This is something I’m really happy with - a podcast in the remarkable HIPOGLOTE series, thanks entirely to the amazing Tiago Swabl - which recounts my ten years in sound poetry this year, 2010 to 2020. A unique audio document, I was invited to provide performances and commentary explaining my path though the noise poems as part of their Carte Blanche series.

It traces my first steps as part of the post Bob Cobbing Writers Forum, my early improvised vocalisation work with Ben Morris and Dylan Nyoukis and at the British Museum, then my travels around Europe working with Zuzana Husarova and Maja Jantar amongst others, then my Soundings project with Wellcome Library, my participation in the Palais de Tokyo sound poetry retrospective and works with British artists I admire like Nathan Walker and the legendary Phil Minton. All this with brand new works made for the show, loads of solo works I’ve dug out of my archive and cover versions of Cobbing and bp nichol, also new for this ambitious hour.

It’s pleasing to not only have had the invitation, but to have Tiago’s editorial assistance (he did it all!) in making this document. It succinctly looks back on so much work I’ve found myself doing in a field which has always intimidated / excited me and it’s made me realise things, in making this summation, that had escaped me. More than anything, it’s made me realise I want to do more sound poetry. https://www.mixcloud.com/Hipoglote/183o-hipoglote_2020-08-17_-carte-blanche_-steven-j-fowler/

I’ve been spending some lockdown time archiving. My website is being archived by the British Library Web team and it’s a decade since I organised my first event, exactly, in May 2010, at Rich Mix, with Romanian poets in London. I started writing, sharing, being out in the world with poetry, then fiction, art etc… almost exactly 11 years ago, after suddenly discovering reading serious work as a thing a dozen years back.

I began through pure chance. I was studying philosophy at university of london and happened to find out about the contemporary poetics research centre from a poster in a hall. I went to meet stephen mooney and he said come to the writers forum. The writers forum that bob cobbing had begun in the 1950s still ran, and still runs now, upstairs in a pub in farringdon, then in old street. My first ever public reading of anything was there, surrounded by some old school poets. bob’s widow, jennifer pike cobbing was there, and some great people, like matt martin, jeff hilson, wayne clements and others. It was formative, because while I read a lot in the year before going, genuinely 5 to 8 hours a day, sometimes more, the poets were sharing sound poetry, concrete poetry, performance. There were some bad things about it too, but who cares. I learned from both.

My first ever publication was about 10 years ago, and it was, to my knowledge, the last publication of the writers forum while it was still united (it split into two, who cares). It was a hand-made, hand-folded set of Concrete Poems, intended to be read aloud as an English person not speaking the language they were built of. They are shaped chunks of text in a language I found and thought looked interesting to shape.

I was encouraged to publish them, helped to make them and became part of the over 1000 pamphlets, booklets and books that make up the remarkable history of the WF press. The forum had published John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin alongside so many important poets from the UK, including Cobbing himself of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_Forum

I found a few remaining copies of this pamphlet in my trunk and some Cobbing publications too, that he had made, that were in a box before I asked for them. It’s good to remember where one started when thoughts of stopping are relatively frequent. I’m not nostalgic at all, almost the opposite, but connections like this aren’t useless perhaps.