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unearthing-stones-and-stories-on-poetry-archaeology-and-landscape-tickets-651948073237

Join artist and archaeologist Rose Ferraby and poets Nancy Campbell, Ruth Wiggins and Susie Campbell for a celebration of the role of poetry in our encounters with place and the past. 

• Does art and literature have a role within the archaeological record?
• How can poetry expand the ways in which we imagine the historical landscape? 

The audience is invited to join a conversation hosted by Rose to consider these questions, and to listen to Nancy, Ruth and Susie share some of their poetry and their experiences as poets. Rose will also be talking about her own art and archaeology practice. 

This event is one of a series of celebrations of the recent publication of The Sleeping Place (Guillemot Press, 2023) which combines Susie’s poetry with Rose’s artwork to stage the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground. The book came out of Susie’s haunting discovery that her family home was built on the site where this burial ground had been excavated in the 1920s. Rose’s layered and nuanced artwork responds to Susie’s highly wrought word patterns to resurrect some of the many histories hidden beneath the earth.  

Right from the start, Susie and Rose shared a vision of expanding the book into a bigger conversation about poetry and archaeology. They have invited their friends Nancy and Ruth, both acclaimed poets of place and landscape, to join them for the Oxford leg of this conversation. 

• Nancy’s environmental writing across non-fiction, poetry and artist books has been recognised by Royal Geographical Society Ness Award for environmental writing which she received in 2020. 
• Ruth’s recent collection The Lost Book of Barkynge (Shearsman Press, 2023) has been chosen as the Telegraph’s poetry book of the month for its haunting recovery of the lost voices of the nuns, abbesses, saints and serving women of Barking Abbey. 
• Rose’s artwork is highly acclaimed and may be familiar from BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, as well as from her richly evocative Seahenge artworks  for the British Museum’s recent Stonehenge exhibition. 
• The Sleeping Place is Susie’s sixth book of poetry. She is currently completing a poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes. 

Join Rose, Nancy, Ruth and Susie at Blackwell’s Bookshop Oxford for an afternoon of poetry and chat about archaeology and our responses to the landscape around us. 

Performing THE SLEEPING PLACE

Reading from THE SLEEPING PLACE at the Peckham Pelican, May 23rd

(at the launch of ./code- -poetry by Chris Kerr and Daniel Holden. Event also featured Oliver Fox and Yanita Georgieva)

Reading THE SLEEPING PLACE aloud in live performance is not just about bringing the book to life, it is also about bringing the place itself into being. The book started with a performance as members of the audience chose the order in which the glass beads of my text would be strung together and thus helped to determine how parts of the text would be structured. This is one of the ways in which place is constructed in my poem as a series of linguistic processes.

These are linguistic processes that draw attention to the material and embodied qualities of their language and ask that the reader look beyond semantic meaning and engage emotionally and physically. This speaks to the idea that any kind of encounter with place isn’t just an intellectual understanding but is also a sensory, embodied experience. I hope that the book’s brilliant design by Guillemot Press, and Rose Ferraby’s gorgeous artwork draw attention to the visual and tactile qualities of the written text, but it is through reading aloud that the materiality of its language perhaps becomes most apparent through its connection with my voice and my breath.

In THE SLEEPING PLACE, the reader is offered patterns of sound as a way of orientating themselves in the text. When I read the text aloud, the repetitions and sonic patterning are intensified. This patterning is also evident on the page but I feel there can be an overwhelming urge to read almost exclusively for semantic meaning when we open a book. When I read aloud, I can use my voice to emphasize that the important relationships are not just the semantic relationships, but also the sound relationships. Place is staged in my poem not just as a set of pre-existing subjects and objects but though assemblages of new possible relationships with and in a world that comes into being through the voice and through the body. And hopefully this surfaces and starts to open up for question the ways in which we organise and experience other places and spaces.  

But live performance also allows me to do something else. I have written and spoken at some length previously about the ethical considerations of working with human remains. In the early stages of composing THE SLEEPING PLACE I used the numbers of the 223 burials excavated at this site as another procedure for organising my text, stripping these graves of any human consideration or affect. At a later stage in the writing, I found it important to revisit this procedure and to offer alternative ways of engaging with these human remains. The glass beads function in a number of ways in the text but one of their functions is to gesture to the ethical issues of treating the deaths of anonymous people (albeit in this case very ancient deaths) as though they were no more than beads to be strung together. With that in mind, at my live performances I am giving out 223 glass beads (not Saxon beads of course but modern Murano glass beads), one for each of the burials, as a tiny physical gesture of memorial for the 223 humans who were buried there.

Glass beads given out at the Peckham Pelican performance of THE SLEEPING PLACE.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to perform THE SLEEPING PLACE at a recent event at the Peckham Pelican pub on May 23rd. This event was the launch of ./code- -poetry by Chris Kerr and Daniel Holden published by Broken Sleep Books, and also featured readings by poets Oliver Fox and Yanita Georgieva. There are two other forthcoming opportunities to hear THE SLEEPING PLACE in live performance. The next event is on Thursday 29 June at Ink84 bookshop, London. This is a celebration of new writing by poets Anja Konig, Ruth Wiggins and myself. In July, there will be a further opportunity. On July 30th, Rose Ferraby will be hosting an afternoon of readings and discussion of poetry, landscape and archaeology at Blackwells Bookshop, Oxford, with Nancy Campbell, Ruth Wiggins and myself. Live performance is only possible through the generosity of these venues and of the audience members who are kind enough to attend. Can I take this opportunity to say thank you for this support.

Sites and sounds of THE SLEEPING PLACE

View from the chalk ridge just above burial site

In this post, I collect together some micro-videos and field recordings to accompany the text of THE SLEEPING PLACE (available now from Guillemot Press https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place)

First up, a field recording of walking onto some loose chalk excavated from new house foundations currently being laid on the site of THE SLEEPING PLACE (the image is of a large chalk flint also dug up by the house builders). I am fascinated by the way the loose chalk sounds like a beach, almost as though the chalk holds a sonic record of its own history.

And here are a series of micro-videos of short excerpts from THE SLEEPING PLACE read in situ:

STONES

GRAVES

SIGNS

And a field recording made walking along the chalk ridge above the burial site (see image at top of post and black and white image below)

There will be opportunities to hear live readings from THE SLEEPING PLACE on the following dates (details to be announced on social media @susiecampbell (twitter) @susiecampbellwrites (IG)

Laid to rest…a not-so final thank you

Votive chalk laid on Lewis Carroll grave

I have spent some time over the last week expressing my deep gratitude to a number of people who have so generously supported THE SLEEPING PLACE. I want to include on that list all the readers of this blog who have accompanied me through the series of posts on writing THE SLEEPING PLACE. To all you readers, a warm thank you. That series of posts has now been collected together in one place on the Guillemot Press Journal here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/journal

(I have also added some additional content on ‘linguistic archaeology’ for those of you who have already read all the single posts).

But I realised there was one more thank you to be said – to the bones, chalk, flinty paths, and headstones of the burial grounds (Saxon and later). A gesture of appreciation for all the creative gifts yielded by the stony earth of this place, but also of release. It has possessed my imagination since my discovery of the burial ground in 2020 and so now it is time to relinquish it to make space for new creative hauntings.

I chose Lewis Carroll’s grave as a totemic place for this gesture of gratitude and so I laid a votive piece of chalk, returning to its original site one of the 7 stones taken from a grave to make the poetic ritual described in THE SLEEPING PLACE. Strangely, the Victorian cemetery was not deserted today. There was no-one around but there was an avenue of votive lights leading from the little chapel towards the Carroll grave.

Votive light leading to Lewis Carroll grave

Perhaps these lights were not leading to the Lewis Carroll grave, perhaps they were the marker of a completely different ceremony (Easter related, perhaps?) but I chose to take them as part of my own ritual.

And as THE SLEEPING PLACE reminds us, there is always another bead to be counted and another way of restringing those beads. This is only a temporary farewell to this place as I will be revisiting it in a subsequent project. The high chalk paths of this place also coincide with the so-called Pilgrim’s Way as it crosses through Guildford on its way towards Canterbury.

