Thanks entirely to Sylee Gore, a poet I admire greatly and have the pleasure to get to know over the last year, I was interviewed for Oxford Review of Books. https://www.the-orb.org
The chat was themed around nature, the city, animals, humans, environment and so that led me to talk of my residency with j&L Gibbons, my time in Kensal Green Cemetery and then read from my 2017 book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, with Shearsman press.
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.
Grand to have this art poem, on the left page, in the latest issue of Oxford Poetry. Thanks to Lavinia Singer and the editorial team at OP, which has been publishing since 1910. The work will be featured in my debut art book, published by Stranger Press in 2017, called I fear my best work behind me. This is what I wrote to contextualise the poem...
"The poem on the page is first a series of markings made upon a surface. Obvious, but it seems to me a great source of often profoundly underexplored potential for the poet. That is the continued realisation of this fact - of black on white, of colour, material, front, handwriting, of dead and living space, of a computer screen or piece of sliced tree - all that is happening aside from semantic content, and the relation of these things in changing, fluctuating, the semantic meaning and content the poet should worry over.
This work draws from the influence post-war central European avant garde pioneers like Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont and Constant Nieuwenhuys have had on my work, all of them poets in the purest sense, all too erroneously and conveniently labelled artists. It draws on asemic writing, experimental logograms and illustration but it also a poem in the clearest, anthropomorphic sense"
And from the editorial ... "Encrusted in paper word impasto, this issue of Oxford Poetry celebrates the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Some poets respond ekphrastically to works of art (Richie McCaffery, Jeremy Valentine Freeman Ganem, Pascale Petit, Nancy Posey). Others paint worlds through bold metaphor and surreal imagery (John Burnside, Rebecca Perry, Mark Waldron, Astrid Alben, Martha Kapos) or evoke the subtleties of consciousness, memory and perception (Dominic Hand, Fiona Sampson, Denise Saul). Others step into the realm of visual poetry (SJ Fowler) to shape their words on the page (Chris Kerr, Elaine Feeney)." http://oxfordpoetry.co.uk/
I was very generously invited to participate in a Symposium on collaboration in Oxford thanks to artists Brook & Black, whose exhibition Arkitektoniske Kramper made collaboration with Christina Bredahl Duelund and Natascha Thiara Rydvald was opening at OVADA.
Really a beautiful day discovering people's work and listening to insights on the collaborative process. Lovely too to share the stage with longtime collaborator / friend, Tamarin Norwood, and to feel the unity of the scene in Oxford. That, and the hospitality and enthusiasm, was palpable.
The large scale sculptural exhibition, which closed last week, was quite stunning and what an extraordinary space OVADA is. Do visit / support both the artists and the gallery if in Oxford. More info here. http://www.ovada.org.uk/arkitektoniske-kramper/
