Minimum Security Prison Poetry - the readings online

A huge thanks to everyone who read and attended and supported on Wednesday night. It was another unique and memorable reading, the 17 voices of the poets spilling together like the contents of a magic intestine. It was a lovely evening to launch my new book and the venue, the Horse Hospital, was really exceptional. Special thanks to Catherine Carncross, Livia Dragomir, David Kelly and Andy Spragg for helping out. And to Colin Herd for the book.






Maintenant #79 - Emanuella Amichai


Perhaps Emanuella Amichai represents the ethos of the Maintenant series more succinctly than any of the other 78 poets that have gone before her. The question of what is poetic is akin to the question of what is European. Both are fluid, unanswerable, and all the more essential for that unresolvability. Working in the medium of moving image, of dance, theatre and film, she has taken groundbreaking strides towards what can only be called a video poetry, a form of visual poetry. Working in tandem with some of Europe’s finest writers, including Jan Wagner, she has shown her absolute control of both mediums, both poetry and film, utilising the grammar of motion to remarkable poetic effect. If this places her outside the poetic mainstream, what might be deemed The definition of a poet, then the fact she is the daughter of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets firmly roots her back into the tradition of European letters. For the 79th edition of Maintenant, Israel’s Emanuella Amichai.


A video poem of Emanuella's will soon follow on the 3am website, but for now can be viewed here, on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0e1GAqvk24


Holly Pester, one of the most exciting poets working in the UK right now, and Maintenant interviewee, has published her first collection with the remarkable If P then Q press, edited by James Davies. The book, called Hoofs, is a radical and original collection, really worth buying. It can be purchased here for 8 quid. - http://ifpthenq.co.uk/books/pester-holly-hoofs/

Also Maintenant interviewee Marcus Slease has just published a chapbook called Smashing Time, as part of the MIPOesias Chapbook Series. It is available for free digital download or print purchase of 9 quid. http://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/299099 The artwork is by the Polish punk poet artist Grzegorz Wroblewski.

I am happy to say the Maintenant Camarade 2 event is now fixed for February Saturday 11th 2012 at the Rich mix centre, near Brick Lane, in London. This will be the first event of ours not themed with international poets but focusing primarily on the paired collaborations that were such a success at the last event. Pairs confirmed so far include:
Sean Bonney & Keston Sutherland
Maria Fusco & Andrea Brady
Jeff Hilson & Philip Terry
Colin Herd & Patrick Coyle
James Davies & Stephen Emmerson
Todd Swift & Matthew Gregory
Sam Riviere & Sophie Collins
Katerina Kashchavtseva & Lucy Harvest Clarke
Tom Jenks & Chris McCabe
Marcus Slease & Peter Jaeger

London Sinfonietta newsletter


Blue Touch Paper collaborators announced

We are also very pleased to announce the successful applicants to our Blue Touch Paper programme. They are:

- Steve Potter (composer) & Kélina Gotman (writer/dramaturg), who will be working on a music-theatre piece exploring the reality of dreams.

- Elspeth Brooke (composer), Seonaid Goody (puppeteer) & Anna G Jones (director) will work with music, puppetry and film techniques to create a re-imagining of the Greek myth of Persephone.

- Philip Venables (composer) & Steven J Fowler (poet) will be exploring the violence, sanctioned by society, that is boxing, through music and poetry.

Click here for more information about Blue Touch Paper click here.

Minimum Security Prison Poetry

Minimum security prison poetry

minimumsecurityprisonpoetry

Contemporary British poets read original poetry on the subject of incarceration & imprisonment.

Tim Atkins / Richard Barrett / Julia Calver / Tom Chivers / Matthew Gregory /Stephen Emmerson / Jeff Hilson / Colin Herd / Holly Hopkins / Kirsty Irving / Antony John / Mendoza / Tamarin Norwood / Chris Page / Holly Pester / Sam Riviere / Jon K Shaw / Marcus Slease / Andy Spragg / Steve Willey / SJ Fowler, launching the collection Minimum Security Prison Dentistry published by Anything Anymore Anywhere press.

