anselm hollo obituary by Pierre Joris on his Nomadics blog


In Front of The Boulder Dushanbe Tea House…

… a few years ago, Anselm & Jane, Jerry & Diane, Nicole & me.
AH&JR&PJAlso: a lovely obit by Steven Fowler in 3ammagazine, one para of which goes:
This is a man who wrote through his life – who skewered life with his work, who affirmed his being alive in poetry, and made things new there too. Anselm Hollo was a viking – he looked like one, he wrote like one, and I am told, he often lived like one. He published over 40 books, and untold numbers of translations into and from Finnish, German, Swedish and French. In 2001 he was elected the United States anti-laureate. He lived for 78 years, and for over 60 of them, he wrote.
You can read the whole piece here.
Also, today (Thursday 31st) he Finnish Obituary in  Helsingin Sanomat (the biggest Finnish newspaper), written by one of the editors of the Cultural Section. Anselm is remembered as having been “Finlands link to the Beat Movement in US”. (via Leevi Lehto on FB):
FinnishObitAH

anselm hollo obituary by Tom Raworth

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anselm-hollo-poet-translator-and-teacher-8473828.html


In a famous 1965 photograph he sits on the steps of the Albert Memorial behind Trocchi and Ginsberg. His hair is dark; his eyes slant. His clothes, as always, are black.

Anselm Hollo was a major poet, a prolific and fine translator and an inspiring teacher. His death is a loss to the world of letters and intelligence. He was born in Helsinki five years before the Winter War into a cosmopolitan and intellectual family. His professor father translated Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Henry James into Finnish, his mother taught music, his grandfather Paul, a chemist, invented the Walden Inversion. A visit to him in Germany as a small child left Anselm the memory of walking past Hitler's Reich-Chancellery. The home language was German. His sister taught him ...

anselm hollo 1934 – 2013


(Image by Alexander Kell – taken in London 2012)
I cannot pretend I knew Anselm Hollo. I met him just last year, in what would be the last months of his life, which ended a few days ago. I witnessed one of the last readings he ever gave, if perhaps actually the very last, at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury. I helped organise the reading and I had the chance to spend an afternoon with him. Even if I cannot say I knew him really, I met him, and before that meeting, and I am sure for many years after it, he will have a presence in my life through his poetry. For there are bonds between him and I, and it is my opportunity now, in the wake of his dying, to make them real in the act of a thorough, if primarily private, recognition. This is a man who wrote through his life – who skewered life with his work, who affirmed his being alive in poetry, and made things new there too. Anselm Hollo was a viking – he looked like one, he wrote like one, and I am told, he often lived like one. He published over 40 books, and untold numbers of translations into and from Finnish, German, Swedish and French. In 2001 he was elected the United States anti-laureate. He lived for 78 years, and for over 60 of them, he wrote.
His life was one of breaking new ground, both in the literal ashes of post war Europe and in the redefinition of what poetry might do to us and for us. He also came to stand for the singular role of what a poet might pursue – to evidence a new kind of holistic understanding – as a translator, with a reach beyond single cultures and ‘great’ figures, as an anthologist, who is a collector of specimens and not a accountant of poetries, as an editor, a teacher, an organiser, a friend to poets and a community in himself. He was completely unique in his voice, instantly recognisable, eminently witty, underhanded, profound and disarming. He was gifted in understatement and ethereal profundity. He was prolific and generous. He was a poet’s poet.
And as many of us writing now are the underlings to his achievement, so he dragged with him so much from a past that might’ve otherwise been occluded or lost in the rearranging world of his youth. Finland, always a place of quixoticism, of underappreciated extremes, spent the better part of its modern history under Swedish yoke, and the great scholars of the fin de siecle, like Hollo’s father, rode a wave of pioneering linguistic and cultural reconstruction, of archiving, of repatriation. Hollo was a child of this movement, perhaps the most important literary Finnish traveller who ever lived, for he took this spirit of newness, of cosmopolitanism, of national energy to the world, unable to leave behind the dryest of Nordic wit and poetic noir. Unwilling to let go of his propensity to admire and inculcate mishearings, misspeakings, mistranslations, he offered this gift to poetries in Germany, England, and America. This is a man who moved to Germany during the immediate post war period, then fled to England when it became too stable, and then again ditched London in the 60s for America. This is a poet who spoke his time in his poetry, who chased it down.
Returning from his last trip to his old home in London, where he was amongst some of his finest friends and peers, those who we can now only envy and take inspiration from for their innovation and energy and daring, he faced the kind of battle against ill health that even his near indestructible constitution could not hold out against. His name lives on in the children of his great contemporaries, more than one of them being blessed with the name Anselm, and we should take time in the wake of his death to mark the passing of a generation that began much of what we might hope to continue, so that we don’t err into thinking we are original while in the shadow of those who have done it all before but have just been stupidly neglected, so that we can build on what took a lifetime to produce, and so that we might try to write well, because Anselm Hollo wrote well. He was an immensely good poet and it is a loss to the world and to poetry that he has died.
I significantly recommend you buy his books.

