Swedenborg Hall, Bloomsbury - April Tuesday 11th 7.30pm : Free Entry
www.shearsman.com/shearsman-reading-events 20 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
I'm happy to announce my new poetry collection will be launched in London at the home of the Emanuel Swedenborg Society, in Bloomsbury. Part of the longstanding Shearsman Books reading series, The Guide to Being Bear Aware will be launched with a new performance relating to both book and place.
More info on the book www.stevenjfowler.com/bearaware and at the Shearsman site.
Also launching a new book on the night will be John Hall, who has been publishing extraordinary work for over fifty years in the UK and is a significant influence on myself and many of my generation. So come and see one real poet and I.
A note on: Lightwave, performing with Lithuanian poets in London
If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them.
-Andrei Tarkovsky
A memorable night at Free Word centre, bathed in a dirty UV light I had associated with searching for bodily fluids in hotel rooms transformed a literary house meeting hall into a space for real performance literature. I was performing alongside Lithuanian poets Zygimantas Kudirka and Gabriele Labanauskaite and thanks to Zygi's suggestion we themed the evening around the Lightwave, all presenting new live works thanks to an invitation by the Lithuanian Cultural Centre tying into the London Book Fair.
I've known Gabriele for years now, she has always been a peer whose work I find motivating, one of dozens of folk beyond the UK doing the work I think we should be doing on the island, blending heavy skill in theatre, poetry and sound. She has an immense presence too, calm, clear thinking, warm. And Zygimantas was a revelation, having never seen him perform before, he was unique, capitivating, authentic, very funny. He made my improvised speaking performance, which involved rope lights nosed around my neck, flames held under my palm and rambling engagements with the theme of light, seem conventional.
The Free Word was kitted out differently too and there was a sensitive, engaged feeling in the audience. It all emerged from the intent, mindful curation of the Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Rūta Nanartavičiūtė and her colleagues were a joy to work with, with an unusual sense of play and a taste for the contemporary and strange. The intense feeling of post performance energy, of soft relief, was permeated this time with a sense of hoping hospitality had been shown to the visiting poets, and it felt as thought they had shared an evening with myself and others that would be long in the memory.
Published: Three poems into Dutch on Sample Kannon
Thanks to the brilliant Tsead Bruinja, three of my newer poems, coming from my new book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, have been translated into Dutch and published in the Sample Kannon journal. http://samplekanon.com/?p=3771
De Toekomst
De toekomst
als een eend met rubbertanden.
Een vakje dat uw reactie zal bevatten
op een gebeurtenis die u in de war heeft gebracht,
wat tot als gevolg heeft dat u gaat denken dat reactie een oplossing is.
Published: two poems into Hungarian in Szif
Thanks to the brilliant Orsolya Fenyvesi, two of my newer poems, coming from my new book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, have been translated into Hungarian and published in the Szif journal. http://www.szifonline.hu/?cikk_ID=679
Nem támadnak meg a medvék
Ez ólálkodik a sötétben,
a vegetarianizmus
barátságos története.
Livia azt mondja, kenyér van az orrban
és a torokban.
A note on: the last soundings, performing with the great Phil Minton
An amazing privilege it was to perform an improvised vocal work with Phil Minton last October at Kings Place in London. The video of that work is now public, beautifully shot by Ed Prosser.
