reading with Sarah Kelly - Ways of Describing Cuts

hhoooo at the 77th edition of the longstanding London reading series the Blue Bus, on June 18th 2013, at the Lamb put in Bloomsbury, myself and Sarah Kelly launched our collaborative book 'Ways of Decribing Cut's published by Knives forks and spoons press with this full reading of the text, accompanied by a buddha box. http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/waysofdescribing.html" writing with Sarah was joyful, her gentility and technique brings me away from myself into new arenas, and to revisit this work at least 18 months after we finished it, now she's back from Buenos Aires, and to find it fresh and communicative was lovely. i enjoyed reading with her. our buddha box vedic meditation accompaniment was supplied by david kelly. it's a beautiful object, and feeling pale in the face of clean readings this was the right, respectful way to contextualise this work at a place like the blue bus. it was a long, boiling hot night, i couldnt really sit in the reading, before we read last, and be still with the happening, sometimes i really feel ill at ease in such a room, words just sewering me, but alls well that ends well

Emigrating Landscapes - an interview with Marek Kazmierski of Offpress

http://emigratinglandscapes.org/2013/06/12/emigrating-landscapes-interview-steven-fowler/
eMigrating Landscapes Interview / SJ Fowler
eML / Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, and how you came to poetry, your cultural background (are you English English, and is it as simple as that?) and how you see the trajectory of your literary journey shaping up?
 
SF/ I came to poetry in my mid twenties, less than five years ago. So … an immensely truncated version … I grew up in south west England, really all I was interested in was martial arts and wrestling. I travelled widely in the year after school learning martial arts, was a doorman too – quite a violent lifestyle. Then I went to university and barely studied, just scraped through. I fought professionally during that time and that was my life. I was in a pretty bad car crash and that lost a lot of money and time, and after having to do some heartless jobs to make things meet I went travelling again. That was a long, lonely trip and I happened, by pure chance, to take with me some books I bought in a charity shop while waiting for a train, Penguin’s modern European poets Gunnar Ekelof and Tadeusz Rozewicz. It changed my life, I had nothing else to do but read them, over and over. My beginnings in poetry were always translated! More than that I was immediately drawn to the avant garde through my studies in Philosophy, I returned to undertake my masters in London. My work immediately started to look beyond the UK, and this wasn’t even really a dualistic notion, England / Abroad, because I don’t really enjoy England beyond London and I don’t know what it is really, and London is not ‘England’. This is a global city of global poets. Oh, and I have Swedish and Welsh ancestry as well as English, but I am 100% monolingual, sadly.
 
The Maintenant Project – it’s success is so richly satisfying, if you hadn’t invented and driven it forward, the poetic landscape around us right now would be much the poorer. How did it come about and has it turned out as you expected?
 
When I starting out I got to read in different countries quite early and it really just made me realise how much work that was contemporary was being occluded in the UK because it was contemporary, and how much people proffered work from beyond their language only when it had reached the unfortunate respectability of middle age. It stunned me in fact, that so much incredible work was unavailable. Moreover, I learned so much about the possibilities of community from these experiences outside of London, it informed so much of what I wanted to achieve with the readings. So I began the interviews to really represent what I thought was grossly under appreciated – contemporary European work and an understanding of just how radical and wide ranging and exciting poetry has become in the new millennium. I actually put on the first reading to impress a girl, who was from the country of the poets (it worked, in the end) but while I was a little unwilling at first, the process became so informative to my own work and practice it was actually hard to stop. I never really saw the series as featuring 100 poets and interviews and so many events as we’ve done. I try to resist my natural urge to formalise and systemise such things, I’ve just gone with the flow and having met so many deeply interesting and generous poets and people the project blossomed.
 
What is your relationship with the English language? How has working with so many different tongues and translation projects affected your own practice?
 
