Published : 2nd edition of 1000 proverbs and Knives Forks and Spoons books

In 2015 I published a full length conceptual collaborative book with my nemesis Tom Jenks. We sent each other warped poetry proverbs, one liners, for a few years, and Knives Forks and Spoons press, headed up by Alec Newman, put it out. It was a poetry society book recommendation and recently sold out of its print run. Took 5 years but none the less, it has been printed in a 2nd edition, with a fancy new cover, see images. I am delighted, as Tom and I continue our collaborations. It also made me reflect on how important Knives Forks and Spoons press has been to my own work and development. In the image below you can see the six books I have published with them. One of my three debut collections (I released three in the same summer) Red Museum, amongst four collaborative volumes and an early Fights pamphlet. I think if Alec hadn’t have supported my work around this time 2010, 2011, then perhaps I wouldn’t have become as overconfident with publishing as I have. But seriously, his faith in me did me a huge boost and I’m very proud to be associated with what the press has continued to do over the last decade. Visit them https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/

A note on : The Printed Poetry Project

A new page dedicated to the PPP www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp

Aiming to create overlaps between poetry and letterpress, as well as publishing and book arts, I’m lucky to be the poet at the centre of this project so far, thanks to Angie Butler and Sarah Bodman. Evolving organically over many months of correspondence, the PPP is creating a generous, generative space for real collaboration between those with the expertise to realise printed matter and those who might write the poems within.

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Supported by the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE, Bristol, the current form of the project is really the brainchild of Angie Butler and has taken in, so far, a short residency at The Whittington press working with Pat Randle of Nomad Letterpress in May 2021.

This will be followed with a limited edition publication, entitled 25 poems, which was written during, and about, the project, before being collaboratively typeset and printed by Angie and Pat. This will be followed by an ambitious symposium in October 2021 and more happenings into the future.

A full diary of my time in Bristol is a available too, www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp, an excerpt here “The process then was a whirl. The evenings in my airbnb, doing long runs through Bristolian suburbs, the sharing of ideas with Sarah Bodman and the the postgraduate students at UWE, and the conversations with Angie, both for an online event and in her motorcar - these all fed into the poems I wrote, that were to be finished in this week so they could be printed there and then! We found an old cast in the press that said ‘25 poems’, next to an image of a cock and bull, and i leapt on this as the title. So 25 poems. A perfect chance for me to exorcise a desire to write one word poems I thought, following Aram Saroyan and 16 were created, for the opening and closes pages. Then notes, fragments, overheard conversations, things I thought when I was not thinking, these began coming together for the remaining 9 poems - with a sense always of the vernacular of letterpress and printing, of the terminology, the vocabulary, the intense sense of workable knowledge.

Published : reading list massage (If A Leaf Falls press)

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Very happy to have a new pamphlet released with If a leaf falls press, in an edition of 60, entitled reading list massage.

It has sold out on the publisher’s site, Sam Riviere, but do go buy other titles https://www.samriviere.com/index.php?/together/if-a-leaf-falls-press/

I have a few copies spare, signed, and welcome enquiries if anyone wants one http://www.stevenjfowler.com/contact.

A few words on the book = “A succinct suite of minimal misspelled poems written for, and published by, Sam Riviere's If a leaf falls micropress. Fragments of speech, mis or unlabelled quotations and comforting typopoetry reference self-referentiality as a kind of brief, grim spectre descending upon writers and academics, in rare moments of lucidity, too clever by half.”

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The booklette was written a few years ago, and is constructed, in parts, of quotations, with my poetry written through. The tone was meant to be different than most of my literary work, ironising a personal subjective involvement in the poems a little bit, following people like Paul Blackburn, Ed Dorn. and Tom Raworth, who weren’t ironic, but acknowledged themselves in their poems with a raised eyebrow.

❧ If a Leaf Falls Press publishes limited edition titles with an emphasis on appropriative and procedural writing processes.

A note on : Broken Sleep list for 2021

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I am happy to be one of the poets on the list for Broken Sleep in 2021, alongside some friends - Lucy Harvest Clarke, Luke Kennard, Emma Hammond, Jon Stone - and a lot of new names to me. Which is excellent.

The book I’ll be releasing in March 2021 is the second, far longer, instalment of my cinema poems. I’ve been working on them bit by bit for years. The first pamphlet I did with BS did really well and was a joy to put together, I STAND ALONE BY THE DEVILS, it was called.

This will be a full collection and more ambitious in terms of methodology too. Aliens is a film about more than one Alien, for example.

What Aaron Kent and his team have done with Broken Sleep is very impressive too, the press is growing exponentially. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/

A note on : a golden time for BIP - Hawkins, Papachristodoulou, Wells, Cor, Turrent, Spittle, Biddle, Knight, Sutton, Shirley, Lewis, Kent

I have often said I am lucky to have got into poetry, by accident, around 2010. I came into British poetry just at a moment when dozens of genuinely open, intelligent, energetic independent presses arrived. More than that, it seems to me, I came around when hundreds of poets from the UK are out working at material that is contemporary because it is innovative. Poetry that is responding to the world as it changes. As it changes seismically, fundamentally, in language.

Lockdown brains us. If we are the fortunate unaffected, physically, as I am (I am mega-fortunate in all ways, I believe). It has inevitably turned many of us in. We reflect and find understandable negative and positive in what we are doing. I have been candid in telling many people I think I am wasting my life writing poetry, because that very well might be true, but not in a catastrophic way. I do not dislike myself for doing it, I am just suspicious of what I am doing, as I try to be suspicious about everything, in order to be more aligned / balanced / decent, and more contented.

I have then had many chats with peers, friends, who feel unappreciated. This is an existential reality. But it is often, in the context of British Innovative Poetry (The BIP) true. I can make a long list of people whose work should be lauded. What is lauding? I wrote something here I then deleted. All I’ll say is, the poets overlooked because they are complex, I read them, I see them, I fucking appreciate them. I appreciate the presses who keep working, keep digging in, keeping sharing. It is proper impressive. I know. People just keep doing the work. It’s brilliant.

I work abroad a lot and bring to these European citizens this UK poetry they have never heard of. They think the UK scene is 5 poets. I share with them the people I admire and I see, dozens of them, through their eyes, I am right.. And I reflect on this and realise further how lucky I am to know the work of these poets, to get the books, to follow their ideas and experiments. And there is no longer the concentric “scenes” where poets are represented by their tribe as well as their work, I don’t think, and brilliant. Who wants that? Petty patty. The internet has scuppered it. We are often alone working and connected briefly. But this is why I put on events, curate, to make those connections, but not make solid any movements, group or crew. Because that is naff.

