The Other Room at The Kings Arms
Sarah-Clare Conlon, Literature Editor
The Other Room experimental poetry night celebrates nine years of events with an extended line-up, and a one-off change of venue, crossing the river into Salford. The gang of three – James Davies, Scott Thurston and Tom Jenks – will also be launching their ninth anthology, which includes contributions from everyone who has performed on The Other Room stage over the last year.
The temporary move to The Kings Arms is to make use of the upstairs theatre space – this special anniversary edition of The Other Room will be welcoming the thirty-strong Juxtavoices “anti-choir”. We’re told: this is singing on the edge of not-singing or vice versa, a music only previously heard in a sound-poet’s dreams, and apparently no two performances are ever the same. Directed by Martin Archer and Alan Halsey, Juxtavoices combines the outer reaches of improvised music and innovative poetry.
Also performing is Erkembode, a multidisciplinary artist based in Leeds. Think films, sound and words. His art has variously been described as irreverent, outsider, spiritual, modernist, cutesy, not art, crude, prolific, pointless, phallic, beat, cheap, childlike, responsive, mischievous, non-academic, difficult, purposeful, instinctual. We like “not art” in particular.
The third act is William Rowe: a poet, translator, essayist and member of Veer Books editorial collective. He is Emeritus Professor of Poetics at Birkbeck College, which is rather posh, and he’s published critical work and translations, plus plenty of books of poetry, and Collected Poems is due to be published by Crater Press early in 2017.
This promises to be a great night, if just a little bit bonkers.