It is the only language I possess in any real or cogent manner. Hard not to sound flippant in print, as it were, but I deliberately under-conceptualise ideas about my relationship to the language. I realised early on that until the moment comes that I possess another language I am blind to all meaning outside of English and this is something that can produce great value if embraced, rather than resisted. There is something to be said for revelling in a certain kind of ignorance. I smash English, I break syntax, meaning, sentence structure – I write in every different way my subject requires me to write in – I work with sound poetry, attacking the roots of meaning, I work with concrete poetry, making the visuality of letters the meaning of the poem. This gift to not be precious, to not fetishise, or romanticise, my own tongue has undoubtedly been influenced by the plethora of languages I’ve worked with in Maintenant, the volume of poets and translators and how English is all their unifying speech.
 
How do you perceive the world of poetry being affected by the vehicle that is the internet? Is it all a rosy picture when it comes to self-expression and communication between individuals and cultures?
 
I think the fundamental news is good, but purely in the realm of access and communication. The world of 30 years ago is truly unrecognisable because of the internet, and its possibilities. It has firmly made history historical when it comes to the reasons, influences, ideas and culture of poets. The thing about the internet, it’s inherent character, is that it is so immense and ever growing that all one can do when commenting on its potentiality and effect is to make weak assertions. The internet is a space of community and many are hermetically sealed by its members – it is also a place of change, and what those changes will bring to our writing and our world I don’t know.
 
Do you think poetry is changing in response to current developments within society? Is it becoming part of what is being termed “the Third Culture” and as a result more relevant or engaged or any other term you might choose to define arts which are getting to grips with their own alienation from mainstream reality, hence becoming more connected with events outside of the cultural milieu? 
 
I do, absolutely, but that supposes I know how poetry was, before I was around, or that I can possibility understand it now. With the brackets on, I think poetry has not moved anywhere, the mainstream has moved. In a very short space of time, fifty years here, less elsewhere – the dominant taste of culture has shifted to a democratised model. The majority of people make up the majority of taste. Their taste is not for poetry, not for something that should be complex, as life is complex, that will not offer ease, that will not turn away from expiry, confusion and so on. Poetry is not an escape downwards, into the cellar. It allows you up, onto the roof, but you have to fucking climb to get up there. People don’t want to do that, and that’s completely fine by me. The people who like poetry now, generally speaking, are the same in relative number and education and character (both good and bad of course) who did one hundred years ago, it’s only since then the rest of society has been allowed to have their say. So poetry is not alienated, to me. It is an utterly personal pursuit, wholly about the individual and their attempts to understand, when reading, or express, when writing, the infinite ambiguous complexity of their thousands / millions of experiences, sensations, emotions that make up their life and their being. This is a completely secular and profound engagement with our possibility, and it is for us, alone, to mulch through life with poetry. When we share ideas or meet to read, well then it’s about people first, people who share an interest, but it ends there. And so poetry, again just for me, has its limits and expansiveness built within it, and questions of its place within or without culture are arbitrary, I don’t care about them at all, because I’m happy alone with my books, humbled by their immensity.
 
 
Interviewed by Marek Kazmierski

London Symphony Orchestra is playing my soundpoetry boxingopera on June 30th

http://lsosoundhub.co.uk/blog/2013/05/24/fight-music/ Just thinking about it, on June 30th the London Symphony Orchestra will play my soundpoetry boxing opera, that I wrote / warped for the true author of the piece the composer Phillip Venables, at St Lukes in Old St. I've walked past that building so much. Now this piece will have been played by the London Sinfonietta and the London Symphony Orchestra. Mind blowing for me. Everyone can go for free, just have to email. St Lukes is another amazing space of London I am wrapping my memory tendrils around. 

The Blue Bus - reading with Sarah Kelly - June 18th, Bloomsbury

The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by matt martin, Nicolas Spicer and Sarah Kelly, with S J Fowler, on Tuesday 18th June, from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the seventy-seventh event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions).