How often have I shared a friend’s book with someone outside of the BIP to see them say surprised “this is amazing, why isn’t this in shops?” yes yes yes, because you don’t buy it mate. But it exists, it’s good. This cannot be denied. I see it. I see it. Do my eyes not count? Yes they do. I have made sure they do.

All this is leading to me saying simply, it’s a golden time for interesting, innovative British poetry. We are lucky. Many don’t know it but if they looked, they’d see. Here are some books out recently or coming out soon which prove what I’m saying. All you need do is get them and find out. iF YOU BOUGHT EVERY ONE OF THESE, IT’S 100 SQUID, AND IF YOU READ THEM, THE IDEAS, THE THOUGHTS THAT WOULD FLOW. WOULDN’T THAT MAKE LIVING BETTER? TO BE GROWING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARTH REFLECTED BACK AT YOU BUT CLEVER LIKE? IT DOES FOR ME. TRY IT NOW! JUST ONE HUNDRED SPONDULICS

A note on : Ranjit Hoskote's Atlas of Lost Beliefs

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Ranjit Hoskote once wrote to me the following, “I recall reading, once, that many of the great friendships of the Renaissance were, in actuality, epistolary ones. Given the geographical distances and political turbulences involved, some of these individuals might have met only a few times in their lives, but the intensity of their friendships - their mutuality - was conducted through letters and the sharing of thoughts and feelings. Sanskrit words carry across the centuries, to gloss such moments: abhijnana, re-cognition, the translation of half-glimpsed connections into persuasive affinities; sahridaya, meaning 'aesthete', but meaning, literally, 'of the same heart'.”

When I was young, I had a palpable sense that I needn’t have connections in the world that were immediate and regular, but would be happy, if not better served, by friends of considerable character and intelligence who I would see from time to time, crossing swathes of the planet, and staying close through writing. I aspired to this, growing up in rural Devon and Cornwall and feeling small and trapped. When I think of the finest fortune my mode of writing has brought me, roving, organising, collaborating as I have, I think it is the meeting of people like Ranjit. He is a brilliant poet, a translator, a theorist, a curator and a critic. His work, across these mediums, is generous, subtle, and constantly insightful

Ranjit published a book in 2018 with penguin in India, called Jonahwhale. It has now been released in the UK, with Arc, entitled The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. I wrote a small piece on the book … “What is each poem in the world but a moment of land lost upon the ocean of language itself? We must then navigate ourselves through poets like Ranjit Hoskote and books like Jonahwhale. As ever before, through his imagistic, complex, dazzling poems, Hoskote’s grand grounded intelligence, and the width of his learning comes concentrated into brilliant mediations of what poetry can do when reflecting upon an essential theme of human culture. For reading Jonahwhale it is clear to any reader the poet’s name is Ocean, and these poems are both the water and the sea creatures, with this book as our raft.”

It’s a really excellent volume and we’re lucky to have it out in the UK. The book can be picked up from Arc here https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/ranjit-hoskote-the-atlas-of-lost-beliefs-604

A note on: editing the Sampson Low Poetry Pamphlet series in 2018

The Sampson Low Poetry Pamphlet Series is designed to evidence the remarkable contemporary and innovative poetry being written by current and recent Kingston University Creative Writing students. This series of beautifully designed pamphlets each features a suite of poems, most often on one theme or in one style, by a solo author. Visit https://sampsonlow.co/wck-pamphlets/ to purchase from the series.

New releases in the series, debut works by Olga Kolesnikova, Yvonne Litschel and Silje are now available to purchase. Click on the title and author to read more about each publication so far and buy a copy!: Click on the title and author to read more about each publication so far and buy a copy!:

“Kingston University brings together students from all over the world, from as wide a range of backgrounds and cultures as can be found in the UK. It creates a community that cross pollinates influences and ideas, and this is inevitably reflected in the work the students create. The university does not get enough credit for this – it is, I have seen, a vibrant, harmonious environment where originality and difference can be transformed into exciting and innovative expression. The students are hungry for that which is innovative, that which allows them to express the true size and complexity of their experience and their community at the university. This series of poetry pamphlets reflects that. The work is utterly contemporary, it is exciting and energetic. It is, I hope, the best kind of representation of what Kingston University stands for – intelligent, unique and various in its character.”  
Series editor, SJ Fowler

A note on: Atlantic Drift page on Edge Hill site

Really a grand anthology to be part of, so many poets included are quite beyond me, I am in every way the runt. It's been brilliantly fashioned by Arc publishing and the good folk at Edge Hill Uni, and they've thrown up a page about me

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/university-press/steven-fowler/ 

It includes this interview, shot specifically for the project in Liverpool while I was there for Camarade'ing.

Published: How I Did It - ‘The Interrupters’ my article for The Poetry School

http://campus.poetryschool.com/how-i-did-it-the-interrupters/ An intriguing series from the Poetry School, hosted on their Campus platform, where they ask poets to discuss the process of writing a specific poem of theirs. Some previous editions were really interesting, but more often than not made me realise how different my process can be from the norm. So this article, where I discuss my poem The Interrupters from my recent collection {Enthusiasm} published by Test Centre, is an attempt to honour the article's remit but still maintain a true reflection of my actual methodology.

"I suppose each collection I have published has been an attempt to relate a style, or form, or concept, to a subject. Not the other way round. No collecting has been done after the fact, the fact has been established and then the collecting. My process is one toward a changing ideal. I don’t denigrate those who are consistent, or whose evolution is subtle, but I personally find the notion of radical growth, or variance, to be something I aspire to. It comforts me that my work is different book to book, that I produce things that bear not a singular stamp of my authorial ‘voice’, for I find that idea unrepresentative of my experience of being. It is not a metaphor to say we contain a multiplicity. I am a different person depending on my mood, my company, my job… As such I am a different poet, I have a different voice when writing about boxing than I do when writing about prisons, or when I’m using collage technique as opposed to visual poetry. And most especially when I’m writing mostly at night, as opposed to the morning, or when I’m reading mostly one poet as opposed to another."

The New Concrete anthology: launch at the Whitechapel Gallery - July 25th

This is the most significant anthology of concrete poetry of my generation. I'm delighted to be included, and alongside many friends / peers - Antonio Claudio Carvalho,  Marco Giovenale, Tom Jenks, Sarah Kelly, John Kinsella, Anatol Knotek, Márton Koppány, nick-e melville, and Jörg Piringer  & legends like Vito Acconci, Augusto de Campos, Henri Chopin, Bob Cobbing, Ian Hamilton Finlay https://thenewconcrete.wordpress.com/about

"The New Concrete is a major new anthology of visual poetry edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe and published by Hayward Publishing (July 2015). The book represents visual poetry published from 2000 to the present day and suggests ways in which the original concrete movement of the 1950s and ’60s has been built upon, developed and redefined by subsequent generations of poets and artists." You can buy it here http://shop.southbankcentre.co.uk/the-new-concrete-visual-poetry-in-the-21st-century.html

The anthology will be launched in a full whack 5 hours programme at the whitechapel gallery on July 25th http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/new-concrete/ I'll be performing "Join us for an afternoon of film and live performance showcasing some of the most exciting work in this field. The event brings together some of the most celebrated poets and artists working at the intersection of visual art and poetry."

{Enthusiasm} by SJ Fowler available to pre-order - Test Centre announcement

 

We are excited to announce that {Enthusiasm}, the new poetry collection from poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler, is now available to pre-order.

{Enthusiasm} is Fowler's 7th collection, following highly-acclaimed publications including The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner (commended by the Forward Prize judges) and Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler. The book's 81 poems are intended as individual pieces in their own right, but are interlinked by subjects including battle and violence, infants and infancy, religion, economy and population, the self, modernity, and the past. http://testcentre.org.uk/product/enthusiasm/

Fowler's poetry is playful and allusive, international in its scope. His Enemies project, concerning the possibilities of poetry in collaboration, has curated over 70 events and 9 exhibitions in 13 nations – these possibilities feed into the possibilities of his texts, his awareness of different modes of expression. {Enthusiasm} thrives upon the effect on language of modern modes of communication, and the book makes disarming use of accident, irony, and error. This substantial collection marks a decisive step in Fowler's tireless, expansive career.

{Enthusiasm} is published in a limited edition of 400 copies, including 25 special edition copies which are signed and numbered by the author and contain additional holograph material.

Pre-orders are available now, ahead of the book's publication on the 3rd of June. 

£12 | £25 + p&p | 225 x 151mm. 96pp. Limited to 400 copies.
Section sewn. Printed offset black throughout.
Designed by Traven T. Croves

Click here to pre-order your copy

About SJ Fowler

SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, curator & vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, theatre, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance. He has published six previous collections of poetry and been commissioned by Tate Britain, the British Council, Tate Modern, Highlight Arts, Mercy, Penned in the Margins and the London Sinfonietta. He has been translated into 13 languages and performed at venues across the world. He is the poetry editor of3:AM Magazine and the curator of the Enemiesproject.

{Enthusiasm} Launch

To celebrate the publication of {Enthusiasm}, there will be a launch on Wednesday 3rd June from 7–9pm at X Marks the Bökship @ Matt’s Gallery, 42–44 Copperfield Road, Mile End, London E3 4RR. More details to follow soon.

a new reveiew of the Rottweiler's guide ... by Colin Lee Marshall on Intercapillary Spaces

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/sj-fowlers-rottweilers-guide-to-dog.html

 

But it is more typically through modifications to language itself that Fowler unsettles the act of easy assumption. At the end of the poem ‘Scent’  (via the rendering of a hairdresser’s comment, only partially overheard) the modifications are orthographical:

[…] “…exicans have been decapitating
peeple for thousands of years
it doesn’t mean there,
what it means here.”

The aphaeresis of “…exicans” is a sly lexical analogue to the decapitations to which the text refers—assuming, of course, that we take “…exicans” to be an aphaeretic rendering of “Mexicans”. Irrespective of whether we make this readerly decision, and supply the missing ‘M’, the sense of violence, of complicity in what things “mean”, and of ultimate detachment from what they are is insurmountable. This is further reinforced by the fact that “peeple" are being decapitated, and not ‘people’. ‘Peeple’ and ‘people’ are homophones (what looks like it should be a diphthong in the standard spelling isn’t) and as such, whoever overheard the hairdresser’s words would not have been able to infer any orthographical difference by sound alone. Contextually, the subtle de-anthropomorphic tweak makes perfect sense, given the implication that the value of human life is lower in the culture in question than it is in the “here” of the utterance; but the homophony preserves the problem of whether we are to read this as satire, or as a straight-faced semantic downgrade—a problem compounded by the ambiguity as to whether these are words cognized as heard, words cognized as (vicariously) spoken, or words that have been tinkered with at the extradiegetic level. Regardless, the text aims deliberately to upset the facile imputation of the spoken words—and perhaps, by extension, any facile imputations that we might be tempted to make upon reading it.

 

the greatest living British poet has a new book - As When: a selection by Tom Raworth from Carcanet

THE MOON UPOON THE WATERS by Tom Raworth
for Gordon Brotherston

the green of days : the chimneys
alone : the green of days and the women
the whistle : the green of days : the feel of my nails
the whistle of me entering the poem through the chimneys
plural : i flow from the (each) fireplaces
the green of days : i barely reach the sill
the women's flecked nails : the definite article
i remove i and a colon from two lines above
the green of days barely reach the sill
i remove es from ices keep another i put the c here
the green of days barely reaches the sill
the beachball : dreaming 'the' dream
the dreamball we dance on the beach

gentlemen i am not doing my best
cold fingers pass over my eye (salt)
i flow under the beachball as green waves
which if it were vaves would contain
the picture (v) and the name (aves)
of knots : the beachball : the green sea
through the fireplaces spurting through the chimneys
the waves : the whales : the beachball on a seal
still : the green of days : the exit

From As When: A Selection by Tom Raworth published this month by Carcanet and available to order here. 

 As When spans the range of Tom Raworth's poetry to date, and includes work omitted from his Collected Poems (2003) as well as poems previously only issued as fugitive cards and broadsides. This edition of Tom Raworth's poems is beautifully arranged, with an introduction to his life and work long overdue. 