For over fifty years Phil Minton has been performing, singing, vocalising around the world. He absolutely has shaped, even defined, free vocalisation and improvised sound poetry since WWII. To get to work with him for the first time, with no prior preparation, no conversation about what we'd do before the performance even, was such an honour, and beautiful / terrifying in equal measure. So important for me to feel I'm crossing over with the greats of previous generations
A note on: beginning production on Land of Scoundrels, new theatre at Rich Mix
I'm to write a new short play, called Mayakovsky, as part of a night of theatre at Rich Mix, commissioned for their Revolution 17 season, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution. It will be staged with an amazing set design by Thomas Duggan, who has designed for Vesterport's theatre's Faust recently amongst other things, and placed alongside new works by Austrian playwright Petra Freimund and Larry Lynch, who often works for the Belarus Free Theatre. We began our production proper this week and already the project is inspiring, I'm learning immensely from the experience of these three deeply intelligent people. Actors will be cast soon, a score written, and then we'll build to June 9th 10th 11th, which will be intense. www.stevenjfowler.com/mayakovsky
A note on: curating the 2nd English PEN Modern Literature Festival
Such was the resonance and enthusiasm around the first, the second had to come. It feels as though this is the beginning of a tradition. I hope so. There isn't another curatorial activity that has proved to be this engaged and purposeful for me. Once again my role really is to liaise between the brilliant, principled, pragmatic work of those at English PEN, again working closely with the inspiring Cat Lucas, and the thirty writers who have agreed, all of them with great willingness and humble trepidation, to write or perform a new work on April 1st, in service of another author.
Once again my experience was to spend time with authors around the world whose deliberate acts of decency, whose ethical drive, whose fundamental character, has led them directly into the kind of psychological and physical harm that leaves one weaker for knowing of it. To spend such brief time with these people, these peers, and to know in that trifling moment how little I can know of what they and their families are experiencing because of their writing, their journalism, their poetry. And so the English writers have expressed again this feeling of overwhelming responsibility. One so overwhelmingly as to be perhaps prohibitive. And for all its remarkable energy and galvanising intensity this is the one thing I have learnt from last year and that I have tried to pass on to this year. This magnitude is implicit. The authors from England should not apologise for their own fortune and comfort while celebrating the courage of another. They should celebrate them, write for them, to them, with them. They should be as modern, as experimental, as humorous as they are grave. They should take their responsibility to be in the investment aesthetically as well as emotionally. This is not a small detail. It is vital. Because by doing the day itself, by making something where perhaps there would be no connection between two writers across the world, that sense of shame, in a small way is being acknowledged. From that moment on, we must just have them in our minds, spread the word of their work and their actions, keep things alive.
Some extraordinary writers are involved this year, you can see the full list below or on www.theenemiesproject.com/englishpen. The event is free, in three parts. What I hope happens is what I hoped for when we initially hatched the idea. Nothing impossible, nothing utopian. The create more members of English PEN, so that the political will of this time is directly forcefully behind the writers charity, who have the expertise, who are on the front lines of absolutely vital battlegrounds in our time, from surveillance to free speech, while also being a light in the dark for many writers abroad, thirty of whom we will celebrate on April 1st.
A note on: Lightwave: New Performance in Lithuanian Literature
Wednesday March 15th / 6:30pm doors for 7pm start / Free Word Centre
60 Farringdon Road. EC1R 3GA : Free Entry but online booking requested here
A unique event celebrating Lithuanian’s new generation of literary artists, featuring brand new readings and performances by Gabrielė Labanauskaitė-Diena, Žygimantas Kudirka and SJ Fowler, a British poet connected to their innovative, collaborative practise.
Both Labanauskaite and Kudirka have carved out reputations across Europe for remarkable writing and live performances to match. This is a rare chance in London to witness poets who are breaking ground in the new European scene.
From Lithuania’s powerful lyrical and formal tradition has grown a culture of experimentation and in this event curated for the London Book Fair, the Lithuanian Culture Institute brings to light the best of Lithuania’s new generation of poets and performers.
Speakers Žygimantas Kudirka is a writer, artist and performer of interactive poetry, artificial languages and electronic music. Kudirka’s first poetry collection, XXI a. Kudirka (The Twenty-first Century Kudirka), is made up of interactive verses, literary remixes, internet poetry, and texts of unusual graphic forms and content. He is also a performer of avant-garde rap and one of the pioneers of poetry slam in Lithuania, representing the country in European slam poetry championships. His works have been translated in different languages and part of them can be found online here, here or here. / Gabrielė Labanauskaitė-Diena is a text producer. She combines poetry, drama, essay and other texts with interdisciplinary arts, enjoying her roles as writer, performer and organizer. Gabrielė also appears in classical forms – as a playwright in theatre, lecturer at Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy, human being in everyday life. Find out more here and here.
