Patrick Coyle & SJ Fowler at You Call Him Doctor Jones!

This was really fun.



Patrick Coyle and SJ Fowler read their collaboration "RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK' Screenplay. REVISED REVISED THIRD DRAFT, AUGUST 1979" for the Penned in the Margins curated homage to the Indiana Jones franchise 'You Call Him Doctor Jones!', featuring music, performance, comedy and poetry. Which is kind of what this is.

Blue Touch Paper scheme with the London Sinfonietta

Following an open, national call the London Sinfonietta has selected a group of composers and multidisciplinary artists to participate in the Blue Touch Paper programme. The three composer-collaborator partnerships, who have all been awarded a Jerwood Blue Touch Paper bursary, are:

- Steve Potter (composer) & Kélina Gotman (Writer/Dramaturg)

- Elspeth Brooke (composer), Seonaid Goody (Puppeteer) & Anna G Jones (Director)

- Philip Venables (composer) & Steven J Fowler (Poet)

The three exciting ideas for new multidisciplinary pieces from these partnerships will be presented at a work-in-progress preview event in May 2012. The projects are:

- a music-theatre piece which explores the reality of dreams through staging political, utopian and everyday examples such as Martin Luther King’s rally against the Vietnam War.

- a re-imagining of the Greek myth of Persephone, experimenting how effects from early animated film could transfer to the art of puppetry, integrated with live musical performance

- a piece exploring the violence, sanctioned by society, that is boxing, through music and poetry

Maintenant Camarade - the collaborations




"On October 15th 2011, 3:AM Magazine’s Maintenant series hosted it’s largest event so far at the Rich Mix centre near Brick Lane in London. Poets from Russia, Macedonia and Latvia joined nine pairs of British poets in a memorable evening of performance and poetry. The British poets were paired as part of the first Maintenant Camarade project, with their efforts published in a chapbook by the Red Ceilings press. The videos below are shown in the order of the readings given on the evening, an event which showed the depth of talent, inventiveness and wit in contemporary European poetry."


Thanks to everyone who came, it was by far our best event, both in attendance and quality. Thanks to Literature across frontiers and Arc publications, and of course to all of the 23 readers, who read remarkably. It was a special evening and I'm happy to say the next Camarade project has commenced, and the reading will take place next February at the Rich mix centre.

Other room preview

SJ Fowler – a preview

14/10/2011 at 8:00 am · Filed under Events and tagged: ,

SJ Fowler will be reading at the next Other Room on Wednesday 26th October at The Old Abbey Inn on Manchester Science Park. You can read some of his work a the Voiceworks site and much more at hisown site. Or watch a film of him reading at the launch of his collection Fights on Veer Publications.

Preview of Colin Herd to follow soon. Click here to read a preview of Jennifer Cooke.

Camarade publication available to buy


Now available to buy at www.theredceilingspress.co.uk, I edited the booklet and it features an introduction before the incredible poetry of Tom Jenks & Chris McCabe, Holly Pester & Patrick Coyle, James Wilkes & Ghazal Mosadeq, Tom Chivers & Simon Barraclough, James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar, Sam Riviere & Jack Underwood, Emily Critchley & Tamarin Norwood, Marcus Slease & Tim Atkins, Sean Bonney & Jeff Hilson. It's only 5 pounds and its without doubt the best work I've ever edited, the poets have really excelled in showing the potentiality of collaboration and the quality of work being produced in contemporary circles.

Maintenant poetry at "Linguistically innovative €#*@$?!"

"Notes on old new little presses part seven
& parts one, two,three, four, five,six

For a 21st century expanding European generation of poets new international networks are emerging fast. Through, for example, 3:AM Magazine Maintenant and Poetry Kit hub - the internet provides updates on local, regional, and international scenes. Universities have their own creative writing bubbles and old London town has plural exhibition/music/poetry spaces.

Both Norwegian poet Paal Bjelke Andersen and Swedish poet Aase Berg, in recent Maintenant interviews with younger generation British poet Steven Johannes Fowler; seem to suggest, in their individual and distinctive ways that 'innovative', 'experimental' may now be the dominant published poetry in Scandinavia, with small press its mainstream vehicle.

Maintenant: the Camarade project has brought into the picture new collaborative possibilities between English-speaking and foreign language-speaking poets.

New small publishers like The Red Ceilings Press, who've published the Maintenant Camarade mini-anthology as perfect-trim A6 artzine, produce inexpensive limited edition print plus open access screen readings. Working from regional locality it is difficult to envisage this little press and others as new mainstream-in-the-making.

These rough 'Notes on the old new little press' will conclude next post before addition to planned Songs Our Teachers Learn Us, or, Lessons To Be Learnedpublication."

Thanks to MJ Weller at http://egnep.blogspot.com/

Maintenant #75 - Anna Auziņa

One of the stars of the contemporary Latvian poetry scene, Anna Auziņa, already established as a classically trained artist, has emerged as a constant and resonant force in Baltic poetry over the last decade. Her work maintains a resolute affinity with the organic and perhaps overtly poetic language of her own personal journey as an artist. Gifted in both fields, her work reveals this creative agility in its imagery and tone. One of the five non-British poets visiting for the Maintenant Camarade event in the East end of London this October 2011, we are pleased to welcome our 75th interviewee in the Maintenant series.