Click  here to order As When by Tom Raworth with 10% discount and free UK P&P from www.carcanet.co.uk 

Tom Raworth was born in London in 1938. Since 1966 he has published more than forty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose and translations. His graphic work has been shown in Europe, the United States and South Africa, and he has given readings of his poems worldwide: most recently in China and Mexico. In 2007 in Italy he was awarded the Antonio Delfini Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He currently lives in Brighton.

Miles Champion was born in Nottingham in 1968. Carcanet Press published his first book, Compositional Bonbons Placate, in 1996. His recent books include How to Laugh (Adventures in Poetry, 2014) and an illustrated interview with the English artist Trevor Winkfield, How I Became a Painter (Pressed Wafer, 2014). He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, New York.

Click here to order As When by Tom Raworth with 10% discount and free UK P&P from www.carcanet.co.uk.

Rottweiler's guide ... reviewed in Poetry London : Spring 2015

Pleased to hear, as a surprise, that Adam Piette reviewed my 2014 collection the Rottweiler's guide to the Dog owner in the latest spring issue of Poetry London. I shan't lie, being attributed Mayakovskian bounce pleases me deeply. I've had Mayakovsky's 'A few words about myself' stuck to my wall, ripped from an anthology, for five years, next to my bed. The opening lines, 'I like to watch children dying,' Anyway, get the new Poetry London, a fine magazine indeed.

http://poetrylondon.co.uk/magazine/spring-15

I'm in 3 books in the Penned in the Margins xmas sale!


Christmas flyer
GIVE SOMEONE YOU LOVE GREAT LITERATURE THIS CHRISTMAS

Give great literature to someone you love with 25% off all our books during the festive season.

And watch out for our special Advent Calendar: half price on a different title every day till Christmas!*

Marginalia

Marginalia

Tom Chivers (editor)

This new anthology celebrates the first decade of Penned in the Margins, bringing together over seventy-five of the very best poems and texts carefully selected by editor Tom Chivers.

£9.99   £7.49






Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City

Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City

Tom Chivers & Martin Kratz (editors)

An invisible mountain is rising above the streets of the capital - and at over 1,800 metres, it is Britain’s highest peak. Mount London is a unique and visionary record of the vertical city.

£12.99   £9.74



Enemies

Enemies

SJ Fowler

This ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary collection is the result of collaborations with over thirty artists, photographers and writers

£9.99   £7.49

new Veer books website

http://www.veerbooks.com/ Delighted to see a beautiful new website for Veer books, who generously published my collection Fights in 2011 http://www.veerbooks.com/filter/veer-books/Steven-J-Fowler-fights & edited by a collective of extraordinary poets, have put together one of the most important lists in 21st century poetry, including poets from around the world. I sincerely recommend you checking them out and buying their wares.
Plus there is a sale! 

Richard Marshall reviews the Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner on 3am magazine

A very humbling, incredibly generous piece of criticism from Richard Marshall. An artwork in itself that supersedes my book in places. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-rottweilers-guide-to-the-dog-owner-2/

"There’s no point in arguing against poetry like Plato did – not just because it would be barbaric but because we might say something forgivable and convincing. A pataphysicist might suggest reverting to inconsistencies just in case the imagination might addle. Which comes to asking : what’s best? – Useless information? Anxiety? Historical solutions awaiting their problems? Nihilist somethings for cute materialists? Poetry that is about the yearning for a moment you missed and couldn’t ruin, poetry that goes to an imagined community of real people who rightly fear the known, poetry that reverses justice, becoming the carrot with the stick taken out, poetry that comes out of bars as philosophy, that never forgets nor forgives Eliot, that is taller, that from afar can be mistaken for tomorrow and from a distance yesterday and from here neither yesterday nor tomorrow nor either proven until false nor shown to be true, poetry that is always losing the connecting verb, that arrives incognito by mistake, that, given a presupposition of well-being and confidence, resists opinions and clings instead to the inward silent atmospheres of Werner Herzog and Bowie’s ‘Heathen’/’Reality’/’Outside’, leaving a distant recorded message because it’s caught in traffic wanderlust or some indeterminate clause… the binaries all left undone and untidy. Somewhere SJ Fowler is sitting quietly at his desk avoiding the bands of deconstructionists on the march. His poems are strange arguments with conclusions missing the middle, are jealous myths that wish they didn’t know where they came from, where men ‘… are forever praying death/against one another’ and only the dead know the end of war.

Stephen Yablo quotes a joke from Wilde that gives a crank to his philosophy but also to Fowler’s poetry so far as we ask: what’s the subject ie what’s it about? So Wilde asks for a subject to pun and someone says ‘The Queen’ and straight back Wilde rebukes; ‘The Queen is not a subject.’ So Yablo riffs on this to show it’s a subtle distinction between Queen and the concept of ‘the Queen’ that’s in play, and the pun plays with just that and in doing so shows that what something is about doesn’t bring with it everything it contains. To talk about the Queen is not to talk about the concept QUEEN, even though it seems that you’ve got to have the concept to talk about that, ie that one, her, the doxie there! So what Yablo has recently argued is that we take too lightly the subject matter of what is being said. Theories of meaning have tended to ignore this matter and yet it’s what we need if we’re to make any sort of sense of sense. Sometimes often it’s only what its about that makes a sentence make sense as a kind of remainder subtracted from logical space. Rules of combination – fusing semantics and syntax, cry out for more and ‘aboutness’ is the missing factor.
Put another way, George Szirtes writes of Fowler’s poems as dealing with: ‘ … disjunctions and interjections. They present us with a world that moves fast and often violently , where the lyrical impulse flowers, breaks and flowers again, too briefly to assert its full syntactic argument. We have to trust our ears, both the music and the rush of fragments. Individual poems and sequences deal with personal feelings, with politics, and, are often engaged with other writers, other places. Fowler’s poetics are an open space packed with brilliant intensities. The reader has to live among them not to get blown away.’

