Beautiful to have this footage from a great collaboration in Krakow this past June. Performance art, video art, poetry, theatre, it was a grand pleasure making the work with Tom and Weronika. For more info www.stevenjfowler.com/krakow
collaborating with Milosz Biedrzycki for Wrogowie & remembering Tomaz Salamun
A beautiful evening at the Rich Mix, march 28th, with some amazing performances by the 16 poets in 8 pairs over an hour or so of magic. The atmosphere was warm, the work really varied and interesting, and the collaborations a success. You can read all about the evening in depth, and watch all the work, here http://www.theenemiesproject.com/wrogowie/
Milosz and I decided to perform a piece in tribute to our mutual friend Tomaz Salamun. First we wrote a long poem where we exchanged lines of Tomaz's with various conditions placed upon them for us to make small alterations, word switches, and so forth. Then we decided that Milosz would read this poem as I handed out a sheet of paper to the 50 or so people in attendance which asked them not to read the poem that was printed on the page. Then it asked them to read the poem quietly as Milosz and I read quietly, and then to finally read with us, as we read it aloud. It gave me goosebumps, the chorus of voices, reading in near perfect harmony, Tomaz's words. It was beautiful, a fitting farewell.
Wrogowie: a Polish Enemies project - March 28th
Wrogowie: a Polish Enemies project www.theenemiesproject.com/wrogowie
March Sat 28th :7.30pm : Rich Mix Arts Centre: Venue 2 : Free Entry
in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute http://www.polishculture.org.uk/
Celebrating the great modern tradition of Polish & British experimental poetry alongside innovative collaborative practise, this will be an exchange between the increasingly familial nations of Poland and England featuring 16 of the most dynamic poets from those nations. This event will see brand new collaborations between the pairs of poets, asked to work together for the first time, specifically for this event at the Rich Mix Arts Centre.
Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese & Scott Thurston
Wojciech Bonowicz & James Davies
Malgorzata Lebda & Tom Jenks
Milosz Biedrzycki & I
Marek Kazmierski & Stephen Watts
Kamila Pawluś & Lila Matsumoto
Tomasz Mielcarek & Marcus Slease
Tasimbaradzwa Kanyangarara & Nik Way
Wrogowie year two is co-curated by Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese
Video of Emigrating Landscape panel talk on Migration
20 June / Polish eMigrants
Debate on contemporary Europeans, new ideas about borders and “Being Elsewhere – Migrating Stories”
Maria Jastrzębska and Marek Kazmierski in dialogue with SJ Fowler
The event focused on Maria’s latest collection of poems At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013). It also featured the official launch of Marek’s new book Damn the Source (OFF_PRESS, 2013)
Link to video here
Wrogowie: Polish Enemies
"It had all the marks of a successful literary event: originality, variety, contrasts, even controversies..." So said one of the fine Polish poets who graced the rich mix with his poetry this saturday passed. I wasn't there for the last part, but the rest, I witnessed, and happily, considering it was lashing down outside, and in filthy weather, the event all the more of a success as an incubator for good will and really considered collaborations. I don't want to write too much about it, but the legacy of Polish poetry in the 20th is so immense, with such validated gravitas, that often working with the poets of the country brings out the worst in the formal (powerful) v. avant garde (flippant) myth. This wasnt the case saturday, these divisions didnt seem obvious, or present, or necessary, and so I judge the proceedings to be a success. My work with Piotr too was a great pleasure to write and to read. He is a really gentle soul, an erudite man, seemingly as emotionally wise as he is in his writing. Such a benefit to me to create this exchange with him, lifted from found texts in philosophy as well as new writing, all about the lost margins of our possible perception of death and transition. Suitably cheery.
Amy Cutler & Ula Chowaniec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LdC442EKk
Angus Sinclair & Laura Elliott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrH3G34BQ_M
Francesca Listette & Joanna Rzadowska http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZukpdL6Cxk0
Philip Terry & Adam Zdrodowski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHzymaGAgPQ
Marcus Slease & Grzegorz Wroblewski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yuRzUnOYXk
Wrogowie - Feb sat 8th at the Rich Mix, London
Wrogowie: February Sat 8th at the Rich Mix Arts Centre:
7pm doors. Free entry.
Marcus Slease & Grzegorz Wróblewski
Joanna Rzadowska & Francesca Lisette
Ula Chowaniec & Amy Cutler
Piotr Gwiazda & SJ Fowler
Adam Zdrodowski & Philip Terry
+ Laura Elliott & Angus Sinclair
This saturday evening, the Enemies project presents Wrogowie: 5 pairs of poets from Poland & the UK premiering original collaborations, and beginning a year long engagement between contemporary Polish poets & their British peers in collaboration & translation. Featuring Polish poets travelling from America, Denmark and of course, Poland, this should be an exciting beginning to our focus on European poetry during the second year of Enemies. Wrogowie is co-curated by Marcus Slease and generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute http://www.polishculture.org.uk/ & UCL SSEES http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees
& on the afternoon preceding, Friday Feb 7th at 5pm, another extraordinary event will take place to celebrate Wrogowie as part of the Emigrating Landscape program, curated by Ula Chowaniec. http://emigratinglandscapes.org/events/grzegorz_wroblewski
The event will feature a poetry reading and discussion with Grzegorz Wróblewski, about Kopenhaga, the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by Grzegorz, one of Poland’s leading contemporary avant garde writers, and his translators, Piotr Gwiazda and Adam Zdrodowski, in the 4th floor Masaryk Senior Common Room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW. Not to be missed.
maintenant #97 – tadeusz różewicz
A poet who changed the face of twentieth century poetry, Tadeusz Różewicz is a giant of Polish literature and undoubtedly one of the most important poets the country has ever produced. Still writing in his 91st year, his lifetime engagement with groundbreaking poetry, fiction and plays has spanned, and often encapsulated, the seismic tumult of the past century in his home nation. His poetic is the rarest of things, an anti-art that resides still within the realm of the explicable, and the ethical, striding between the utterly personal and the political – often brutal in its beauty and intensity, it is an aesthetic that is wholly his own, unique and unwavering. His first poems were published in 1938, before he served in the Polish underground home army in WWII. His brother, Janusz, also a poet, was executed by the Gestapo. This desolate chapter in our collective European history produced few artists and writers able to even begin to make sense of such destruction, but the eruption of poetry and dramaturgy that followed the war experiences of Tadeusz Różewicz has set him aside as one of the most respected innovators and stylists in modern European history. In the decades since the war he has continued to produce extraordinary literature, winning the Nike prize, the Griffin prize and the European literature prize, and now, on the eve of a brand new translation, into English, of his work ‘Mother Departs‘ by Stork Press, we are proud to elevate the Maintenant series with the inclusion of Tadeusz Różewicz, our 97th poet.
Far and away this is the edition of Maintenant I am most proud of, Różewicz's work being so fundamental in the beginnings of my own. I want to thank and acknowledge the tireless work of Joanna Zgadzaj for making this interview possible, and draw attention to the extraordinary celebration of Różewicz's work and life that happened last Saturday evening at the Southbank centre, as part of their literature festival, and for the launch of the brand new translation mentioned above. Here is a podcast the Polish institute produced about the event I was so sad to miss, being in Norwich, finishing off the EVP tour