For the first episode of the new year, I'm on the Scottish poetry library podcast being interviewed / chatting with the grand Ryan Van Winkle, alongside Tomasz Rozycki. A pleasure indeed, it was recorded in Sofia, Bulgaria, at the Sofia Poetics festival. It was also recorded in the morning, before I had caffeined. http://www.podomatic.com/profile/scottishpoetrylibrary http://scottishpoetrylibrary.podomatic.com/entry/2013-01-07T00_00_00-08_00 "Ryan chatted with SJ Fowler and Tomasz Rozycki during the Sofia Poetics Festival with Literature Across Frontiers. We get a chance to hear them reading from their work and they discuss their individual approaches to their work. Presented by Ryan Van Winkle. Produced by Colin Fraser. Music by Ewen Maclean."
I’d like to announce a new programme of events and publications that I’ll be curating and launching over the next 12 months or so, supported by theJerwood Charitable Foundation, called the Enemies Project.
The Enemies Project is a multifarious, multidisciplinary but essentially cogent programme of events and exhibitions that provide the grounding to comprehensively explore the notion of collaboration in a strictly contemporary, ‘active’ realm of poetry. When exploring what the medium of poetry can do with film and visual grammar, motion, sculpture, song, composition, music, sonic art, photography, paint, ink, graphic design, illustration, publishing etc… poetry will be presented not just as a monolithic mode with hard edges, but an immensely fluid medium that absorbs and is absorbed into that which gives it context and inspiration.
The Enemies Project will include five publications, an exhibition, over a dozen readings and performances, three workshops, two screenings, over ten art/poetry organisations and well over one hundred poets, artists, musicians and performers, culminating in the publication of my selected collaborations withPenned in the Margins in September 2013.
EVP is going on tour with a specially produced show featuring new commissions by Outfit, Hannah Silva, Ross Sutherland and SJ Fowler. Plus special guest artists and performances at each venue. More dates will be announced in the New Year.
The sorrowful centenary of Dada looms electric in this eulogy for the lost art of mocking the shrill, shrieking ghoul of the soul-destroying machine of war and commerce. In song, video & poetry, SJ Fowler performs a dead dodo dada language as an attempt at resurrecting a happy ghost.
Electric Dada descends into the realms of electric harm through noise, humour and horror.
I'd like to announce a new programme of events and publications that I'll be curating and launching over the next 12 months or so, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, called the Enemies Project. www.jerwoodcharitablefoundation.org
The Enemies project is a multifarious, multidisciplinary but essentially cogent programme of events and exhibitions that provide the grounding to comprehensively explore the notion of collaboration in a strictly contemporary, ‘active’ realm of poetry. When exploring what the medium of poetry can do with film and visual grammar, motion, sculpture, song, composition, music, sonic art, photography, paint, ink, graphic design, illustration, publishing etc… poetry will be presented not just as a monolithic mode with hard edges, but an immensely fluid medium that absorbs and is absorbed into that which gives it context and inspiration.
The Enemies project will include five publications, an exhibition, over a dozen readings and performances, three workshops, two screenings, over ten art / poetry organisations and well over one hundred poets, artists, musicians and performers, culminating in the publication of my selected collaborations with Penned in the Margins in September 2013.
On the website and listed below you can find details of the events that are confirmed to happen as of now, as well as details of the artists and poets involved in thevarious collaborations that make up Enemies, including work with Tim Atkins, Emanuella Amichai, David Berridge, Patrick Coyle, Frederic Forte, Tom Jenks, Pekko Kappi, Alexander Kell, David Kelly, Sarah Kelly, Anatol Knotek, Ben Morris, Eirikur Orn Norddahl, Tamarin Norwood, Matteo Patocchi, Claire Potter, Monika Rinck, Endre Ruset, Marcus Slease, Rob Thomas, Ryan Van Winkle, Philip Venables, Wenjing Wang and more to be announced
These are just the core events that formulate the Enemies project, but more will be added as the year goes by. Thanks go to Tom Chivers, Jon Opie, Shonagh Manson, Nathan Jones amongst many others. Hope to see you as the year unfurls.http://www.sjfowlerpoetry.com/
Carcanet Press invites you to celebrate the launch of
Collected Poems
by
EDWARD DORN
from 7pm on
Thursday 29th November
Join us for a celebration of Edward Dorn's poetry, featuring recordings and readings by a host of friends and fans. Linked to the Black Mountain poets and The Cambridge School of Poets, Edward Dorn was the author of over forty books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and translation. The evening will be introduced by Iain Sinclair with readings by the poet's widow Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, Carcanet poets Tom Raworth and Elaine Feinstein, as well as Lee Harwood, Tom Pickard, Justin Katko and more at the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London, WC 1A 2JL. 020 7269 9030. RSVP toalice@carcanet.co.uk. The event is free and all are welcome. Refreshments will be available.