A note on: pictures by Alexander Kell from Museum of Futures Visual Poetry Exhibition Launch
Some beautiful images of the lovely beginning to the exhibition, capturing, as Alexander always seems to, that which was not visible outside of fixed time. www.theenemiesproject.com/futures
The Guide to Being Bear Aware : my new new book
I'm happy to announce my latest poetry collection will be published with Shearsman Books. The Guide to Being Bear Aware.
More info on the book www.stevenjfowler.com/bearaware and at the Shearsman site.
The book will be launched in London on April Tuesday 11th, 7.30pm, at Swedenborg House in Bloomsbury, with further launches in York, Bristol and Kingston.
"... advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in. Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own” Sarah Howe
You can read a poem from the book published by Poetry Magazine online here: The Robin Hood Estate : Poetry Magazine October 2016
"In SJ Fowler’s work, which surprises & delights by turns, I’m fascinated throughout by the fast moves he makes, quick on the draw & changing rapidly from image to image, meme after meme as it were. His is in that sense a markedly original enterprise, but one which carries with it another thrust – toward sharing, even collaboration – that has been central to much of his earlier work. Here every poem starts off with the words of some other poet (present or past, close or distant) before his own voice enters & takes over, with those other voices, spirits, hovering around. It is all new as I read him, all special, and I’m drawn to follow him now wherever he takes us." Jerome Rothenberg
About the publisher: Shearsman Books, who for nearly three decades have been a home to some of the most extraordinary high modern and literary poets the UK has produced since WWII, have published many poets profoundly influential on myself, from Cesar Vallejo to Fernando Pessoa in English, as well many peers whose work has given me much, from Vahni Capildeo to John Hall.www.shearsman.com
A note on: The University Camarade II
The future is in good hands if this event is any indication. Though ostensibly about pairing students across the country, and allowing them to experiment / collaborate / create new friendships, what it is really about is giving a platform to younger poets who might be locked into the boundaries that come with being a 'creative writing' student or in a university. It's just a way to discover people, to see them shine, and they were really remarkable on this occasion, all 22 poets, from all over the UK. A really resonant evening, all the videos are here www.theenemiesproject.com/unicamarade worth watching.
A note on: Curating the Museum of Futures Visual Poetry Exhibition
I conceived of this exhibition for multiple reasons. The first, I wanted to invest in the place. I've been teaching at Kingston University for a few years and wanted to create a platform in the area, outside of London (just) where those living or studying local felt that not everything was east of them, in the city, that there was some focus on the place as other than a place to visit, but to reside, creatively. Second because I wanted students and faculty from across departments to connect, from across ages and years and practises, and I wanted this to happen in the context of the many brilliant poets and artists who were also not associated with the Uni. Too often we're all in our own boxes, in all things, but especially in the pace of teaching or studying. Thirdly, I had hoped new friendships and collaborative relationships would begin and by placing students work next to those who are ostensibly professionals, that many students would take inspiration from that, would get permission to experiment, to follow their own noses, and that it would as a project show them they could go into spaces beyond the university. This is often a problem too, that students feel too safe at university creatively, and this comes to bear painfully when they graduate. Fourthly I had built some fantastic connections with a specific group of students, both undergraduate and postgraduate whom I felt deserved the opportunity to do something special, or unique certainly, and I knew I could rely on them to help me, to make it a collective enterprise. This proved true. And finally, I wanted the actual aesthetic content of the exhibition to be innovative, to explore the potential of text beyond the book, or the visual to be read as a text. In the end we had 40 works of a really striking standard, the exhibition looks genuinely engaging, original and beautiful.