And something else. Half-hidden in the long grass of the modern Downs nearby (a remnant of centuries-old downland), I come across this:

‘a missing bead’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (7)

Saxon glass bead (replica), Surrey burial ground, grave 223*

In this final post of my series on the context and processes of writing THE SLEEPING PLACE, I discuss the role of the glass beads which appear throughout the piece and help to string it together.

THE SLEEPING PLACE, as I describe in previous posts, sets out to stage in the text archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground situated beneath my family home in Surrey. During the 1920s excavations of the site, a large number of glass beads were dug up alongside bones, pottery, pins and brooches. The strings themselves had rotted and so the beads had rolled apart. These beads were re-strung by museum staff in a creative approach to determining their original order. This resonated with my own project and so I adopted this as an additional textual strategy.

Archive photograph of some of the actual Saxon glass beads found during excavations

This additional textual strategy drew on an interactive performance in which members of the audience were invited to participate in selecting coloured beads and deciding on their order. I used modern Murano glass beads for this performance but as far as possible, I duplicated the colours of the Saxon beads: red, blue, green, silver, black etc. I also made space for the broken and missing beads noted in the archaeological site report. Each bead was linked to a bank of text fragments and so each time the audience reselected a string of beads, this led to a new iteration of the text.

Modern Murano glass beads used for bead-stringing performance

These word-strings are threaded through THE SLEEPING PLACE, forming a cohesive ribbon of repeated words, sounds and rhythm which link together the sections of text organised around burials. And these bead sections of the poem have a further, meta-textual function, figuring and drawing attention to the way words and phrases have been strung and restrung to make the body of the text. They foreground the way my compositional process has sometimes involved treating words as if they were beads– matching them by look and sound rather than semantics, much as the museum staff restrung the beads based on their colours and patterns.  The patterning and rhythms of the way the beads are strung suggests a way of reading the text that takes the emphasis away from the semantic meaning of individual sentences, and directs it towards the changing relationships between words and phrases. As each new archaeological find changed the meaning of previous ‘finds’ for Lowther’s team, so each ‘restringing’ of words creates new possible meanings for the reader to construct.

Part of a Saxon glass bead string (replica)*

Murano glass bead string

But this brings me back to my ethical dilemma around using human grave numbers as part of a procedure of random text generation (see blogpost 4 in this series) and the push-pull between creatively using these material traces to construct a past in the present, and an abiding sense of irretrievable loss: those missing beads. In THE SLEEPING PLACE itself, these tensions remain unresolved and play out across the text, resolving temporarily but then rolling apart, waiting to be restrung.

THE SLEEPING PLACE. Available from Guillemot Press. https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place

Saxon glass bead (replica) dedicated to Rose Ferraby in gratitude for her artwork

*all replica Saxon glass beads made by Tillerman Beads

---

A little piece of grave robbery: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (6)

Chalk sketch of ‘sleeping’ skeleton

This is the penultimate post in my series of 7 posts about the writing of THE SLEEPING PLACE, my project to stage in text the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground (Now available here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place ). The seventh and final post will be next week just before the book’s online launch at 7pm on 13th April 2023 (https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/events/book-launch-the-sleeping-place-by-susie-campbell-with-guest-reader-alec-finlay)

Seven is a significant number for this book. It operates in a very different way to the numbered burials 1-223 which are used as a procedural ‘hook’ for my use of a textual constraint based on the archaeological site map. 7 is more mysterious. With its accompanying 1 2 3 4 5 & 6, 7 appears in various configurations throughout the book, straddling the gaps between the poem’s sentences much as did my little skeleton doodles in an earlier draft. These more symbolic numbers arrived in the book as a result of a poetic ritual involving a minor grave robbery. This is the topic of today’s post!