Fowler’s aboutness is a fragmenting that gives us secret aboutness, a partial truth in every shard of language – partial in Yablo’s sense that part of it is true, cocooned in falsehood or secreted in irrelevance. So instead of building up into a big picture via the fragments – as earlier modernism did – Fowler’s fragments need to be reduced, constantly subtract parts of themselves – ‘eg so much/noise/at home’ is reduced to ‘(love; too brief)’. How the hell to know what the algorithm is for the reduction? But the line’s meaning shoots out in the opposite direction to how we might read Pound who over 50 years built and built up. Instead, Fowler’s cutting a content down to size, takinge back a subject matter out of the heap of cholera and cholera fly. The poems are the result of a studied logical subtraction with variations on the theme going to a silent intensity.
So Fowler’s allusive content comes out of sentences that overstate, shoots over and then pulls back from its noise, or winds out of a great dark pool lines like gleaming fish that dazzle briefly before falling back into a massy dark. We end up with fragments that are the end result of these processes rather than the foundations for something yet to come. This poetry is happening and gone. Whilst knowing that every thought is someone else’s and our passions are quotations Fowler is hanging on to what he’s about, deftly reinventing what Eliot noted of Milton, that ability to make each sentence ‘… an active complication, a complication deliberately introduced into what was a previously simplified and abstract thought.’ Sometimes something in the line is a part of that and other times it’s a mere consequence. New subject matter can change what you know and presuppose and so forth. Fowler’s aesthetic works with this, shaping his images into situations of deliberate functional obscurity.

‘There are more than twenty poems here’ implies there are numbers. Assertive content become’s whatever is left after identifying the subject matter. An anti-Platonist doesn’t think numbers exist. But she can say ‘there are more than twenty poems’ by focusing on the subject matter, the poems and dividing through to them, subtracting any commitment to there being numbers. Something is bridging the gap between literal content and what is being said. That’s what Fowler is doing. Who knows what’s making the trick work as poetry, but it does. There’s nothing stranger than what we say is what he says in his poems. It’s not clear any appeal to context is going to resolve what is happening. It’s not forced by the semantics of the words but it’s an elective process that readers engage with to work out what’s the matter. We have to enrich the content along the way that it’s already going and that’s always going to be a matter of tuning in and picking up on the atmosphere.

We hear things that conventional meaning disallows. We hear them in the night, on the streets, on tired trains and fucked dawns, and over that last, too long dream or drink. We hear the sentences and we hear extra things but the sentences don’t have in them the possible meaning we find are there. Eg ‘the dancing bear/teaches hibernation/how useful/on such a long journey’ – how do we know this is saying something the words disallow, or which is the truth surrounded by falsehood? Is there an incremental content – some adding to what was already understood – but there’s a sense in which incremental content only works with implications. But the assertive content is not part of the implied content or the presupposed content. The meaning is the result of that twisty dance from convention to elsewhere. Sometimes he’s pivoting off a presupposition and we have to follow. You pivot too far then there’s no way of grasping what is happening. But that can be ok when the primary thing isn’t to say but maybe to guide an atmosphere. Perhaps its best when metaphoric content needs explaining. This is poetry from a last chance saloon where it’s before the dawn and the drink and despair is thick on your soul.

Fowler’s in a world of dark play and his make-believe things specify what is to guide the imagination. The poems have a content dictated by props and rules based on properties of the props – the list is protean e.g. ‘ road, travel, perfumier, doctor, cat cancer, afterbirth, ambergris, lid, eye, hartpoon, whale, tourists, horse skin, cooking meat, animal shit, coffin pine, pommel horse, cruel portion, skips, blue overalls, young girls, red scarves, plaster casts of Venus, fruit stall, charred apples, orange steam, old woman, army coat …’ it is vast. Other writers emerge out of the dim lights and are allowed to float as gentle reminders that we’re playing with the world as it shudders. And the more we understand the world the harder everything else becomes. You could just enjoy meditating what could be the case and comparing it with the actual and how things would be different if there were fewer or longer adjectives. Or it might help to shed light on the properties of the props. You look to what is to be imagined to look to the real life. Where would I have to be to license that ceilings are horror, or answer the direct question, ‘how do you cope with your past?’ It’s what you have to plug into and what it gives you, to get what comes out of your mouth and the truth of it as something that’s more than just ordinary consternation. Sometimes the shortest lines are too long because so loaded with terror or pain of regret.

Fowler: ‘tomorrow it will be herbs/on the moon’. This alerts us to Wittgenstein; ‘it’s five o’clock on the moon’ which we should understand, everything in it makes sense, but the combination is senseless, so we don’t. Yablo quotes an Einstein story to illustrate – I loosely recall it:

‘Man: I don’t understand how telephones work.
Einstein: Think of a giant dog with its head in Hamburg and its tail in Munich (or wherever). The message goes from the head to the tail.
Man: But it’s the wireless phone I don’t get.
Einstein: The same only without the dog.’

Wittgenstein’s explains the intention to lift your arm as lifting your arm but without the arm going up. There’s some kind of pretence going on. And we don’t know what to make of these but the strangeness is that we seem to know what literal content would require and what it would be to know what is being said. ‘Five o’clock on the moon’ is that sort of illusion. In our everyday world it’s strange but totally normal. In Fowler he finds it out as a tricky process, as in: ‘ I bring you seaweed/emotional/ and yet, you just want tea…/ this will not work out’ and what we always have to do is see that something is being pivoted from literal understanding and it gets us somewhere else, includes a whole lot of things with a single sentence, like a whole lot of metaphorical meanings from a single sentence, where the person giving seaweed is like giving tea but without actually giving tea. And there’s the distress of our modern world where what we want is to be at peace without, you know, stopping war. Like wanting war to be lost in the post. Fowler: ‘today there are hands I love/ yesterday it was an ape’ Piggybacking on a pretence (hands I love – His? Hers?) and pivot on a presupposition (All men are apes, all lovers, all are barbarians outside love). There are missing links that are crying out, but from outer space – these are, after all, poems and there’s nothing required here except some occasion being created to allow us to plug in props so the game can begin. And you can’t pretend if all you’re doing is describing what the game would be, saying ‘this is a hold up’ without pointing your finger like it’s a gun and without expecting the others to stick their hands up – or start firing back. Poetry is where living works even if the end of the world is in the next minute. This is what the last scene of Lars von Trier’s ‘Melancholy‘ shows.

Fowler’s poetry is sometimes just brinkmanship with prose, as life is with suicide, walking with falling over. Sometimes his poetry is prose. The sections of prose are form without form, which is to say they have form in the same way that prison cells have ‘breathtaking views’. The worlds we extrapolate from Fowler’s world is what we might have already taken advantage of. There are certain ways that carry falsehoods which are compatible with them being true. We are being pushed beyond boundaries. One eyed poets dish it out but can’t see it back home, whereas Fowler is at home with the remainder, the stuff that is left when we just obtain what is right. He has ten eyes, like certain spiders. As in his question: ‘were it not for the spines/ would it rather not be a fish backwards?’