Museum of Futures themselves, Simon Tyrell and Robin Hutchinson, introduced to me by the brilliant Lucy Furlong, were amazingly supportive, doing great work. Myself and the student co-curators, especially Molly Bergin, Olga Kolesnikova and Matt Navey, had a laugh putting it all together on a windy Wednesday in Surbiton. There is real camaraderie to be found in this kind of project. And the opening night was amazing, gratifying. The room was so full someone feinted. Packed to the gills we listened to a host of new collaborative readings I had commissioned for the night and I got to make new friends as well as seeing some of my favourite people, old friends and talents like Thomas Duggan, Alexander Kell and Camilla Nelson. The readings were great and the sense of community, of purpose and excitement was palpable. A special project all told.
All the reading videos and pictures are, or will be, here www.theenemiesproject.com/futures
Published: 3 poem-bruts on Partisan Hotel
Very happy the brilliant Partisan Hotel magazine have published a set of three of my poem-brut artpoems, all taken from my upcoming Stranger Press book 'I fear my best work behind me' due out in the summer. http://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler
From the magazine bio "These works are taken from his trilogy of books in the poem-brut tradition, exploring ready writing materials, the composition of handwriting and mark making and the role of illustration and legibility in determining poetic meaning. The three books are to be published in 2017 and are entitled I fear my best work behind me (Stranger Press), New prim (Hesterglock Press) and Aletta Ocean Empire (Blart Books). A sequence of Fowler’s poems will appear in Hotel #2."
A note on: The Cast of the Crystal Set - X marks the bokship record
The Cast of the Crystal Set: Readings, Radio, Recordings, Interviews and Performances from: / Jenny Moore & House Music, Sinkhole, Marcia Farquhar with Anne Bean and Judy Clark, / Drawing Room Confessions, Maia Conran, Jessica Worden, SJ Fowler, Denise Hawrysio and Kriswvyd.
The Crystal Set was an evolving structure oscillating between a sound studio for recording and an open stage for live listening events. Between June – August 2015 at X Marks the Bökship & Matt’s Gallery, it hosted a series of recording sessions, workshops and performances. The invitation to a cast of artists and publishers was to use the studio as a resource to translate material from the printed page into sound. This record is a collection of extracts from some of the readings, live radio and interviews all recorded or performed in The Crystal Set.
The Cast of the Crystal Set / 12" Vinyl Record / Published by X Marks the Bökship, 2016 / Edition of 200 / Price £10 http://bokship.org/xaudio.html
A note on : The Poetry Society annual lecture with Jan Wagner
The first time I've attended the Poetry Society annual lecture, given by Jan Wagner at Kings College, after a short national tour. I met Jan for the first time in Berlin, travelling there as a tourist many years ago, having barely written much, just emailing him from nowhere really. He came to meet me, showed me around Berlin, was immensely hospitable and generous to me. Such things are not to be taken lightly, the gesture belying his great humanity, humility and talent. His lecture was really remarkable, rang powerfully true to me. Over an hour in length in covered enormous ground so i don't wish to do it a disservice by merely focusing on a few likely misunderstood or misrepresented points but his deft exploration of influence, how we carry our poetry forebears and heroes with us, where this becomes lost in our work, though still present in our own minds, is very important to me, having written of those who hold such sway over me often (Mayakovsky, Pessoa, Hollo, Raworth, Salamun and co). What I should say rather than recounting the lecture, soon to be published in the Poetry Review and available as an audio file, is that it seemed to me represent Jan as what I aspire to be - a human being working through life with poetry, and not the other way around. Not a poet working through being a human being. Though our work is markedly different, though I share his passion for form (I have no gift for it), I feel an immense kinship with his method, his contextual sensitivity and his sure sense of lineage and deep reading. Moreover he is an immensely decent person, and this is enormously important, fundamental to what I deem a necessary modern turn we should seek in connecting poetics and ethics. I would recommend those interested seek out his book from Arc publishing too, https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/jan-wagner-self-portrait-with-a-swarm-of-bees-532 It is no small thing too that the Poetry Society choose a European poet to give this lecture too, the first time since its inception I'm told, an important and marked thing at this time in our island's political climate.