Click here to order Collected Poems with 10% discount or here to read more about Ed Dorn.
Alexander Kell is a friend. More than the fact that we worked together for awhile (money work) and trained together for a bit too (martial arts), we also just hang around a lot. I give him chips and he then comes to the poetry events to take snaps. These pictures have come to be a record of this time in London, and one I think might be important to me in the future. For the PFPRII event, he indulged me by taking some more snaps of me with friends and people I admire - Michael Horovitz, Marcus Slease and Tim Atkins. I am adorned with the Koto Atkin's designed wolfhood.
http://issuu.com/alecnewman/docs/est_issue_2/1 The remarkable north-west based poet and editor Sarah Crewe has published a really generous review of my collaboration with the poet Sarah Kelly 'Ways of Describing Cuts', in the second issue of the Jo Langton edited Establishment magazine, the poetry magazine wing of the ever brilliant Knives Forks and Spoons press. This small collaborative chapbook has garnered some really positive reviews, which is heartening, considering it's experimental form and tone.
Equus press presents a unique opportunity to witness some of the most exciting contemporary avant garde European fiction authors from London and abroad, representing equally adventurous and groundbreaking 21st century publishing houses, including 3am press, Stork press, Equus and Carcanet. The authors will be reading excerpts from their works.
The Golden hour is a tradition. This is what I discovered spending a week touring with Ryan Van Winkle's capricious enterprise of music, poetry, art writing and I suppose one could say Cabaret. The tradition he is maintaining is one that is far too rare but is fundamentally a part of the avant garde history of performance. When surrounded by artists who work in other mediums, whether through desire or osmosis, their performitivity, their personality of performance affects your own, and rarely does the poet become consistently exposed to that kind of difference. By aligning the spoken word (and I obviously I mean that phrase in its purest sense, not in the sense of the escape clause phraseology used by cheesey motivational speakers who parade as poets) with the epithets of other mediums in one whole, curated by a strong aesthetic hand, there is a lot to be given and a lot to be taken. I had an extraordinary time on this tour. Brighton, Oxford, Bristol, Cardiff and London saw shows both in the confines of a travelling van, a moveable gallery as it were and in venues I had never performed in before, art cafes and bars and such. The intimacy of the smaller shows really forces an adaptation of manner which is a unique challenge, the onus of the poet to become a performer, or at least to present people with something that they can engage with when it is just three bodies in a small space, is interesting. This model was based on an installation work Ryan Van Winkle pioneered at the Edinburgh festival and I glad to have a part in it. The other artists were both warm and humble as well as quite brilliant at what they were doing. Discovering the work of Deborah Pearson and Garance Louis were special highlights of the experience. I was able to adapt the originally commissioned 22 poems I wrote for the tour day to day thanks to immersion of the tour experience and much of what the other artists said and did found their way into my work. The 22 meditations on scent owes much to Bill Griffiths too and his remarkable 'tract against the giants'. I would be lying if I said the fact that the tour was sponsored by a perfume company did not give me pause for thought. The reality was in fact what I was promised. An unobtrusive presence, complete creative freedom and the sense, whether one believes it or not from the outside, that a perfumier is the olfactory artist equivalent to the poet with language. In such an environment as this tour, such concerns have a way of falling away, even if there immediate consideration is vital if one is going to maintain integrity.
I saw the Modern Tower as part of my apprenticeship, as it were, part of my education, to listen to all these different voices and to find out as much as possible. And I wasn’t going to get that from the fucking University, because they weren’t putting on readings; it was as it is now: horribly institutionalised. I think I am a bit of an activist, or certainly have been. I suppose you just have the energy and if you have someone to support you, a partner, that makes it easier. I suppose I was an arrogant bastard and I didn’t like being told to fuck off and I was persistent in trying to get money to keep the thing going. But that wasn’t so difficult when you had the encouragement of Basil and MacDiarmid, who people could appreciate, plus the audiences who were coming, and it was our own place and it seemed pretty much a part of what was happening.
Alex Niven interviews the British poetry revival legend Tom Pickard
SJ Fowler has published four collections of poetry, commissioned original works sonic art, installation, poetry and performance art for a variety of institutes and organisations, performed and been published in countless countries and publications, as well as editing and working on several poetry magazines. Needless to say, he’s a busy man, which is possibly why his works, as we’ve seen them, tend towards the brief. Which is not to say they’re short – more that he cuts straight to the heart of the matter, whether it’s Ryan’s $20 suit, or a twisted whale-tale in just four lines.
For this tour, SJ has been reading from a specially commissioned work, based loosely around the theme of fragrance. We’ve loved having his stylish person around the place, and are super excited to present him at Cafe Kino in Bristol, The Gorilla Bus in Cardiff, and in London on October 27.
Here he is with the gorgeous Garance Louis, who will also be performing in London. As you can see, they make quite the duo.