‘Burials 15-65’ (detail from text of THE SLEEPING PLACE)

Pen sketch of ‘sleeping’ skeleton used in drafting process, later replaced by numbers

My primary approach to a linguistic staging of a Saxon burial ground involved using various textual constraints and an experimental ‘decentred’ Steinian grammar. However, ethical and affective considerations to do with grief, death and the mysteries of mortality started to assert themselves (possibly due to the time I spent wandering around cemeteries!). As I have written about in blogpost 3 of this series, the hillside beneath which the Saxon burial ground was excavated is also the site of Lewis Carroll’s grave. Dodgson was of course a mathematician and like Stein (who was herself a close friend of mathematician A.N. Whitehead)  found correspondences between mathematics and language as a symbolic and relational system capable of generating meanings beyond the semantic (this is the basis for Carrollian nonsense). As I started to contemplate Dodgson’s interest in mathematics, I found some numerical symbolism and ritual entering the text. Although I am a little sceptical about ritual I am also drawn to its generative power, and so I followed where it led. 

And where it led was to an act of grave desecration. In the book, I describe this incident as follows:

‘May 2021. I perform a ritual at the burial site itself. I find a grave has been opened in the Victorian cemetery in order to repair its monument. The human remains have been temporarily moved but when I look into the grave opening, I see sockets of chalk and knuckles of chalk-flint. Carbon unites bone and chalk in the ground. I steal 7 pieces of chalk from the open grave and form them into the shape of a human body. This creature I lay out on the earth. It resembles a skeleton curled on its side or a foetus. My ritual is galvanised by my grave robbery. The 7 stones now enter my text, virtual subjects hosting my decentred grammar but creating a new question of how to combine the symbolic 7 with the pragmatic 223. The procedures I used to create my initial draft loosen and slide, and something more mysterious starts to animate the text.’ (THE SLEEPING PLACE, ‘Timeline’ notes).

7 pieces of chalk ritual

7 pieces of chalk preserved and later used as votive objects (see blogpost 2 in this series)

This more mysterious and affective approach started to dominate the closing stages of the text’s many drafting cycles. To an extent, this remains mysterious to me but I believe it to be, in some ways, a return of the mortal griefs and terrors initially banished from the text by its procedural response to human burial. I was keen that the skeleton doodles would give way to numbers in the text, not only because of the more open-ended work done by the latter, but also to clarify the visual poetic of the book and to allow Rose Ferraby’s rich, suggestive and profound collage to do its work across the fullest range of concerns (some of them barely surfaced) by the written text.

Detail from Rose Ferraby’s collage, back cover, THE SLEEPING PLACE

On doodles, art, and the ‘ineffable’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (5)

THE SLEEPING PLACE Susie Campbell/Rose Ferraby from Guillemot Press.

(Pre-orders here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place)

It is here! My author copies of THE SLEEPING PLACE arrived this week. The book is everything I had envisioned and more. Because I had worked previously with Guillemot Press and artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby, I was able to draw on my knowledge of what they could bring to the realisation of this project if I were fortunate enough to be published by them again. And I built this into my vision of THE SLEEPING PLACE, dreaming of a book as multi-layered as the archaeological excavations it depicts. In the hope that Guillemot and Rose would come on board, I imagined a book whose design and visual artwork would work in an assemblage with the text itself. I am so excited that this imaginary book is now a real book to share with a wider audience.

Cover of THE SLEEPING PLACE with detail from Rose Ferraby’s artwork plus pieces of chalk picked up from the site.

Early in my discovery that an ancient Saxon burial ground had been excavated beneath the site of my family home, I had the first conversation in what would become a series of formative chats with Rose about art and archeology. We talked about the importance of broadening the archaeological record to include a range of responses to the material traces of the past. These responses might include visual art or a range of other art forms. Poetry of course is one of these forms. I am fascinated by the poetry of archaeology. There is much important work currently being done, including volumes of poetry (Vestiges and Peat) curated by poet archaeologist Melanie Giles with artwork by Rose. Other important books engaging with poetry, archaeology and the landscape are currently being published by Corbel Stone Press, Longbarrow Press and recently, Osmosis Press, as well as other books by Guillemot Press and many other presses producing important work in this field. Rose is of course renowned for her archaeological artwork, including her work on Seahenge for the recent British Museum Stonehenge exhibition (https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/art-seahenge). It was an enormous privilege to collaborate with her on this project. Her collage work for THE SLEEPING PLACE not only adds another rich layer to the book, image and text working together, but also creates new spaces for the reader’s creative response to the landscape. And, as always, Rose’s work brings an intelligent integrity, compassion and humanity to archaeological enquiry.