Published: Oxford Brookes Poem of Week : Snow Bunting bay bay
Well nice of Oxford Brookes poetry centre at the University to publish my poem Snow Bunting as their weekly poem. The poem was commissioned for the amazing Birdbook 4 anthology from Sidekick Books, who are equally brilliant publishers. http://www.brookes.ac.uk/poetry-centre/weekly-poem/weekly-poem-for-21-february-2017/ I put a good bio on this one
SJ Fowler is a poet and artist. He has published five collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, The British Council, Tate Britain and Wellcome Collection. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine, Lecturer at Kingston University, teaches at Tate Modern and is the curator of the Enemies project. He is a high functioning vegan bear, befriends birds and will protect their eggs with electric technologies. Currently he is writing an autobiography of the famous Hyde Park Mud Crow. Find out more about his work on his website.
Notes from Sidekick Books: With this poem we continue our selection of poems from Sidekick Books’ four volumes of Birdbooks. In 2009, with two micro-compendiums under their belt, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone, the editors at Sidekick, discussed the idea of a book of bird poetry – but one in which less well known species were on equal terms with the popular ones. There are dozens of poems about herons, eagles, ravens and nightingales, not so many about the whimbrel, the ruff, the widgeon or the hobby. Paper-cut artist Lois Cordelia was recruited to give the series its distinctive covers, and over 150 artists and illustrators were commissioned over six years to complete the series. The first volume is now in its second printing. Find out more about the Birdbook series on theSidekick website.
A note on: Asemic Exhibition in Minnesota
Asemic Writing: Offline And In The Gallery: an Asemic Writing exhibit at Minnesota Center for Book Arts opens March 10th and runs till May 28th 2017. Curated by Michael Jacobson http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/asemic-writing-offline-and-in-gallery.html
Featuring Asemic Writing & Book Art from: Tim Gaze, Rosaire Appel, Luigi Serafini, Carlos M. Luis, Israel F Haros Lopez, Paul A Toth, Alain Satié, Jose Parlá, John M. Bennett, Marco Giovenale, Cecil Touchon, Scott Helmes, Derek Beaulieu, Brion Gysin, Satu Kaikkonen, Cheryl Penn, Raymond Queneau, Logan K. Young, Steve McCaffery, Xu Bing, Geof Huth, Gene Kannenberg Jr., Christopher Skinner, Max Ernst, Timothy Ely, Charles Stein, Gazaliel, Lucinda Sherlock, Volodymyr Bilyk, Catherine M. Bennett, Henri Michaux, Spencer Selby, Jim Leftwich, Louise Tournay, Abdourahamane Diarra, Joe Maneri, Michael Jacobson, Robyn Ellenbogen, Donna Maria De Creeft, Marilyn R Rosenberg, Francesco Aprile, Bill Beamer, Nuno De Matos, Lynn Alexander, Tony Burhouse, Scott Ross, Axel Calatayud, Henry Denander, Jean-christophe Giacottino, Lin Tarczynski, Tom Cassidy, Ricky Brett, Edward Kulemin, Phil Openshaw, Kerri Pullo, Anneke Baeten, Benji Friedman, Laura Ortiz, John McConnochie, Kimm Kiriako, Sam Roxas Chua, Steven J Fowler, Tatiana Roumelioti, Ekaterina Samigulina & Yuli Ilyshchanska, Nico Vassilakis, the unknown author of The Voynich Manuscript, all the authors & artists in Asemic Magazine, everyone in John Moore William's asemic issue of The Bleed, & including everyone in Paul A. Toth'sALPHA BET A TEST: The Eye Am Eye Asemic Anthology: Language In The Act of Disappearing.
A note on: The University Camarade II
The University Camarade II : February Saturday 25th 2017 - 7.30pm - Free Entrance
Venue 2 : Rich Mix Arts Centre (35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA)
www.theenemiesproject.com/unicamarade
The second University Camarade presents pairs of creative writing students from seven different Universities in the UK to collaborate on short new works of poetry or text, for performance. The only participants are students, and writing with poets they've never met before, who study within a different institution, this initiative allows them to expand their practise, knowledge and networks, and takes a stand against purported factionalism or department competition. The innovative collaborative methodology also allows them to include experimentation early in their writing careers, and perform to a large audience.