Sarah Kelly is recently back in the UK after a couple of years living in Argentina. She has contributed to the anthologies 'Better than Language' (Ganzfeld Press) and 'Dear World...' (Bloodaxe), alongside many magazines. She is the author of two chapbooks, 'locklines' (KFS) and 'Ways of Describing Cuts' (KFS), the latter a collaboration with Steven Fowler who will be joining her to read some extracts. Examples of her current work, exploring text and handmade paper, were displayed at the 'Visual Poetics' exhibition (Poetry Library).

S J Fowler, who will be reading alongside Sarah Kelly in the second half of this event, is a poet and artist living in London. He's published four collections of poetry including Fights (Veer books) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA press), and has collections forthcoming from Penned in the Margins and Egg Box Publishing. He has been commissioned by the Tate, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and has read and exhibited across Europe. He curates the Enemies project, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and Maintenant, a series of reading and interviews focusing on contemporary European poetics and collaboration. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College and is an employee of the British Museum.www.sjfowlerpoetry.com www.blutkitt.blogspot.com www.weareenemies.com

Forthcoming events will include Johan de Wit and Antony John (16th July), Chris McCabe, Andrew Taylor and David Miller (20th August), Simon Smith, Anthony Mellors and David Rees (17th September), Laurie Duggan, Andrew Spragg and Peter Philpott (15th October), and Richard Berengarten, Cristina Viti and Michael Zand (19thNovember).

Vídeos de los enemigos

A very literary event, interesting to hear the translations in Spanish. The event was rescued by two lovely Spanish speaking poets living in London. Thanks to them. Jeff Hilson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq9i8ao5ZoA

EVP Norwich

Strange it may be but Norwich is a poetry monsterland. The amount of good poets it has produced, through uea, and its cushy environs, of my generation, is really impressive / unnerving. A fine place for the last show (?) The town was Norfolk festivalled – quaint, yokelfest, saw morris dancing. The arts / writers centre is such a beautiful venue and lovely people throughout its tunnels, had some lovely exchanges with those people, and ate their food. Everyone on the tour seemed very balanced, calm, happy with what we’d done, still growing into those ideas, still critical, but neither nostalgic or overwrought. No worn out sentiment about the benemothian undertaking of EVP, which has been great and for me personally a success for all the challenges it posed were new, and I sucked in loads from those conflicts. Good to know..., consistently, adapting each night – learning all the time from my tour peers, the venues, the space, the techs, the producers, the work, the memorising, the acting, maybe even the audience (though still in general I believe what I always did – balls at them) Probably the end of this character too, a last dada hurrah for the retch acorah shaman bear host spine birdkiller.
To the show. This the end, may 25th, a date I have eyed some some suspicion for a few months, but it arrives First bits were a tiny bit wonky – I blame the conservative audience, gentility folk in the crowd. Norfolk arts festival. Then on in, pretty good. A good bear, my favourite of the Zamyatin story, the dragon. A nice going for it at the end came natural. Some spit up lung butter bedraggles, some fear, & I finished after hard ZIMZALLA BIM BIM BADA ZALADU ZALADIM by screaming ILL MISS YOU, ILL MISS YOU SO MUCH. A lot of warmth and respect for those involved. Started out without much ‘acted’ performed. Wrote whole 45 minute theatre piece. 2 month notice, national tour, sage, st georges hall rich mix, burgess centre …. 8 shows, 37 appearances. Went well. 

Lucas Matthysse 'murderous puncher'