your friend

By Anselm Hollo.

he said this
he said that
when pressed
as to which
he said nothing at all

in his country the weather
was mostly rainy

he tried to ride horses
they didn’t go or went
too fast

he punched them in the head
he fell off them

he tried to love women
tried to write poems
even his fellow men
their wives their children and cattle
he tried to love
but he didn’t know
how or what was
or was good for him
at all

whatever it was
it kept punching him
in the head to make him
fall off

so he blamed them for it
all of them fellow men women
children cattle poems and horses

many a rainy
day you could hear him
yelling ‘it’s all
your fault’

after that things
were all right for a while
until the next try

dear world renga

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/dear-world-renga/

 These poems are the result of a collaborative workshop called ‘Theft Renga’ i ran at the launch of the ‘Dear world & everything in it’ anthology launch, at the Saison Poetry Library, at the Southbank centre, in London, January 24th 2013. Around a dozen poets were asked to rapidly write sequential lines in response to one another, upon a piece of paper passed clockwise around the group, with reference to themes decided by the group and, if needed or desired, with the aid of plagiarised lines lifted from books in the Poetry Library’s collection.

 These poems were written collectively by myself, Angus Chisholm, Taniel Yusef, Tim Wells, Iman Sid, Becky Cremin, Dennison Smith, Mitch Albert, James Wilkes, Elizabeth Guthrie and Chris Kerr.

Poem in Portuguese, translated by Ricardo Marques

http://revistaagio.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/oni-por-sj-fowler.html I recently had the pleasure to meet a remarkable Portuguese poet living in London, Ricardo Marques, who shares many of my pre-occupations, within and beyond poetry. Our worlds overlapped through Ana Hudson's project of offering contemporary Portuguese poets to an English language readership, and I have a sure feeling his work and presence in London will become intertwined with the activities I'm trying to maintain. He has been kind enough to turn his gift for translation towards some of my work, including this poem from Red Museum

ONI por SJ Fowler

ONI
(SJ Fowler, 1983-) 

Os demónios japoneses não têm pernas e são do sexo feminino.
Eu tenho um profundo respeito pela perspicácia da sua cultura.
O espaço da galeria é dividida em quatro, quatro faixas,
braços estendem-se de uma sala circular central,
centrada por sua vez pela onda interna,
a escultura aquática de Onchi Koshiro.
As maravilhas da actual era da arte.

The DARK WOULD - preview event Feb 6th at the Southbank centre


I'm really happy to say on February 6th at the Poetry Library there will be a preview event for the launch of THE DARK WOULD anthology, edited by Philip Davenport. There will be both a physical and e version of the anthology. My work with the Austrian visual poet Anatol Knotek features in the books, along with a discussion between Anatol and I and Philip. Please make it along if you can.

THE DARK WOULD

A preview event for a new, pioneering anthology of text artists and poets THE DARK WOULD, which includes work/interviews from 100 contributors including Richard Long, Fiona Banner, Charles Bernstein, Robert Grenier, Marton Koppany, Elena Rivera, Maggie O'Sullivan, Kenny Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, Tacita Dean, Tsang Kin Wah, Tony Lopez, Robert Sheppard, Geraldone Monk, Rosemarie Waldrop and many more.