Students have been drawn from the Creative Writing departments of Kingston University, Oxford Brookes, York St John, Kent, Essex, York and Royal Holloway and the project has been curated by SJ Fowler with Kim Campanello, JT Welsch, Dorothy Lehane, Robert Hampson, Prudence Chamberlain, Philip Terry and Niall Munro.
tom raworth 1938 – 2017
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tomraworth/
With Tom Raworth’s death, the world of poetry, and of human intelligence in general, has become lesser. I am not alone in thinking him the finest British poet of his lifetime. For over five decades Tom’s work was a blazing light across the often murky path of British poetry. He was a friend to so many, gregarious and kind, in his person as well as his work on the page. He was a mentor to even more, including myself and many of a new generation of contemporary poets, who will see his legacy as a link between a positively historical period of invention and the maelstrom of our present time. Along with his work, he will also pass on a profound inheritance to those who knew him – while being deeply intellectual as a man, as subtle and complex as his poetry, he was utterly unpretentious, humble, admirably without patience for fools and hypocrites, and viewed common human decency as more important than anything else, including poetry.
Tom led an incredible life, publishing over 40 books, with his first The Relation Ship emerging in 1966. He spearheaded the British Poetry Revival with his unforgettable readings as well as his work with Goliard Press, which published Charles Olson’s first collection in the UK, amongst other now greats. He made a collectively vital impression on the new poetry of both Britain and America in the 60s. But this doesn’t really capture it. The prohibition and complacency readily celebrated in so many literary circles on these islands, along with his natural energy and openness to the world sent him into global recognition. He spent many years in the US and lived for a time in Mexico and Spain. He attended festivals to present his work everywhere from China to Macedonia. At a time when few looked beyond the UK, Tom was showing poets that something powerful and unique had emerged from the post-war scene. In fact it is in America that he found his due, not only in his deep friendships with poets like Ed Dorn and Anselm Hollo, but in a readership. I was once at a festival in central America and was asked by the audience which British poet was most important to me. When I replied with Tom’s name, the American poet Forrest Gander, with a smile on his face, shouted out ‘he’s ours.’ By rights, this is not entirely untrue. The feel of Tom’s Irish parentage, his class and his cosmopolitan outlook ebbing into his always inventive poetry left him at times profoundly underappreciated in the UK while celebrated in America. Certainly in the time I knew him, though he would have immediately spurned any haughty honour, it was unbelievable to me that he was not celebrated more in his home nation.
I am quite sure I am one of hundreds of young poets Tom befriended. I first contacted him very early in my writing, with immense naivety, just cold emailing him, to tell him how much his work meant to me. He had no reason to respond, and yet he did, not only with supportive words about my work, which he had clearly sought out and read in response to my clumsy missive, but then with an invitation to spend time with him and his wife Val in Brighton. That began a friendship which profoundly shaped, or certainly confirmed, my approach to being a poet. The last thing Tom really wanted to speak about was poetry, or so it felt. What we talked about was almost everything but. Over dinner, always laughing, amazingly hospitable, talking about crime novels or Game of Thrones, incidentally I was able to hear Tom and Val tell stories of their life, their friends, with poetry the route to these experiences, but not the subject of them. Poetry was a way into friendships, experiences, communities, and this in itself reflected back into the work. Tom’s poems are always alive to reality, in all their pace and fragmentation and mishearing and insight and beauty. I’d leave with long lists of poets to look up, not because Tom had recommended them, but because their names had been casually mentioned next to brief meetings with Octavio Paz in Mexico or William Burroughs in New York. What I really learned then was that there is sometimes a palpable connection between a kind of writing and a way of living, an ethics in poetics. It was a path being shown to me, knowing nothing, understanding so little, and Tom and Val seeing that, were helping me on. What I know now that Tom is gone, that he had passed on to me and so many others a responsibility to be kind, generous, to be communal and supportive, while always being critical and alive to bullshit, and to protect our work from pernicious collective normativity while building friendships around that task.