I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to copy Lucas Matthysse recently - in training, alone, on the streets, in the supermarket - the way he holds his guard, crouches, the way he punches. I want a rat's tail. Some boxers have qualities which make them appealing as personalities to the public at large, and some appeal to the afficionados before they become well known - this process has always fascinated me and was a huge reason why I wrote my books Fights structured around individual boxers and their personas. It is often said it is their backstories which captivate people, but I'm not sure it's that because they are often very similar. There's just something authentic about a human being who is willing to dedicate their lives to a sport that only financially rewards 1% of it's participants, and tends to damage the health of 100% of it's participants. Headaches, dementia, blindness, speech slurring, failing cognitive abilities await. Yet they plug on, making themselves into monstrous machines, human weapons. Lucas Matthysse exemplifies these characteristics - he is quiet as a man, taciturn, even dour, but as a fighter, he is a cannibal. Relentless Argentinian madness, he's knocked out 32 of the 33 men he's beaten. And when he was robbed in decisions against home fighters, he just came back, shrugged it off, and destroyed the next men he faced. He punches as hard as any fighter I can remember, with both hands, it is awful to watch him hit people, in the most exciting of ways and he is single handedly inspiring me to revisit some of my work on boxers, rejig it, and write some more. 

maintenant #97 – tadeusz różewicz

A poet who changed the face of twentieth century poetry, Tadeusz Różewicz is a giant of Polish literature and undoubtedly one of the most important poets the country has ever produced. Still writing in his 91st year, his lifetime engagement with groundbreaking poetry, fiction and plays has spanned, and often encapsulated, the seismic tumult of the past century in his home nation. His poetic is the rarest of things, an anti-art that resides still within the realm of the explicable, and the ethical, striding between the utterly personal and the political – often brutal in its beauty and intensity, it is an aesthetic that is wholly his own, unique and unwavering. His first poems were published in 1938, before he served in the Polish underground home army in WWII. His brother, Janusz, also a poet, was executed by the Gestapo. This desolate chapter in our collective European history produced few artists and writers able to even begin to make sense of such destruction, but the eruption of poetry and dramaturgy that followed the war experiences of Tadeusz Różewicz has set him aside as one of the most respected innovators and stylists in modern European history. In the decades since the war he has continued to produce extraordinary literature, winning the Nike prize, the Griffin prize and the European literature prize, and now, on the eve of a brand new translation, into English, of his work ‘Mother Departs‘ by Stork Press, we are proud to elevate the Maintenant series with the inclusion of Tadeusz Różewicz, our 97th poet.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-97-tadeusz-rozewicz/

Far and away this is the edition of Maintenant I am most proud of, Różewicz's work being so fundamental in the beginnings of my own. I want to thank and acknowledge the tireless work of Joanna Zgadzaj for making this interview possible, and draw attention to the extraordinary celebration of Różewicz's work and life that happened last Saturday evening at the Southbank centre, as part of their literature festival, and for the launch of the brand new translation mentioned above. Here is a podcast the Polish institute produced about the event I was so sad to miss, being in Norwich, finishing off the EVP tour 

EVP Stockton

mad maxville, the place the students used to call mount doom in durham. actually an enjoyable day, a train over Yorkshire from Manchester to start, to Thornaby. Then it was explained to me what MadeinChelsea was, sonic interruption, a t=rex swipe into buildings, half the shops shut, like depression shut, tattoos on the back of a man's head in caffe nero. The Arc is a beautiful theatre, like a roman outpost for art. Wandering Stockton for hours and hours. I'd been before but why? I did many circles. Lots of charity shops. Bought a blue crocodile, a pig and a whoopie cushion. Listening to arvo part, a mistake, too many ideas for novels. The show itself was good, nerveless again, swishing, seemed to be easier now. Even the closer wasn't too hurtful and draining, but enough. A couple talked in the front row, I cane pointed them, adlibbed the most since Brighton. Premier fucking inn again, but a privilege even that. Second to last. Such fast passing, sad, learned too much.