Detail from Rose Ferraby’s artwork (inside THE SLEEPING PLACE).

I’ve written in earlier posts about the influence of the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks on the development of my poetic for this book. I want to quote them again in this context. They advocate for a new way of making the archaeological record, including ‘mutual experiments with modes of documentation which can integrate text and image’. They talk about the importance, when coming face to face with the mysteries of the past’s material traces, of creating ‘joint forms of presentation to address that which is, at root, ineffable’ (Theatre/Archaeology, 2001, p 131). For me, addressing the ineffable is able to happen, if anywhere, across the spaces and relationships of THE SLEEPING PLACE’s images, text and design.

But, at a much earlier stage, it was doodling rather than art which helped me shape THE SLEEPING PLACE. Rather than textual, my first exploratory response to engaging with the archaeological archive was with sketches of lively skeletons dancing across geographical maps and site plans. As these cartoon skeletons increasingly started to resemble letters and words, so the ideas for my textual response emerged.

Skeleton doodles combined with grid and map.

Skeleton doodles playing with how to structure text on the page.

And now these little skeleton doodles have a new role in this project, appearing on my hand signed extracts from the text which will accompany the first purchased copies of the book. As I inscribe each page of the published text with these loose-jointed doodles, they emphasise the open-ended nature of this book and the discovery of more and more skeletons just waiting to be made.

Poetry as archaeology and the poetics of archaeology: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (4)

Detail from site plan of Saxon burial ground made by AWG Lowther in the 1920s (this and all images in this post reproduced courtesy of Surrey Archaeological Society)

In previous posts I’ve written about how this project was inspired by the multi-layered complexity of a local Saxon burial site with its Pagan and Christian burials mixed in together and its multiple bodies within each grave. In this post, I write more specifically about engaging with its archaeology. 

The archaeological records of the 1920s excavations of this site are held in my local museum archive. The main site plan was made by archaeologist A W G Lowther. He led the dig in its final stage but his plan incorporates the notes and plans made by an earlier team, using a numbering system based on the order in which burials were excavated. The site plan is crowded with layers of finds and multiple burials, a teeming mass of layered information which demonstrates the choices and decisions made by different archaeologists and the way the understanding of the site and its burials kept shifting and changing. Perhaps inadvertently, Lowther’s map provides a diagrammatic representation of this site as a one in a state of flux and constant revision. 

Site plan of Saxon burial ground made by AWG Lowther

One of the aims of my project was to deconstruct any essentialist notion of this burial ground as a ‘heritage site’ or as linked with a nationalist myth of a supposed Anglo-Saxon ‘Englishness’. The provisionality and revisions of this archaeological record struck me as a useful template for an alternative construction of this place as a dynamic series of changing networks and relationships. Conversations with artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby were formative in how I shaped the poetics for this project and led to the brilliant artwork Rose has produced (thanks to the support of Guillemot Press) as an intrinsic part of the project. Also formative was the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (Routledge, 2001). Pearson and Shanks’ concept of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology suggests that the task for archaeologists is to forge assemblages which, if they are to be authentic and meaningful, must be volatile: ‘the emergence of new meanings depends on the perception of instability, of retaining energies of interruption and disruption’. This was the start of what became the poetry of The Sleeping Place. Archaeological excavations of this burial ground are staged as provisional assemblages of language and visual collage out of whose unstable layers, insistent patterning and ‘misplaced’ anachronisms the reader is invited to re-assemble the past.

But my work on this project also raised bigger questions about the role of art and poetry in relation to archaeology and formulations of ‘the past’, and the importance of including a variety of different kinds of response – statistical, performative, scientific, affective, aesthetic etc – within the overall archaeological record. I hope that as part of the publication of The Sleeping Place there will be the opportunity for further conversation about archaeology, poetry, cultural enclosure and the work of decolonisation.