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.
susiecampbellwrites 