EVP Manchester

Maybe the most involving performance, maybe. The Burgess foundation was an intense environment, inspiring for me http://www.anthonyburgess.org/ His spirit was about, I waited between sets in his library, filled with first editions, signed copies, weird books that must've been his. I sprinkled his ashes on stage. 1985. I felt quite warmed by the presence of friends in the audience, Holly Pester (who I beared, hoovered, retched and flicked), Tom Jenks, Scott Thurston - poets I respect, fun to show the stuff before them, and it was packed, and dark, and I felt stranglely nerveless beforehand, and so it did flow, lots of heavy pukkke. Exhaustion can relax, can afford funny rifts in a character. I returned the morning after, to buy some books, and I had a open, meditative afternoon waiting before, in central Manchester, confused and enlightened by its bleak newness and unfinishedness, like my performance and my piece. I worried I was a little too ebullient after, too loud and sharp in conversing etc...but our hotel was bizzarre, like the overlook, shining-esque, and that returned me to ground. 

poetry in Recours au Poeme in French translation

http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/ Thanks to the efforts of the excellent translator Elizabeth Brunazzi and the tireless and extraordinary editorial efforts of Matthieu Baumier my work has appeared in the respected French journal Recours au Poeme in both English and French translation. The work is taken from my meditations on scent sequence. http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/po%C3%A8tes/sj-fowler

 http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/flub-ambergris
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/were-it-not-i-then-were-it-not
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/fog
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/i%E2%80%99m-smart-enough-make-my
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/cleansing-compliment

 Recours au poeme has an almost unmatched width, frequency and quality, and Matthieu's work is truly both inclusive and ambitious. 

Recours au Poème
Poésies & Mondes poétiques
 Nouveaux articles en ligne cette semaine
Sommaire 51 / Issue 51 /Sumario 51
Pour toute proposition ou demande : 
Focus     Nikola Živanović, 6  poèmes
PoèmesJoël Bécam Anne-Cécile Causse Margaret Beston Roger des Roches SJ Fowler
 Chroniques 
Vu du Sud (3), la poésie d’ Abdellatif Laâbi, par Nasser Edine Boucheqif
Lecture (s), autour d’Eva-Maria Berg, Jigmé Thrinlé Gyatso, Danièle Faugeras, Dinu Flamand, par Paul Vermeulen
 Essai
Tête d’Or, la force et le sens (Paul Claudel), par Claude-Pierre Pérez
Ecrire en situation mauricienne : l’obscurcissement de la perspective ontologique, par Catherine Boudet
CritiquesLa doublure de R. Roussel, par Lucien Wasselin
Brocéliande, de Gilles Baudry et Pierre Denic, par Pierre Tanguy
Anthologie de poésie canarienne : ontologie visible pour archipel inventé, par C. Boudet
Toucher terre de Vincent Pélissier, par Matthieu Baumier
Sur deux récents ouvrages de Salah Stétié, par JP Gavart Perret
  RencontreRencontre entre Sege Nunez Tolin, Marc Dugardin et Jean-François Grégoire
 Directeur de la publication  :
Gwen Garnier-Duguy
Rédacteur en chef :
Matthieu Baumier

Fight music: an evening celebrating the work of Philip Venables

I'm really delighted to say on June 30th at the amazing LSO St Luke's on Old Street in London, at 7.30pm, there will be a portrait concert of the recent work of Philip Venables, who I worked with for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project on our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto.  The concert will be one hour and is free to attend.

The concert features five recent pieces, all focusing on muscular music, spoken text and themes of violence, socialist protest and memory.  Performers will include the Ligeti Quartet, Ashot Sarkissjan, The Warehouse Ensemble, Melinda Maxwell, Leigh Melrose, Richard Baker and The London Sprechchor.  The concert is being supported by LSO Soundhub, the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and Arts Council England. 

It will include a performance of the Revenge of Miguel Cotto, so my sound poetry and words will grace a really incredible stage once again, something I am very proud of. 

