holy fluck the camaradefest will be good - october 26th @ rich mix arts centre

Camarade IV – October 26th 2013  2pm to 10pm ​​at the Rich Mix arts centreThe Camarade poetry festival is a unique and unforgettable one day explosion of dynamic collaboration in contemporary avant garde and literary poetics. 100 poets align in 50 pairs, each writing an original collaborative work, written specifically for the festival and premiered on the day. The 5th Camarade event, and the crescendo of the Enemies project’s first year, this ambitious exploration of the possibilities of collaboration in poetry will evidence the true width and depth of poetry that is happening now. 
Featuring:


​​​​Kirsty Irving & Jon Stone
Ahren Warner & Mark Waldron
Stephen Connolly & Emily Hasler
Chris McCabe & Tom Jenks
Carol Watts & George Szirtes
David Berridge & Mary Paterson
Chrissy Williams & Nia Davies
Giles Goodland & Alistair Noon
Ben Stainton & Nathan Hamilton
Sophie Collins & Rachael Allen

Sam Riviere & Joe Dunthorne
Becky Cremin & Ryan Ormonde
Deborah Pearson & Tamarin Norwood
Andy Spragg & Joe Kennedy
Ollie Evans & Robert Kiely
Stephen Watts & Will Rowe
James Davies & Philip Terry
Sean Bonney & Nick-e Melville
Tim Atkins & Jessica Pujol I Duran
Oli Hazzard & Caleb Klaces
Ryan Van Winkle & William Letford

Jeff Hilson & Fabian MacPherson
Robert Sheppard & Robert Hampson
Jack Underwood & Alex MacDonald
Ekaterina Paronian & Sophie Mayer
Sarah Crewe & Jo Langdon
Matt Dalby & Steven Waling
James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar
Matthew Gregory & Robert Herbert
Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner
Sarah Kelly & Gabriele Lebanauskaite

Mendoza & Nat Raha
Rhy Trimble & Harry Gilonis
Joel Shea & Ricardo Marques
Pascal O'Laughlin & Scott Thurston

Marcus Slease & Claire Potter
Daniele Pantano & Nikolai Duffy
Holly Pester & Emma Bennett
​Tom Chivers &Amy Cutler
Marek Kazmierski &Wioletta Grzegorzewska
​Joanna​ Rzadkowska & Kristen Kreider
Christodoulos Makris &Kim Campanello
Zoe Skoulding & Ondrej Buddeus
Reza Mohammedi & Ana Seferovic

the Wildermenn collective

http://wildermenn.weebly.com/

 visual art / sculpture/ poetry / sound art
david kelly / robert hitzeman / sj fowler / ben morris

Transhumance in the city, animalisms across four art mediums, wholly collective, fundamentally collaborative - the Wildermenn produce artworks that subvert and celebrate the rituals and rites which are essentially linked to that which is forgotten in the sprawl - fertility, procreativity, seasons, elements, creatureliness and death. Anthropomorphic modernist folk practise from cultures now unknown find form in sculpture, noise, performance, fragmented poetry and mud paint. 

Wildermenn @wilder_menn 

anthropomorphic art collective    
The River Thames · wildermenn.weebly.com
First exhibition coming December 2013

Nikolai Duffy interviewed about Like This pressby Rob Mclennan

I have said to everyone who has listened the work Nikolai Duffy did on my two books in boxes with Ben Morris and David Kelly was some of the most astounding publishing I've experienced. Like This is a quality press and Nikolai's work is truly amazing. His erudition is well evidenced in this interview 12 or 20 questions with Rob Mclennan http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2013/08/12-or-20-small-press-questions-with.html
Q18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Three of the most recent titles from Like This Press have been two collaborative works by SJ Fowler, with Ben Morris and David Kelly, and Andy Spragg’s very wonderful To Blart & a Kid. Each title comprises the collation of different materials gathered together in a box, and each fuses word and image in a collaborative process. They are emblematic of everything Like This Press stands and I’m very honoured to have had the opportunity to publish them.

SJ Fowler and David Kelly’s Gilles de Rais comprises 34 loose-leaf postcards in a box and is an  interchangeable narrative reflection on the life and legend of Gilles de Rais that fuses avant garde poetry and modernist line drawing.

SJ Fowler and Ben Morris’ The Estates of Westeros also comprises 34 loose-leafed postcards and marks one of the points at which avant garde poetry meets avant garde illustration. The Estates of Westeros is a meditation on the living space of the housing estate framed through the universe of George RR Martin's Game of Thrones. Where Gilles de Rais explores the absurdity of mythmaking in that which once was real, the Estates of Westerosexplores the grinding realism at the heart of the fantastical.