Each poetic fragment is a life gesture: a life gesture is unambiguous, perfect in itself, and yet is hollowed out by what Lukacs, writing about Kierkegaard, says: ‘The gesture alone expresses life: but is it possible to express life? Is this not the tragedy of any living art, that it seeks to build a crystal palace out of air, to forge realities from the insubstantial possibilities of souls, a bridge of forms between men? Can the gesture exist at all, and has the concept of form any meaning seen from this perspective of life?’ – so many times there are moments when Fowler in a flash of energy catches the shape of a disappeared gesture: ‘ an easy way to loose a leaf/to drag bird shaped rocks from coal, as a cloud/& assuming , nothing will now abstain from grief/& mischief filth/a lost dog still must ‘strain its greens’/as fingers that remain attached/were not meant to remain/clean/moving in, as a profession marching/& now not to bring sheets/but plenty for the stuffing/the greened/unbroken//& brown flitter, the dropped/Water/a mattress made of what is dead’… here in this brief extract there is in some ways the backdrop, the gesture, the dire multiplicity of a concrete life presented as a place where monumentality has ended in psychology and materialism, a fist of shitty stuff and an allure that is mortally wounded, maybe dead, certainly unseeable. In Fowler we go to the gym ‘to learn how to fall…’
Class is what you need to beat people who look like you at the moment they’re making you disappear. There are poems where we have the characters, plots, asides but no one’s fat enough to be playing the part of Jerusalem. This is where he’s playing, in a fictional place , ‘… at the start/ of Alien on the eve of Prometheus… ‘ where great beauty is being timed by incoming horror. You don’t need to be a cannibal to know clowns taste funny. We read; ‘is it remarkable how much pain the bodies can endure?/the spiny po/cket puffer granade/the oligarch, raping the maid…’ You know these lines are squaring up to the crapola of our dissolving world and then going out, further than the premise, and we know it’s about that maid and that oligarch and then all of them.

What’s Fowler about? Burial at sea will fuck over anyone wanting to dance on your grave. There are two styles: the one we read and the one we can’t. Who knows whether the invisible ink ran out? Die quietly sleeping, not screaming like your passengers. Fowler knows the quickest way to the heart is with something sharp enough. What kind of an achievement is it to have a disease named after you? These poems don’t always care what they’re about but sometimes they’re about what else they could have been about, like the way men aren’t interested in the programme they’re watching but the programmes they’re missing. We’re all approaching a certain age but god knows from which direction; our time is nothing if not ambiguous. Well, we know that writing’s a mug’s game because you’re never as good as what can’t be written. Some poets don’t get writer’s block and can write anytime – best choose early 20th century –or Elizabethan/Jacobean.
I deliver my criticism in earnest – they’d prefer it in prose. Whoever discovered milk from cows raises the creepy question of motivation. Fowler is deadpan: ‘sarcastic Chinese/asking/why…milk?/ because of breats/& because udders just hang there’. Fighting fire with fire ain’t what the fire brigade are looking for. Fowler isn’t looking to put out any fire. If the world is bleeding he knows it’s because that’s what it’s for. That doesn’t mean he likes it. Some things you need a reason; other things a place. When it gets too cold flashers just draw a picture and hope the thrill carries in the line. Morality, recall, is like art in that it means drawing a line somewhere. It’s a cold time in the world and it’s all about money, disease and violence. No beauty therapy took place in a museum nor library. Beauty’s not truth. So Fowler, amidst chaos, works a fresh modernism with a gimlet eye, hard and flash, and the intention of high serious calling, the poet who knows ‘this is this’, our idiot mortal dangerman. His ‘aboutness’ is the curse of prayers being answered.

Fowler shuffles his business cards to cause discomfort. If they don’t want poetry to do more than entertain then what are they saying?- the rape, sodomy and drug addiction they can get at home? The peril of the modern time is a clear conscience. It catastrophically indicates memory loss. Ever asked how many poets stop writing one day because they don’t know how to conclude? Not enough. Fowler resists the call of the age to be temporary and new. He has discovered – or is in the process of doing so – a way of not being new, of not being a beginning. To be satisfied with just being the start of something, to not draw a conclusion, that is the pitch of what Kierkegaardian derision labeled the ‘premiss-author.’ Fowler is an anti-premiss author.

When Eliot said ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ he made sure that what was being subtracted remained as its hinterland: ‘But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’ It’s like snoring: if you’re going to, do it whilst not asleep. Or else like what Van Gough took from Dickens, which was that an artist should use the model but not make it the purpose. Fowler has an enormous capacity to resist spectatorship, to take instruction from the modernist moment. One element is done as Rimbaud: ‘one must be absolutely modern’ and ‘inventions from the unknown demand new forms’; and Marinetti : ‘Why should we look back?’ ‘destroy syntax’ and ‘parole in liberta’; and Hugo Ball ‘Poems without words’: whilst another element is done as Eliot, Pound, Rilke, Montale, as Saba arguing for an ‘… historical sense … not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;’ ‘the poem that is absolutely original is absolutely bad; it is, in the bad sense, ‘subjective’ with no relation to the world to which it appeals;’ and Graves : ‘ …the divorce of advanced contemporary poetry from the common-sense standards of ordinary intelligence;’ and Yeats: ‘…this love of allusion;’ and Valery’s ‘I banish myself’ . Well, this is a wide learning curve, like he’s got a sequence of Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ doing a thing thing of Rilke with a bunch of Acmeist stuff too ie Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Gumilev et al captured all at once and refusing to talk. Reading, you keep waking up each line, each word, with a jolt, so that the modernist poetics of a century is always there, in the margin that surrounds them, the special atmosphere he’s always asking to prove itself.

He also reverses modernism’s predilection for pride, elitism and self-indulgence (in this he’s the desert poet Dante with Virgil outside the city of Dis , the only place Virgil can’t enter unimpeded in the ‘Comedia’ imagine, the city of the Epicureans whose great sin is a damning intellectual pride) via the technique (cold word that, but you get the idea as in e.g. ‘disappearance of the poet as speaker’ in order, to quote Mallarmé, ‘… to unravel the word into qualities belonging to inner realms.’ For Pound technique is ‘ a test of a man’s sincerity’; for Stevens it extends to ‘ the poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice’) of a partial intensity of feeling wrapped in one and a half truths. The universal intensity of the poetic machines Fowler runs is felt through what may well be superfluous, crazy, particular, peculiar and personal wiring. Fowler has adopted the paratactic method of Pound’s ‘Cantos’ – a process-orientated form of writing that stretches over great time that’s not ultimately about history but is rather a juxtaposition of various legacies – public and private, concerned and bottled, reminding me of the Scottish modernist MacDiarmid who wrote poetry as ‘.. a stand made against intellectual apathy/It’s material founded, like Gray’s, on difficult knowledge.’

As a rule I never get involved with possessed people but to be fair it’s more of a guideline than a rule. Like the rest of us, sometimes I worry about beige fanatics. ‘I told the truth once and they didn’t believe me so what the hell, I’m not telling anyone anything anymore.’ That’s actually the last line from ‘Lost in Translation’ that the actor Bill Murray says to the actress Scarlett Johansson. What we see is him whispering but we never hear the line. It is a secret that Murray revealed later in an interview. It is a heroic line, a fragment of reality that is possessed neither by the film nor its characters and yet finds a way, a realm that weaves a different history, time, existence, eloquence and reality into an elegant modernist spirit. Similarly ‘Fire Walk With Me’ was the name of the David Lynch sequel to the ‘Twin Peaks’ tv series. Lynch revealed that it was what Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, had tattooed somewhere on his body in the film ‘Blue Velvet’. Hopper didn’t know this. It’s never shown in the film. Hopper, needless to say, had no such tattoo. It was Lynch’s secret. Both the secret Murray line and the secret tattoo add meaning to the world in a mysterious addition of aboutness. They are metaphors for the inward silence of poems, their atmosphere and sensibility. They are versions of hidden allusiveness. Allusion is a form of inheritance, as Christopher Ricks reminds us, that alleviates the poet’s loneliness.

What’s Fowler about? It’s impossible to generalise. You’re unique like everyone else. Language undermines itself, self reference conjures some a kind of spandrel. Will fake poetry fail if no one pretends to like it? Wanna look glamorous? Be symmetrical. We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know. I like long walks taken by other people. The mediocre are always at their best. You try and fall into the arms of poetry without falling into its hands. Best advice: be obscure clearly. No one is a vegetarian once they start leaning towards the light. I was his imaginary best friend, next door to Pete’s only twin. Live to 150 and you’re made – no one has ever died after that. Some things you wear just to know when you’re upside down. Some things you read to realize you were dying all along. I’m as loyal as my options. Most poetry is based on a dare. Don’t address the necessity of the superfluous.

If this is the poetry of film rather than music then it includes videogames. Topically we might mention Okinawa and Chris Marker’s film ‘ Level Five’ because the horror of that is just the kind of knowledge presupposed by Fowler throughout, as in e.g. ‘when a hole in them/like a tree syrup did leak out & they died’ . What the poems do is gather us the instruments – earlier I called them props – same thing – to investigate properties of our world. We know about modern war via its videogames: Marker’s film begins the necessary process of thinking hard about this. We know about oligarchs, people trafficking, modern slavery, darkpornographic history and empires through video games, action films and snuff documentaries. Fowler’s poems make us think hard about this condition. The video game and the film give us abstract mannerisms. They allow us to do something passively. Fowler wants a definite thought out there, against the inflexible empirical facts that we know and absorb and skip away from, wants the ‘faded mythology’ of Schelling that emerges in the fact, as Andrew Bowie puts it, that ‘…neither language nor mythology is consciously invented, but both are crucial to how sense is made of things. Metaphors give us one way of seeing what he means: some metaphors will be cashed in and become literal, but others live from the way they, as Davidson puts it, make us notice new things, even though we couldn’t say what they literally mean.’

Subject matter in Fowler comes within the blurred visions of logical space as if we are seeing this space from a distance. This cashes out the idea – we find it in Schelling, in Heidegger and that lot – of ‘ground’ and ‘light’. For Schelling language is grounded in a fixed number of signs but expands beyond the pure syntax rules of combination to be able to speak into the world where we actually are now. Heidegger’s dasein is a kind of ‘hello’, I’m here.’ The actual world is in some blurry cell near the world where the sentence is really really true. The actual condition of the subject matter is totally cool with it being totally true. Fowler is working in these distant logical spaces.

Puritanical attitudes towards truth miss what poets are doing in extremis and what the rest of us do all the time whenever we even just speak according to Stephen Yablo. Truth isn’t just a style, and there’s no need to be skeptical, but when truth puritans think only total truth is truth Yablo’s unhappy and compares them with kids who haven’t yet learned what Klein the child psychologist says they actually learned at about 4 months, that what pleases them and what doesn’t can be the same thing. This ends black and white thinking, which must be a kind of relearned fault education puts back on the table, the kind of thing we get in the kid who wants to know whether the Shrek donkey is good or bad, or the adults who want to know the same about Putin or whatever. We’re uncomfortable with this in the moral sphere, preferring nuance, but when it comes to truth there’s a black and white thing going on that seems regressive. Saying everything’s either true or not is, from this perspective, like being brilliant with people with hangovers over toast.

A poetry of partial truth isn’t used to downgrade truth. But what we have here is the William James thought that we need to let false beliefs in so we can get to true beliefs unobtainable without the falsehood. James wasn’t thinking that some truths come wrapped in falsehoods in the same sentence. But Yablo’s thought – that some propositions can’t be assrted if there is no sentence to express it – is that thought – like using numbers in a sentence without believing numbers exist, for example which is where we are overshooting the bar, saying something false in order to say it. The linguistic flux in Fowler isn’t that he’s forgotten the English language, as Leavis famously said of Milton, whose ‘… departure from the English order, structure and accentuation … produces passages that have to be read through several times before one can see how they go through…’. Fowler is continually pivoting and piggy-backing – whichever is required, relying on whatever will cue you in to the truth of the thing. The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner is funny because of what we know we are expected to know about Rottweilers ( huge sinister kill dogs), guides (sensible, over-focused doggy geek manuals) and owner’s of Rottweiler’s (huge sinister kill folk wannabees) but also we cue the fact that it’s poetry, where we can get, for quick starters, rot for a while and Kurt Weil which we can swiftly morph into a world where rotten time, Denmark, Hamlet, death,Threepenny Opera, Bowie singing ‘Port of Amsterdam’, all sorts of miracles, become the truths of the collection as a whole from the off. Is France hexagonal? Partly; it’s about an approximate shape minimizing non –overlap with minimal number of shapes to choose from. Same with the title.