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool. The same site also published a review of the show, which was rightly glowing about Hannah Silva and Honor Favin, and included this snippet "The evening was compered by London-based poet SJ Fowler (main image), who through a series of vignettes attempted to channel a retching spiritualist's progressive decline into suicidal despair. While amusing, and Fowler has obvious talent and performance skills, it was impossible to banish images of Derek Acorah from my mind (albeit during his little documented laudanum phase), and although thematically relevant, we found it hard to understand how the piece contributed to the promised exploration." An amazing link, Acorah is the kind of underground avantgarde television personality whose authenticity I often have felt I am aping on this tour.
http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/2013/05/electronic-voice-phenomena-fea.html

EVP review on a younger theatre

http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-electric-voice-phenomena/      Have you ever been to a séance? Have you ever been tempted to try to contact the other side? Have you ever felt the presence of some ethereal being? Or have you always been the sensible, cynical type that thinks all of that is rot? Well, either way, the boundary-pushing, ground-breaking and dimension-rattling cabaret that is Electronic Voice Phenomena will certainly make you question the beliefs you hold most dear. Electronic Voice Phenomena combines experimental technology, literature, music and performance in a show that focuses, quite bluntly, on death and the afterlife. The project is inspired by the notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments conducted by Konstantin Raudive in the 1970s, where he captured voices-from-beyond in electronic noise.
This show is unique. It is not easy, not always clear and certainly not easily comprehensible. But it is fascinating. The wordsmith SJ Fowler acts almost like a compere, being the through line, almost a reference point that keeps the audience anchored into the proceedings. This is very useful, and makes the show nicely coherent. He tells us that he is a conduit the spirits use to contact the living, flipping the perception that it is only the living that tries to contact the dead. He also introduces the idea of a kind of electronic empathy that the living can find with the dead. These are complex concepts that are gradually elaborated on........
........The show always comes back to SJ Fowler. He really stands out of the crowd as an extraordinary performer and poet. The climax of his show comes in a mind-blowing, deeply unsettling and ultimately haunting moment when he is overwhelmed by the bottled resentment he has in him and by the voices of the ghosts that are taking over his head.
It must be said that this show is an acquired taste. There are moments when the art is more about the artist than it is about the audience, and this can make it hard to find a way in. That said, the experimentation in this show is amazing to watch, and the way it deals with such a difficult subject in a head on way is commendable. The show makes the audience feel in a way that most theatre doesn’t. It accesses a fundamental, animalistic emotional response to the material that is hard to explain. And this kind of experiential theatre is incredibly rare. If Electronic Voice Phenomena comes to a theatre near you on its tour, don’t miss it.

Sarah Lester's article on Electric Dada

http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/the-voices-in-the-radio-sj-fowlers-electric-dada/ ....... click to read the full whack
As the centenary of Cabaret Voltaire looms ever closer, poet SJ Fowler has been adopting Dadaist methodologies as a way of questioning our own preconceived notions. Drawing on Dada’s own sense of terror and menace, Fowler’s “Electric Dada” asks the audience to consider what it might actually mean to make contact with the dead. Or, rather, what it might mean for the dead to contact us. Far from hearing the comforting voices of our dearly departed, Fowler conjures up a profoundly more painful and unsettling affair. “Death has a language”, he sinisterly declares onstage, then, without waiting for an invitation, continues: “I will give you that sound.”

As Dadaists superceded formal language to engage with subjects that could not be understood outside of the abstract or the absurd, Fowler’s own sound poetry urges the listener to make their own connections between word, sound and meaning.   Transcending a language concerning death that is overfamiliar to us, Fowler’s ritual-esque vocalisations evoke magical incantations and otherworldly seances in words from a language of his own invention.  Fragmentary phrases, fields of invented words can bypass the author’s own associations and trigger new ones in the listener – it’s a Dadaist technique that was deployed in an attempt to overcome the subjective (bourgeois) ego.

If art appeals to civilised sensibilities and genteel good manners, Dada is the opposite. Dada – anti-art – was intended to offend. The performance experiments at Cabaret Voltaire (and beyond) did not lend themselves to polite rounds of applause, rather they stood for a rigorous critique of prevalent systems. Even so, when Fowler outlines the specific details of an artist’s exemplary suicide case for the benefit of all those in the audience who have refrained from committing suicide “for fear of making a mess” there’s no riot exactly, but there’s more than a ripple of nervous laughter. Like the audience of Henning’s performance of Totentanz, we’re not quite sure how to react.