The Wrestlers for the Tate

Happy to say my commission for the Tate has now been published online, as part of their In Focus series and thanks to the amazing work of Dr Sarah Victoria Turner, who has curated an extensive response to the 1914 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska plaster relief The Wrestlers, of which my work is only a small part.

There are ten poems, 9 for each cast of the relief and 1 for the original, as well as two short essays, one on the wrestling depicted in the piece and another on Ezra Pound, who was a close friend of Gaudier-Brzeska and a conduit between his work and my response.

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/gaudier-brzeska-wrestlers/sj-fowler-a-poets-response-r1142398

Sarah Turner’s remarkable work on this project is immense, well worth checking out

“The large plaster relief Wrestlers was made in London by the French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) at a time when he was forging a reputation as one of the most radical and innovative sculptors of his generation. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed fighting in the First World War, and his achievements slipped from view in subsequent decades. In the mid-1960s, however, curator Jim Ede had the relief cast in an edition of nine to help make Gaudier-Brzeska’s work better known, and he gave a cast to Tate.

This project explores the circumstances of the making of the relief and the posthumous cast. Drawing on material in the Tate Archive and early twentieth-century sports periodicals, it includes previously unexamined material about Gaudier-Brzeska’s interest in wrestling and asks new questions about representations of sport and physicality in modern art and poetry at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

SSYK 5

http://www.eggboxpublishing.com/books/show/stop_sharpening_your_knives_5 "Having
been away busy defining a new generation of talented poets and things like that, the long-awaited fifth instalment from Stop Sharpening Your Knives is finally here, this time carrying a playful introduction from Mark Waldron.

The series has proved itself as a hotbed of new poetic talent for nearly 10 years, in one form or another, so we have stopped using the word young as much. Stop Sharpening Your Knives 5 is a selection of work from over 30 of the most exciting poets around, some new and some now more established, edited by Emily Berry, Nathan Hamilton, Heather Phillipson, Sam Riviere, and Jack Underwood.

This instalment includes poetry from Emily Toder, Ben Stainton, Heather Phillipson, Laurence O'Dwyer, Lamorna Elmer, Tim Cockburn, Callan Davies, Chrissy Williams, Catherine Woodward, Andrew McMillan, Harry Burke, Mollye Miller, Robert Herbert, Agnes Lehoczky, Nicholas Liu, SJ Fowler, Lydia Searle, Daniel Rooke, Sarah Chapman, Joe Dresner, Sam Riviere, Theodore Best, Charlotte Geater, Emily Berry, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Nathan Hamilton, Sophie Collins, Benjamin M. Nehammer, Andy Spragg, Rachael Allen, Jack Underwood, Ben Pester, Hayley Buckland and Matthew Gregory."

Enemies is coming thanks to Penned in the Margins

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2013/07/new-titles-autumnwinter-2013/
In September we publish a groundbreaking anthology of collaborative poetry by the experimental writer SJ Fowler. Enemies is the result of collaborations with over thirty artists, photographers and writers – each imbued with the energy, innovation and generosity of spirit that has become Fowler’s calling card as a poet. You can find out more about the widerEnemies project.
Enemies: The Selected Collaborations will be launched on Friday 25 October at Toynbee Studios, London E1, with readings by Fowler & collaborators.

Enemies at the Hardy Tree closing night

Thanks to the 40 + poets & artists who performed / exhibited over the two weeks. Thanks to the over 200 people who came to the events all told, the others who came to view the work in the gallery. It was a very special few weeks in the rarest of London weather, and the second week rounded off an immense enterprise all told. Thanks to Amalie Russell, Cameron Maxwell, David Kelly, Catherine Carncross and the many others who gave of their time to help it on. Tamarin Norwood http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtE2sBTai1A
Sandeep Parmar & James Byrne http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUhLczT7Wl4
James Davies (& Tom Jenks) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUyGoEE94UQ

Rustblind & Silverbright anthology

A piece of my found found fiction is featured in this new anthology edited by David Rix and published by Eibonvale press. http://eibonvale.wordpress.com/
category/for-writers/rustblind-and-silverbright/ My work involves taking selections from David Markson's remarkable novel Writers blocks and adapting them to theme. Markson's novel is a story told entirely by literary anecdote. The Anthology is of an unbelievable quality, I received both hardback and paperback versions and they are both mindblowingly pretty. Something to savour. 

