More Song at The 1 in 12 Club Library
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
In Bradford’s year as City of Culture, More Song is back with a line-up of poets featuring Rowan Evans, Sean Roy Parker and Rebecca Lockwood, plus an open mic.
More Song has been running since early 2023, hosted by Tom Branfoot, writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral and judge of its competition. Every outing features a handful of invited guests from the world of poetry, including, in 2024, the likes of Holly Hopkins, Hannah Copley, JR Carpenter and Fran Lock.
Treating the More Song audience in February to new work is poet, composer and sound artist Rowan Evans, whose debut poetry collection is A Method, A Path (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2023). His chapbook The Last Verses of Beccán (Guillemot Press, 2019) won the Michael Marks Award for Poetry. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2015 and a selection of his work appears in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard and Shining Things (Penguin, 2018). Rowan writes and produces music for theatre, performance, film and installation, and was a Creative Fellow at University College London 2019-20. In 2022 completed his practice-based PhD research, Ancient Tongues: Radical Encounters with the Early Medieval in Late Modernist and Experimental Poetry, at Royal Holloway University of London.
Writer, visual artist and landworker Sean Roy Parker’s debut poetry collection stewarding came out with London’s hyper-cool Monitor Books in 2024. Here’s what their blurb says about the book: “stewarding maps the joyful and embodied ways we can resist oppressive structures that control our food, housing, and socialisation. We begin in an abandoned school, previously the union headquarters for a coal board, which became a legal guardianship, now condemned. We witness acts of communing between human inhabitants, composting worms, microbes in fermentation, and learn working class histories along the way. Here, complex networks emerge between agents, and thrive, disrupting the monolithic power of corporate extraction. Sean Roy Parker’s debut collection of poetry is a generous account of hopeful ways to eat and ways to live.”
Rebecca Lockwood is a flash fiction and prose poetry writer, whose first collection Grace was published by Fishbowl Publishing Ltd. A former Young Poet Laureate for Staffordshire, she hosted Staffordshire’s Young Teen Fiction Awards in 2018 and she now runs Leeds Writers Collab, which launched in January 2024 to connect writers across Leeds looking for feedback on their writing. She will be reading from her pamphlet Arms of Other Men, published last year by Fawn Press and described by her University of Lancaster tutor Eoghan Walls as: “Moving, garishly sensual, giddily realised; these poems crash into you. Without a doubt, one of the best books I have read all year.”
Ticket sales help pay the poets for travelling and performing. Email tombranfoot@gmail.com for a five minute slot on the open mic.
