This project is funded by the Royal Society of
Literature's Literature Matters awards.
The plan is to treat Bristol Temple Meads Lost
Property Office as if it were an access point to the Underworld. That tallying
that goes on so efficiently is not so different from a nurse’s itemizing the
artefacts about a deceased person. Over eight months, I plan to record the
practice of staff as they field items from all over the UK and to talk with
members of the public about their individual stories of losing and reclaiming
their possessions. Together, these accounts will form the basis of a pamphlet
of poems. In a sense, this project is an extension of my pamphlet Night
Porter, which documented life in a Yorkshire hotel.
Where the project differs from Night
Porter, is that I will also be exploring katabasis – visits to
the Underworld – in literature, since there are parallels between the
subterranean Lost Property Office, located at the feet of numerous flights of
stairs, and an entrance into the afterlife. The poet Tim Liardet memorably
described swimming pools as places which ‘one has to divest oneself of self to
enter.’ The lost property office is a place where these items – so telling of
the self – are detachedly tallied and calculated before being entered on a
database.
The two guiding images of this project are
Stanley Spenser's The Resurrection,
Cookham in which villagers brush the dirt from their finery as they rise
from their graves
and the grandiose but clean machinery of Powell
and Pressburgers' A Matter of Life and Death.
One cannot but call to mind Ian Curtis, and those intrepid
and unorthodox travelers Flat Stanley and Waldo Jeffries when considering these
staircases.
Further research includes a trip to Greasby’s Auctioneers
and Valuers which runs an auction of unclaimed baggage every second Tuesday in
Tooting, and to the Bureau des objets trouvés in Paris (for which I can thank a
residential grant from the Society of Authors). In addition, I will be studying
with the Arvon Foundation, Exeter University and the poet and musician Kirsten
Norrie.
So, I start tomorrow, and this blog will be a document
of my every visit as well as a working document for draft poems to be played
around with and knocked into shape.
If you have any contributions or thoughts to
offer, please leave them here as a comment, or alternatively contact me
directly at matt.byden@gmail.com