Minimum Security Prison Poetry,
The Horse Hospital
Wednesday November 23rd 2011 @ 7pm
Entrance free

Praise for SJ Fowler’s Minimum Security Prison Dentistry:

If you think poetry is some sedate pursuit carried out in an ivory tower then you obviously ain’t read Steven Fowler. He makes Bukowski look like Billy Childish and Billy Childish look like William MacGonagall!
- Stewart Home

Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct, these kaleidoscopic poems enter the house of prison language via the back door and take no hostages. If Captain Beefheart had done St. Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this
- Philip Terry

This could be the worst book you will read this year, the discussion is violence, but really it’s a punch from a cup cake, using narrative and expressionist syntax. His celebration of where is, has a clipped disgust
- Allen Fisher

Imagine a Boys Own Paper landscape with True Crime architecture. Laurence Harvey dodges from building to country trying to evade CCTV whose sound footage runs through Babelfish. The smells are Jack London, the light is Genet and the memories are Edgar Lee Masters. Equally in words is Steven Johannes Fowler’s Minimum Security Prison Dentistry: elegant, coldly funny, at times emotional, textured with occasional accidental/intentional solecisms; but getting the work done. Nowadays most pages labelled “poetry” are unreadable and uninteresting: these give hope. Anyone who can name-check Joe Arpaio and Jacky le Mat, and reference the cover-texture of an Anselm Hollo book from the sixties rides my particular range
- Tom Raworth

For Mercy, this Friday in Liverpool, with Ben Morris

http://www.mercyonline.co.uk/who-we-are/what-we-are-up-to/article/last-2011-overlap-commission-steven-fowler-and-chora-do-liverpool-music-week


Steven Fowler( 2 )
  • Steven Fowler
  • Infinite Love

Last 2011 Overlap Commission: Steven Fowler and Chora do Liverpool Music Week

0
03/11/11 Live
by Nathan Jones

We're teaming up with Samizdat and La Racaille again on brilliant new music/language/art event, this time exploring trance, mantra and the loop at Liverpool Music Week. Featuring a new commission with Steven Fowler and an amazing new setting of Dustin Wong's seminal Infinite Love album set for guitar orchestra by wizz-kid Jon Davies...... read on by clicking the link

Maintenant #78 - Damir Sodan


Though his work is utterly modern and could only be of the now, Damir Šodan, as a man, recalls a different age. Cosmopolitan, engaged, political, satirically adept and poetically versatile, he is a poet who defines and embodies one of Europe’s great, surging contemporary traditions, that is Croatia since the turn of the millennium. One of the most active and veracious translators and editors on the continent, he has won international awards for his plays and finds employment at the Hague, as a translator for the United Nations War Tribunal. This is beside his reputation as a poet, which is considerable and deservingly ever growing. His work is striking for its elasticity, its precision and its ability to retain power amidst a wit rarely found in modern letters. In a typically generous and eloquent interview, discussing everything from war crimes tribunals to the Croatian poetic tradition, we present a locus of modern European poetry, Damir Šodan.


I'm very pleased to say we have published ten of Damir's poems in English alongside the interview


Recipes published in Otoliths


a new issue of Otoliths for spring 2011. As ever it's one of the most considered and wide ranging poetic publications online. Features a mass of poets including excellent standouts Márton Koppány, J. D. Nelson, Felino A. Soriano, Grzegorz Wróblewski and sean burn.

I think this is my fifth or sixth time in Otoliths. These poems are from Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, the collection launched this month.

the Other room - my experience & an interview with its founders

I've just returned from reading at the Other room in the old abbey inn in central Manchester, it was the 29th edition of the series and one of the highlights of my year in terms of poetry.

The invitation had a special significance for me. Firstly, the Other room is a project I have followed as closely as any other - the web presence being a vital resource for British poetry, plus the readings are always meticulously recorded, both with performances and interviews and I've been able to follow some of my favourite poets partaking - Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Holly Pester etc... Secondly, those who organise the series, and seem to represent succinctly the surge of amazing innovative poetry emerging from the contemporary North West scene, have been instrumental in my writing (Tom Jenks gave me my first magazine publication in the sorely missed Parameter, Scott Thurston was one of the first to offer me invaluable critique and support, and Alec Newman published my first collection.) Thirdly, and finally, I have come to see the series as an inspiration for the events I organise and the spirit in which poetry is fostered and supported. The Other room is never dictatorial, never knowing, exclusive or smug - it is open, collective, earnest and centred entirely around the poetry itself. The excellence of work is matched by the atmosphere in which the readings take place and are organised.

The hospitality afforded me was remarkable, those in attendance were welcoming and receptive and the discussions in and around the event were as enjoyable to me as the reading itself. It is a remarkable project and one whose increasing legacy reflects correctly, and brilliantly, on its instigators.

Here is an interview with those who run the series, James Davies, Scott Thurston and Tom Jenks, a resource I am sure will be important in the future: