a tenuous line, a lot of feelings at SEESAW
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
We don’t often celebrate World Poetry Day in style, but, thanks to literati mover and shaker Tom Branfoot, this year we can! Put on your best metonymy and fancy univocalic and get ready to shake your assonance as experimental / hybrid writing takes centre stage at one-off event a tenuous line, a lot of feelings.
The promo promises an evening that’s: “Rich in timbral diversity: engines hum, instruments are methodically destroyed, tension hangs on taut wire.” (We note that these words are lifted from a write-up, in ArtReview, by Ross Simonini about Barcelona-based sound artist duo Lolo & Sosaku. We do look this stuff up, you know.) So think cut-ups, blackouts, constraint-led wordage: the idea behind a tenuous line, a lot of feelings, we’re told by Tom, is to celebrate community and DIY ethos on World Poetry Day.
In alphabetical order, the readers are Tom Branfoot, Lu Rose Cunningham, Jordan Hayward, Martin Kratz, Hamish Rush and Hilary White.
Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford, and the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He won a Northern Debut Award for Poetry in 2024 and the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of I’ll Splinter (Pariah Press, 2021), This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop, 2023) and boar (Broken Sleep Books, 2023). He has written reviews and criticism for Poetry Review, Poetry London, The London Magazine, Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been published internationally by SAND, bath magg, Oxford Review of Books, Wet Grain, Ludd Gang and Berlin Lit. Tom is also running a workshop on Peter Gizzi’s practice the same day, 2-4pm, at Castlefield Viaduct.
Lu Rose Cunningham has written for and exhibited performances at Leeds Art Gallery, The Hepworth Wakefield, South London Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre and HuMBase, Stuttgart. She is the author of poetry pamphlets For Mary; Marie, Maria and Interval: House, Lover, Slippages, both published by Broken Sleep Books. She has also written for Pala Press, SPAM, MAP Magazine, SNOW lit rev and More Song, and for arts journals Terra Firma Magazine, L’Essenziale Studio and émergent magazine. She is co-founder of London-based residency space The Writers’ Room, providing support for practitioners working at the intersection of image and text.
Jordan Hayward is a poet and editor from Preston, based in Manchester. His work has appeared in The Rialto, bath magg, The London Magazine and elsewhere. He is an alumnus of the New Poets Collective at the Southbank Centre, and is the editor of Basket, a magazine for contemporary poetry.
Martin Kratz’s reviews and translations from the German have appeared in various journals and in the anthology The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2019). He is the co-editor of Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City (Penned in the Margins, 2014). A pamphlet, A Skeleton’s Progress (Poetry Salzburg) was published in 2018. He has work in After Sylvia: Poems and essays in celebration of Sylvia Plath (Nine Arches, 2022) and No Net Ensnares Me (Calder Valley Press, 2024). Martin also works at Manchester Poetry Library.
Hamish Rush is a writer and actor from Salford, Greater Manchester. A full scholarship to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama saw him graduate and move on to notable projects including This Must Be The Place (Vault Festival Show of the Year 2017), Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, with multiple appearances on BBC Radio 4 Drama, the latest being Undercover – The Fury, broadcast in February. His debut publication, Scale Heavenly, was published with Pariah Press in September 2023. He has had short fiction published by Tar Press and is working on a forthcoming pamphlet with Team Trident Press.
Hilary White is a writer and researcher. She is the author of Holes, a novella published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2024. She is currently at Maynooth University in Ireland, working on a postdoctoral project called ‘Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence’. Her writing appears in Strings, Tripwire, Happy Birthday?, The Yellow Paper, Corridor8, MAP, Banshee, The Stinging Fly and others. She has written on her sleep project for RTÉ Brainstorm. An interview about Holes featured on New Books Network. She is a co-editor of the collection, Gestures: A body of work, out now with Manchester University Press.