Hearing of his death, it feels to me now that we have been left to fend for ourselves, just for a moment, precisely when we need poets and people like Tom and all their wisdom. I wouldn’t want to presume, but I would imagine Tom would not have liked what I’ve written about him, finding it mawkish in its compliments. But his poetry, like his person, was not an assurance, or a correction. It was its own thing, shared for the purpose of being read and nothing more, correcting by example, inspiring new ideas and poems. Through its sheer intricacy, its intelligence, delicacy and humour, for my generation, his work has set a standard. So in both his manner and his poems Tom Raworth has left a palpable legacy, even a responsibility. When I asked him once for a blurb for one of my books that no one has really read or will ever read, he responded it was “doing the work that needs to be done.” What greater compliment can be given, in all its restraint? Following his example I should hope to live a long life, full of friends, full of writing, full of people as down to earth, charismatic, intellectually vigilant and warm hearted as Tom Raworth. He was a great poet, following his own path, and will be sorely missed.
A note on: North x North West Poetry Tour part 2 - Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool
All info and funbatch on this tour is here www.stevenjfowler.com/nxnw and allll videos www.theenemiesproject.com/northwest
Leeds was fire. I’d heard it was a quiet town for the avant garde or literary poetry but this proved untrue, or we got unlucky. In the wharf chambers we had over twenty poets and from many different scenes and backgrounds. From first time readers to folk like Ian McMillan and Robert Sheppard, it ran the gamut. I got there early, in the snow, to be met by Ian in fact, whom, ever the gentleman, helped me shift 100 chairs into the basement punk venue. So many poets I was excited to see and meet for this one, and there was a uniformly playful tone, with a noticeable investment by many. For my own work with Patricia Farrell we wrote a collaborative poem and then I played with some ideas around memory and recitation, recording her poems onto my phone, popping in earphones and reciting from that audio file at parts, and at others, just trying to copy what she had said. Nearly 100 crushed in all told and some of these collaborations will be long remembered, everyone was buzzing
Sheffield was interesting. Again there was talk of a quiet gig but our room at Bank Street Arts was chocked, even dangerously so with much of the gig standing room only with people blocking my camera or stepping on each other’s feet, literally. Some great works here, punctuating a range of stuff, from the high literary to the amusing. At times it leaned into the self-referential, the audience having its favourites / friends, which is really the opposite of the deliberately open Enemies mode, but this is inevitable with such an intense room and a single city scene.
To be honest for me, the whole time in Sheffield was clouded by hearing of the death of Tom Raworth, who was a great influence on me and a friend. I wrote a piece remembering him, feeling emptied and deeply sad, in a Travelodge in the city, having travelled from Leeds and so it was a melancholy day. It took me many attempts to write the piece, I was feeling quite out of sorts. We ended the event with Chris McCabe and I reading some of Tom’s poems and this I will never forget, to have the big audience to read Tom’s work to, a day or two after his passing.
Liverpool is a city I love and this sprawling reading in the beautiful Everyman playhouse, who could not have been more generous as a venue, brought together many friends and great poets from across the region, being the final gig. I had the grand pleasure of working with Nathan Walker, whom I respect immensely and our improvised sound poetry vocal piece was a joy, though it was maybe too intense for the audience. Some fine works here but it was a rare misfire over all in terms of the Camarade tradition. Not quite sure why, but there was an imbalance in the works overall, perhaps a lack of identity in the event, a lack of successful experiment, or engagement with liveness. Happens sometimes.
Certainly I left the event happy because it was the summation of the project, and the final moments of that were spent with my friends, Tom Jenks especially, a brilliant poet and a great person to work with. As ever it’s a privilege to do this work, to such large audiences and such enthusiastic and varied writers.