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
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