Museum of Debt online

Emanating out of Chris McCabe's groundbreaking collaboration course for the Poetry school, a new web resource for collaborative poetical material has been set up and features some of my work with the photographer Alexander Kell, called the Museum of Debt. http://newcollaborations.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/s-j-fowler-alexander-kell-museum-of-debt/

The Museum of Debt is an exploration of the unspoken in a contemporary British workplace – most specifically a workplace where the task in hand is the preservation of dead objects – inanimate historical trinkets which pass on their own ossification to their watchmen & watchwomen, and breed a myriad of depressions. Between the concussion of photography and irony of poetries, so the Museum of Debt is about mortality, and a mild form of waking death. Both poet & photographer involved were involved doing the job they documented. A project of internal projection with an innately shared set of meanings and experiences. The photographs were taken then the poems were written

xxxiv. the thin blue line between front of house &  back of house
short devil
o how I often want to bite my fingers off
when attending Events I must attend
that I hesitated to attend
my inner race, my struggle (translated)
my emotional poetry reading & racing
I’m pregnant, inseminated while winning
every rugby match that has ever taken place
so tired, in pajamas, with a boy
how he bites my clitoris, I believe a bear trap
is a forceful face in shadowy water
you tall devil, I
surrender

Enemies: POW

Our second to last reading of the fortnight was the quietest but undoubtedly retained the intimacy and warmth and community empowerment that has been so indicative of the whole endeavour. The project it celebrated, Antonio Claudio Carvalho's deeply underappreciated Poetry / Oppose / War series is so remarkably beautiful it needs to be seen to be believed. It consists of three, six poster series that harks back to Hansjorg Mayer's Futura series, and evokes the great heyday of the Concrete poetry movement. The posters are of an exceptionally high production and print quality that each becomes an art object in itself, and when faced with all 18 you can't help but marvel at the achievement. 

Sarah Kelly - Ways of Describing cuts as Pulped paper sculpture

Dear friend, poet & paper maker, Sarah Kelly has turned her skills to our collaborative book http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/waysofdescribing.html and pulped it. This is the essence of the poets practise as artist, which I suppose I am currently exploring in sound and performance, returning back to materiality, interrogating the ground on which language sits. As ever Sarah's foray is authentic, gentle and beautiful.

Enemies: Contemporary Poetics Research Centre

Really hot, really well attended - a beautiful atmosphere of exchange. The reading celebrated the groundbreaking Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck College, University of London, a rare academic entity which facilitates the research and understanding of innovative and dynamic poetry happening in the present day. http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/ 

Enemies: Dear world & everyone in it anthology reading

Each of the seven events for the Hardy Tree exhibition have been curated to have their own unique atmosphere. The dear world...reading was supposed to be a poetry reading, and true to what that means now, in London, in 2013, with this anthology, wonderful for many reasons, being an excuse, a locus around some of the people and things that are happening, that are exciting. It was that in the end, a good reading with good poets, who share certain ideas and outlooks on writing and on the experience of being a poet. It was nicely attended again, in the sweltering heat and as in each event before it, people were warm and friendly and generous.

Enemies: mini-lecture poetics

There is a profound, calming and inspiring core of poets and writers active in London right now. There is no way to see the current scene as anything but expansive and exciting. The hope with this event was that the form, which was intended as non-academic, personal and informal, would showcase the people behind the poetry and allow a wider audience access to discussions which were fascinating but also gentle in their direction and scope. So it proved to be, with the audience sat on the floor around Tim Atkins, Peter, Jaeger, James Wilkes and Marcus Slease in turn. The feeling afterward was one of real community, and that was well appreciated when it really seemed, because the Voice art event was so spectacular and memorable, that there might be a quiet shadow over things. 

Kingston writing school international pedagogy conference

I gave a off the cuff chit chat paper on the Enemies project and innovation in poetry projects, alongside for more erudite talking by Kim Campanello, James Miller and Fiona Curran, and that was nice, we had a nice audience and a wide ranging chat. Then I went hollywood and went home. Then I returned for a really intimate and enjoyable reading in a lecture theatre in the Galsworthy building of Kingston U. Which is quite modern and clean and new, and like Kingston itself, new to me, and strange. I was one of only two men in a room of about twenty, and so went all dirty magician with my reading, interactively forcing a gentle goose cacophony through the Estates of Westeros book in a box. Saw Philip Gross, Kim Campanello and Jane Yeh read too, having heard of but never seen, all of them. Then I tried to walk the 8 miles home, and got locked in Richmond park in the dark and had to climb into someone's back yard.