More Song at The 1 in 12 Club Library
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
At Bradford’s number-one live lit night with invited guests, the autumn season closes by welcoming Jazmine Linklater, Nell Osborne, David Mullin and Edwina Attlee, launching her debut collection a great shaking. More Song has been running since early 2023 and every outing features a handful of invited guests from the world of poetry, the likes of Zaffar Kunial and Will Harris.
The programme for More Song 2024 has panned out nicely, with readers including Holly Hopkins, JR Carpenter and Fran Lock, and a special showcase to celebrate Liverpool’s Pavilion Poetry’s 10th Anniversary with readings from Hannah Copley, Janette Ayachi and Sarah Corbett. This is a great way to bring the year to a close.
More Song host Tom Branfoot, Manchester Cathedral writer-in-residence and himself a guest at last month’s Manchester stalwart Poets & Players, has a treat lined up and says to expect “a phenomenal evening of poetry”. He calls the line-up “a real powerhouse of readers”.
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer living in Manchester, where she works for Carcanet Press and edits the online art journal Corridor8. Her most recent pamphlet is Figure a Motion (Guillemot Press, 2020). If you can’t make Bradford, how about Leeds, when she’ll be reading on 19 October alongside TS Eliot-shortlisted Peter Gizzi and Luke Roberts at Wharf Chambers (2pm, free entry).
Jazmine ran Manchester’s amazing feminist avant garde poetry reading series No Matter with Nell Osborne, also appearing at More Song*. Nell Osborne’s Thank You For Everything launches on 1 November with Monitor Books. It is a collection of poems, appointments, wiggle rooms, self-help guides, dialogue scraps, and misery chambers. It skewers the idea of the ‘poet’s voice’ with drab ease, and then skewers that. By turns oblique, seductive, and silly, here is a melancomic portrait of existence in 2024/5. It follows the pamphlet The Canine Redeemer Has Entered The Bungalow (Just Not, 2021) and a research PhD on intimacy, gender and experimental writing by women at the University of Manchester. You can also catch her in Manchester at Peste (or P3 Annihilation Eve) on 21 November.
David Mullin is an archaeologist and writer based in West Yorkshire. He is returning to poetry after a career in academia and is currently writer in residence at the Special Collections at the University of Bradford, working on a project focused on the poetry of archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. He has work published in Apocalyptic Landscape: Poems from the Expressionist Poetry Workshop edited by Steve Ely (Valley Press), After Hours: Beat Culture Made New edited by Alan Parry (The Broken Spine) and in the journals Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Where Meadows and Channel Magazine. David will also be at the launch of the Apocalyptic Landscape volume at Leeds Library on 23 October, when there will be 24 readers in total, so it’s going to be a very full evening!
Edwina Attlee is the author of two pamphlets, Roasting Baby (if a leaf falls press, 2016) and the cream (Clinic, 2016). She teaches history to students of architecture in London. Her debut collection a great shaking, published by Tenement, and was selected from Tenement’s first open submission window by Lucy Mercer and Vanessa Onwuemezi. It is a triptych of works – ‘The Book of Days’, ‘Nursery Songs’ and ‘Archive Songs’ – that “detail the ways in which ‘a table can be overturned,’ an idea can be tilled, an hour can turn from something germinal to a quiet object of attention, an oblique artifact, a talisman for change”.
Rebecca Tamás said in The Guardian: “This profoundly exciting debut explores the complicated embodiments, politics and emotions of domestic life through the prism of the turning year. Attlee draws subtly luminous images from mundane, ordinary life—I pat her gloves with apricot foam / blow bubbles in the dusk / with liquid from the pound shop—allowing us to see the vivid, electric power of moments to which familiarity usually blinds us. At the same time, she is always aware of the vexed inequalities of family, time, class and gender—joy unfurls from coupledom and a shared bank account / watch out or the big horse trudges on your head. Her writing about childrearing is painfully tender yet radical: they pack him differently at the nursery … am I letting them snuff it out / the little yellow flame. In this beautiful, funny and innovative book, an important new poetic voice has emerged.”
*Unfortunately, Nell Osborne will no longer be able to perform at More Song on November 7th.