Join us for a set of readings and a panel discussion by artists and poets. Chairing the discussion and fielding audience questions is THE DARK WOULD editor Philip Davenport, with a select panel. 
Free but space is limited. To book your place email specialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk

dear world anthology launch at the poetry library


LONDON SE1: Launch Event: Dear World & Everyone In It

The Poetry Library, Level 5, Royal Festival Hall, London, SE1 8XX
Thursday 24th January 2013, 8pm
Free but booking essential, please email: specialedition@poetrylibrary.org.uk
"Join us at the Poetry Library for the launch of Dear World & Everyone In It: new poetry in the UK   (Bloodaxe),  an eagerly anticipated and groundbreaking new anthology. Hear and meet those who are leading UK poetry in exciting new directions; receive a free glass of wine on entry and find out more about what's going on."
The publicity material for the book says:

"Edited by Nathan Hamilton
Dear World & Everyone In It is a ground-breaking new poetry anthology presenting the work of over 60 of the most talented and interesting young poets currently writing in the UK. Chosen by one of the country's leading young poetry editors, inspired by American precedents, and growing out of The Rialto's recent series of young poets features curated by Nathan Hamilton, it is the first British anthology to attempt to define a generation through a properly representative cross-section of work and a fully collaborative editorial process.
By drawing on the poets' own recommendations, this anthology represents more effectively and appropriately a new generational mood - hybrid, playful, collaborative, ambitious, inclusive, cooperative. Less top down, more bottom up, it speaks also of other movements in our world, and even ends up challenging parochial notions of Britishness by including overseas poets who live or work here and who have become engaged and influential in the scene.
Avoiding older, oppositional attitudes, Nathan Hamilton introduces his anthology with an essay describing 'this new generation's hybridisation of two aptly ironic and business-sounding "strains" in UK poetics...taxonomised as "product" and "process"'. His lively analysis juxtaposes modernist approaches with those exploring more traditional modes, hoping to bring some of the pleasures of the former to a wider audience.
Dear World & Everyone In It is an indispensable summary or starting map for anyone wanting to explore and enjoy more of the current UK poetry landscape or seeking to better understand what's going on out there.
The poets included in the book are: Rachael Allen, Andrew Bailey, Emily Berry, Ben Borek, Siddhartha Bose, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, James Byrne, Stuart Calton, Tom Chivers, Tim Cockburn, Becky Cremin, Emily Critchley, Joe Crot, Patrick Coyle, Amy De'Ath, Laura Elliott, Stephen Emmerson, Amy Evans, Ollie Evans, S.J. Fowler, Miriam Gamble, Jim Goar, Matthew Gregory, Elizabeth Guthrie, Emily Hasler, Oli Hazzard, Colin Herd, Holly Hopkins, Sarah Howe, Tom Ironmonger, Meiron Jordan, Katharine Kilalea, Sarah Kelly, Luke Kennard, Laura Kilbride, Michael Kindellan, Agnes Lehoczky, Frances Leviston, Eireann Lorsung, Chris McCabe, Michael McKimm, Fabian Macpherson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, mendoza, James Midgley, Marianne Morris, Camilla Nelson, Kei Miller, Tamarin Norwood, Richard Parker, Sandeep Parmar, Holly Pester, Heather Phillipson, Kate Potts, Nat Raha, Sam Riviere, Sophie Robinson, Hannah Silva, Angus Sinclair, Marcus Slease, Andy Spragg, Ben Stainton, Keston Sutherland, Jonty Tiplady, Emily Toder, Simon Turner, Jack Underwood, Ahren Warner, Tom Warner, Rachel Warriner, James Wilkes and Steve Willey."

Enemies in Berlin - February 19th collaborative performance with Alessandra Eramo in Wedding

http://wortwedding.blogspot.de/search/label/02%20Februar%202013

 The culmination of one of the most engrossing collaborations of the Enemies series will come to a head this February when I'll be working with Alessandra Eramo on a brand new performance. She has been an extraordinary correspondent and is an artist I really admire, so it's very exciting prospect.


RESIDENCY
Alessandra Eramo (IT/Berlin) & poet Steven J. Fowler (UK/London)
“Poetry, Sound, Voice, Object: A journey through our daily rituals”

Presentation of the Residency:
19.02.2013 20:00  ||   Live Performance and Installation
22.02.2013 19:00 - 23:00  & 24.02.2012 14:00 - 18:00 ||  Exhibition
CONCEPT
The ongoing research of sound artist, vocalist and performer Alessandra Eramo explores the interferences between Sign and Voice: writing and sign in their multiple forms, and the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument. Cultural and language interactions have strongly influenced her art, which focuses also on relational aesthetics, action and site specific interventions rather than object-making.