Boundaries get shifted – ‘there’s nothing in the fridge’ stays true only so long as people don’t start shifting the line and counting the smear of butter, for example – boundaries shift readily out but not inwards. In Fowler there is the constant allusion to some things without them being the subject matter – ‘it is better to be a thing of wool/and rag/that provokes freedom from fear/than a golden couch that brings trouble and woe.’ The allusion is to the golden fleece of course but that fleece didn’t exist any more than Pegasus did. So its an impossible reference. Perhaps impossibility doesn’t entail impossible to certain constraints. Things are impossible in virtue of certain items. Bachelor is unmarried but being a male who’s unmarried doesn’t mean I have to to make it being about a bachelor. How can Fowler refer to the Golden Fleece if there isn’t one? Perhaps we’re talking about the poetic mental state so the part of reality we’re talking about is true. Or the golden fleece is a fleece in the same way as a wooden duck is a duck.

Yablo says translation schemes tell you in what world would make the model true and how it then maps onto the real. But the apple falls once; it doesn’t harbour the faster fall implied by the law of nature. There’s just one fall. Where gravity calls the shots Gallileo is right. But it never did here. Ever. Everything that exists plays a role and can be a disqualifying property. Pure maths is false but we want keep on saying things with numbers. But what’s the true part of pure math? Does a hand prove there is an external world? I lock the door so evidence that I didn’t is misleading. It’s five after five so I conclude the watch is accurate if it says it’s five after five. I’ll be reading Fowler next year so I won’t die before next year. The closure principle is that knowing a thing puts you in a position of knowing the entailments. Deduction extends knowledge. This where the fun starts trying to grasp the difficult knowledge in the poems, and how he stays fluid without the fatuity of smooth.

So Fowler: ‘the clumsy odd/a family friend for fourteen years/now plant stalks your daughter’ – so do you lose your nerve, pay respect to confident deduction, adding conjuncts – you know the implication before the implier? It’s already there, or what? Or is it outside? That is, are there things we should be presupposing that then we’ll pivot off, like a dancer, or piggy back onto, like Billy Childish playing dinasaurs with his boy? If you know a thing you know its parts. Unless someone throws in a new subject matter. Then new subject matter makes new vulnerable flanks of its meaning, so we have to be careful. Don’t add anything that would make it false; make sure what is added is added to make it true. Presuppostions in hearing this make it a very dark saying for there are now new ways for it being false. As Fowler comments, ‘this is not anxious to please the mob,/for what pleases them, it does not know,/and what it does not know is far removed from their comprehension.’ Fowler understands that in his poetic act there are dangerous counterpossibilities. We can be a witness to the odd etc but not more stuff ie the biographical detail implied entailed or just contingently the fact of the matter. What confirms the belief about ‘the clumsy odd’ isn’t all counterfactuals, because there are new possibilities they might give which we’re not talking about here. Fronting and backgrounding makes a difference to implication. ‘it knows that when flesh cries aloud,/not possessing flesh/it is unnatural that the mind should cry aloud too./ a silent stomach communicates in sweeping thoughts.’ What will calm each reading down is grasping what it’s about when read from another, truer space than this one.

For the line: ‘on the banks of the yellow & black/don’t live in leeds/beat quarter’ would Manchester be a counter-possibility? What if there is no beat-quarter in Leeds? Nevertheless the matter isn’t that but living. We can divide back and avoid the falsehood. The partial truth is the bit we care about. Let’s fudge what is being noticed here, what beliefs, a part is not assured if it requires greater sensitivity to new subject matter. I can have Leeds beat quarter without a beat quarter, or know it’s Leeds and it’s this way, it’s like this … without knowing whether there’s a beat quarter, whether this is it, whether it’s one of those ie a beat quarter.

All my dreams are not this lifelike. Allusion accommodates two way traffic when we draw on myths, as in, say, Pounds ‘Cantos‘ 39 and 47.

These restless poems are wondrous strange and mysterious. Fowler’s astonishing ‘Maintenant’ series of interviews with poets here at 3:AM gives his work a contemporary international and cosmopolitan flavour that adds to the excitement of the atmospherics in his works. As we’re told by the publisher’s: ‘The collection is made up of 13 different sequences or commissions, including works written for VerySmallKitchenZimzallaThe Enemigos projectLush and the Wortwedding gallery. The book also features works that call on, or celebrate, the poetry of Anselm HolloTom Raworth & Jack Spicer.’ This is a significant addition to his already impressive and growing oeuvre. There is much more going on in the poems than I’ve managed to chew on. There are going to be new things discovered on each reading . It’s about noticing closure features that weren’t counted first time round, like inverting cartoon image Nietzsche to eyebrows rather than moustache, for example. What I think I like best is the way Fowler manoeuvres the language to create patterns of impact rather than straightforward logical or grammatical sequence, and there’s a constant downward movement that seems brilliantly attuned to the inward silence his poetry is about.

The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner launched

I was trepidatious about the launch of my new collection, the wine-ing of the event not being my normal outmode, but in the end it was a lovely evening, and I owe a debt of thanks to everyone who was kind enough to attend and buy a book and to those who brought it into physical form. It has been extraordinarily well produced and designed, don't think it could be better really, and the people at the London Review of Books were amazing too, John Clegg making me feel as at home as was also possible.http://www.eyewearpublishing.com/products-page/books/s-j-fowler/ Here's the vid

my new collection launched at the LRB

I'm happy to say my new poetry collection is launched on May 21st, 7pm, at the LRB bookshop in Bloomsbury. http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/ If you're free and are kind enough to attend, you can book a spot using the eventbrite link below. It's free.


The Rottweilers guide to the Dog Owner is made up of 13 different sequences or commissions, including works written for VerySmallKitchen, Zimzalla, The Enemigos project, Lush & the Wortwedding gallery, & features works that call on, or celebrate, the poetry of Anselm Hollo, Tom Raworth & Jack Spicer.

A sample work here: http://www.dusie.org/atacama_by_SJ_Fowler.pdf Thanks, Steven.




Wednesday, 21 May 2014 from 19:00 to 22:00 (BST)
London Review Bookshop
14 Bury Pl
WC1A 2JL London
United Kingdom