“Is This The Final?” – A Spoken Word Performance by Susie Campbell
WASTELINES
‘a line, a white line, a long white line’
Author’s Note:
‘Wastelines’ works back into my ‘Wasteland’ piece (published as part of Ice Floe’s ‘Casandra/chorale’ series) and my subsequent book Wastelands (Guillemot Press, 2025). This new piece explores the idea of textual waste, here in the sense of discarded or ‘waste’ lines edited out of a ‘final’ poem. The epigraph is a ‘waste line’ from The Waste Land, one of the lines deleted from an early draft by TS Eliot/Ezra Pound. In my ‘Wastelines’, deleted lines and edits from my notebook not only resurface to interfere with the published version of the text, but (like the dangerously active waste in landfill) start to form new compounds, new possible poems. If the transcript of the original, annotated drafts of Eliot’s poem is the inspiration for my text poems, it is Bowie’s verbal corrections and the stuttering start of ‘Andy Warhol’ (Hunky Dory) that inspired my improvised audio version ‘Is This The Final?’
WASTELINES (PDF) VERSION
As well as text poetry, Susie Campbell also makes visual, textile and sound poetry. Her visual work and textile poetry have been included in exhibitions such as Text-Isles (2022) and Living Library Ecopoetry (2025), and in anthologies Seen as Read (2021), The Book of Penteract (2022) and Seeing in Tongues (2023). Her poetry publications include Tenter (Guillemot, 2020), Enclosures (Osmosis, 2021), The Sleeping Place (Guillemot, 2023), and most recently, her debut collection, Wastelands (Guillemot, 2025). She can be found on Instagram at @susiecampbellwrites.
IceFloe Press 