Accompanying the interview are four of Anna's poems.

Maintenant #76 - Kārlis Vērdiņš


One of the most versatile young poets writing in the Baltic, Latvian Kārlis Vērdiņš is a renowned critic and a prize winning poet. Already included in two of the most important anthologies of young poets from Central and Eastern Europe in the English language ‘A Fine Line’ (Arc Publications, 2004) and ‘Six Latvian Poets’ (Arc Publications, 2011), Kārlis Vērdiņš has already begun to establish his legacy outside of Latvia. We are especially pleased that he is one of the five visiting poets to read at our largest event in London yet, Maintenant XI: Camarade. October 15th will see him read along side some of the finest poets in Europe, undoubtedly where he belongs.


Accompanying the interview are two poems by Kārlis, translated by Ieva Lešinska

Poetry Book Society article

http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/poetry_portal/knives_fists_and_spoons
Huge thanks to Peter Hughes

Article ImageI hope Alec Newman and Steven Fowler are having a relaxing break this summer. They have been busy.

Earlier this year, Alec Newman's Knives, Forks and Spoons Press was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form. It is easy to understand why. KF&S has been putting out an amazing range of innovative poetry at an extraordinary rate. There is a buzz and an urgency about the whole project which has made it a particularly welcome addition to the British poetry scene. The website is riddled with unpredictability - as well as some enticing offers, such as three books for £10.

The first KF&S pamphlet I can remember reading was by S J Fowler and was the first in his fightsseries. There are now at least twenty of these, each one inspired by a different boxer. The first fifteen have been assembled and published in a single volume by Veer books, in July 2011, under the title fights cycles I-XV.

Maggie O'Sullivan describes this as a dazzling, visceral, proficient, kinetic work. Tim Atkins agrees, saying there are not many books of poetry where you turn the page not knowing what is coming next, but this is one of them.

Steven Fowler was born in Cornwall in 1983. He studied philosophy at Durham, then at the University of London. Somehow he finds time to edit the Maintenant interview series for 3 am magazine, write extensively, study for a PhD in contemporary poetics at Birkbeck, and hold down a job at the British Museum. He has been an employee of the museum since 2007 and its vast holdings inform his recent volume Red Museum, (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2011).

It is difficult to convey the breadth of reference in this book. Perhaps listing a few of the titles will give some idea: a cubic mile is sufficient to contain one hundred billion souls, provided they are packed tightly, 'like anchovies'; the Crusaders treacherously Crucify those taken at Odessa; William of Orange; how to shorten the yard; Tamerlane harvests horses; how to enlarge the Pudenda; Porphyria; The Hospitalier grand master Guillaume de Villiers or Guillaume de Clermont defends the walls of Acre without enthusiasm; Blue cocoon; Pagan depression; the sixth fiddle; Oswald Spengler has a go; Jesus wept; I leave my meals to Neseus.

I feel that this should whet your appetite. Iain Sinclair is impressed too:
A tremendous and persuasive surge of the red and the black: conflicted doctrines, scorched paper. Gothic scripts and plague-year screenplays for an apocalyptic cinema. Death chess. Heretical crusades. Hurt flesh. Fire angels. Madness. A grimoire for a haunted river-city. The poetry lies in the interpretation of malfated woodcuts. It is sinewy, knotted, persistent. And true.

So it has been a year of formidable achievements by Alec Newman and Steven Fowler. Red Museum is just one of their accomplishments, but it is the most startling book of poetry in English to appear this year. I hope they are sitting somewhere sunny, nursing chilled drinks, enjoying well-deserved breaks. But something tells me that they're not.

Peter Hughes' poetry publications include Paul Klee's Diary, Blueroads, Nistanimera, The Summer of Agios Dimitrios and The Pistol Tree Poems. Nathan Thompson writes of it as ‘flickering, intense, innovative and utterly mesmerising'. Peter also runs Oystercatcher Press, based on the Norfolk coast, which has published more than 40 poetry pamphlets over the last three years.

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Maintenant #74 - Ailbhe Darcy


Already considered one of the finest poets of Ireland’s new generation, Ailbhe Darcy has gained international recognition for her vibrant poetry and rapidly growing body of work. Being at the forefront of a tradition as considerable as Ireland’s has required her to maintain the idiosyncracy of her own taste and voice, and though undoubtedly, the lilt of her work, it’s care for being read and for being rhymtical, resounds with the narrative tradition of Irish poetry, it is also true her idiom can be disjunctive, unpretentious and colloquial. More vitally she creates poems that are conceptually often unresolved, an act of humility that sits apart from neat lyricism. Yet it is too far to say she has made a break from the tradition of her nation, and many would say this is the bigger achievement. For the 74th edition of Maintenant, our first Irish poet, Ailbhe Darcy. thanks to Michael Schmidt
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-74-ailbhe-darcy/Accompanying the interview are three of Ailbhe's poems. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/3-poems/