After meeting at the Liverpool Biennial 2012, hosted by Mercy's one day Electronic Voice Phenomena symposium, Alessandra Eramo and London based poet SJ Fowler began a collaborative correspondence of unusual intensity and design. Brought together from across Europe to discuss the new creative possibilities in those art's which approach performance/voice/text/sound/video as one holistic art practise, their collaboration has engaged the full energy of their collective practises, exploring notions of performative ritual, martial physicality, personal historicity and collaborative conceptuality. For Wortwedding, their work will utilise collaborative performance and interactive sculpture alongside a video installation that presents a sixteen day journey through their daily rituals, simultaneously recorded, presented as the heart of a wholly unique and intensive enjambment between two artists whose work together attempts to find shared localities in the compassion of the physical and the gentility of force.

BIOGRAPHIES
Alessandra Eramo is a sound artist, vocalist and performer based in Berlin. She creates text-sound compositions, live performances, videos and installation that have been exhibited and performed in Europe, Canada and USA, among others, at: Italian Pavillion in the World - Venice Biennale, Sonic Circuits Festival Washington DC, Lyd & Litterature Festival Aarhus 2012, Roulette New York,  Festival Bandit' Mages Bourges, Harvestworks New York, Galerie Haus am Lützowplatz Berlin. Since 2010 she is co-founder of the vinyl & sound art production Corvo Records in Berlin. Currently she is conducting her PhD Research at the University of the Arts in Berlin.  Furthermore she is active in educational and cultural programs in Germany.

The residency and performance is being hosted by wortwedding - wortwedding is a space for interdisciplinary and interactive poetry projects, which opened in the spring of 2009 by Nicola Caroli. Artists of all disciplines are invited to explore their art form in connection with poetry. There are exhibitions, residencies, workshops, performances ... wortwedding is also a place of service - at exhibitions, there are actions to participate in residencies and visiting hours, where you can meet the artists. wortwedding is part of the project area network colony Wedding Association. On the last weekend of the month, the project rooms opened and guided tours are available for visitors.

Maintenant #95 - Ivan Hristov


An instrumental figure at the core of 21st century Bulgarian poetics, Ivan Hristov’s poetics are as variable and layered as the modern history of the country itself. As an educator and organiser, Hristov has been the driving force behind the Sofia poetics festival, bringing poets from around Europe to witness and interact with a surging new generation of poets emerging from the city, and as a poet himself, his connection and fusion with English language poetry has produced a unique style and cadence within his output which has gained plaudits from across the continent and America. Another figure in European poetry who conceives of organisation as a responsibility alongside his own practise, we are pleased to introduce Ivan Hristov as the 95th respondent of the Maintenant series.
 
 
Accompanying the interview are three of Ivan's poems, translated by Angela Rodel.
 

Modernism in Bulgaria contradicted the totalitarian doctrine known as “socialist realism.” Even though some scholars claim that socialist realism began as an avant garde offshoot of modernism, the two approaches conflict. This led to repression against many modernist writers by both extremely left-wing and extremely right-wing regimes. Modernism means “freedom” above all, followed by “individualism.” The first stage in Bulgarian modernism is called “individualism.” Freedom and individualism are the two things totalitarianism hates the most. Modernism was marginalized after the Second World War. During the 1960s, due to the partial liberalization of the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria, some modernist writers were rehabilitated and interest in their work was revived. But true interest in modernism began at the end of the totalitarian epoch, when new postmodern literature used the foundation of modernism as its steppingstone.
In the 95th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Bulgarian poetIvan Hristov.

on the Scottish Poetry Library podcast

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."

digging up the dead - my Reilluminations series from 2010

friends like these

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/friends-like-these/
3:AM‘s S.J. Fowler on his exciting new project:
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 tour in 2013

http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/electric-dada/

ON TOUR

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.

10 MAY 2013   THE SAGE GATESHEAD

17 MAY 2013   LIVERPOOL

18 MAY 2013   LONDON RICHMIX

23 MAY 2013   ARC STOCKTON

DATE TBC   NORFOLK & NORWICH FESTIVAL

Electric Dada – SJ Fowler

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.

very proud to announce The Enemies Project

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/