Vikings are here! POW published my poetry poster art

One of the publications I am most proud of, without a doubt. Finally Ive managed to produce something, outside of collaboration, which is as satisfying visually as it is textually, to me at least. These are six poems rendered in the shape of the first six magical letters of the Elder runic alphabet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark The Futhark, left behind by the norsemen as a incantational representation of something I am bonded to, as an urge, but am happy to misunderstand and rerender as a plate for my own warping language. This is but the first of many interactions my poetry will have with Vikings in the next few years, a subject in my blood, and the first poetry I was exposed to by my dad, the Sagas. 

 "The invention of the script has been ascribed to a single person[9] or a group of people who had come into contact with Roman culture, maybe as mercenaries in the Roman army, or as merchants. The script was clearly designed for epigraphic purposes, but opinions differ in stressing either magical, practical or simply playful (graffiti) aspects. Bæksted 1952, p. 134 concludes that in its earliest stage, the runic script was an "artificial, playful, not really needed imitation of the Roman script", much like the Germanic bracteates were directly influenced by Roman currency, a view that is accepted by Odenstedt 1990, p. 171 in the light of the very primitive nature of the earliest (2nd to 4th century) inscription corpus."

 All the better that this work should be with Antonio Claudio Carvalho's remarkable POW series. These are poetry poster artworks, far too underappreciated, emanating out of Brazil via Edinburgh, and taking in 26 authors in their finality, now, with my Vikings being the 25th, and Hansjorg Mayer the 26th! Incredible, and with Chris McCabe, Peter Finch, Augusto de Campos and so many great others coming before, I am privileged to be in such company. I owe Antonio such a debt for the commission, it really challenged me to grow as a poet who is also an artist in aspiration. Thanks too to Anatol Knotek, ever aiding in my technical ambitions. 
So exciting these posters will be launched and available soon, and part of the upcoming Translation Games project, with the special edition poetry library event on march 5th. Check out Ricarda Vidal's great post on the series, with more examples, here http://ricardavidal.com/test/translation-games/pow/

4 poems from {Enthusiasm} published by Frankmatter

http://frankmattermag.com/ Really happy to more poems from a future work leaking out into the world in some fine journals and publishing enterprises. Frankmatter, based in the US, is a tri-annual online journal, and really has set some fine standards for itself. Im pretty chuffed to be in this issue alongside a new translation of Le Clezio for example. The poems are about Ealing, Healing, the FSB and IEDs. http://frankmattermag.com/2014/02/02/four-poems-by-sj-fowler/

Healing as a planet
-
I saw to it, Ealing as a planet earth
going to its slow growth
a place begging vegetable
sombre, health seeking, much a taste acquired
in time, application & practise
for health in wisdom
big ball of blue veined envy & ambition
missing the high st. when on holidays
you have a home, sad puppet lurch of our heart suburb
red road bezerker
full of family

Philip Terry & Tom Jenks on otoliths

Proper pure Enemies! http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/philip-terry-and-tom-jenks.html

Footprints
     For J. H. Prynne, in The Pyrenees

1. 
Days are a proposition laid by desolate gorges, the body a repulsive looking landlord. Into muscle blood-red capas. The dark clouds and chasms, ancient summit Alps; valleys of a richer southern sunlight. Smell of a Frenchman and orange-peel saturated within the first three-fifths, muted interchange in the iridescence of the descriptions of energy. The usual perfunctory fasces at the scanty distant mountains. Memories of the lonely roads walk by a doughty Colonel. Open terrace twice girdled in soft banditti. Nothing which the Pyrenees, a skyline untrodden by Americans. In our City of the Great Czar chemistry is livid heat reduced to coigns of vantage. Bid on a Biscayan beach, her sweet making ready. Condition of bright awnings, the palest green verandas. Single spark of its sober, unornamental, business government. 

talking boxing on BBC radio 3 free thinking program

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t0d93 Im in after about 32 minutes. Not much on there, but pha.

Boxing in Art

The Grudge Match
Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham is available in hardback and e-book now.

S J Fowler will be reading some of his poetry at The Poet is a Boxerat the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, on Wednesday 5 February.

The Grudge Match (pictured) is in cinemas nationwide now, certificate 12A.

Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth show will be at dates across the UK in March. 

the Launch of Bill Griffiths collected poems 2 at Goodenough college

Announcing launch of Bill Griffiths' Collected Poems  (Vol 2)
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Launch of Bill Griffiths Collected Poems Vol 2


Reality Street published Bill Griffiths’ Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80) in 2010. Extending the account through the following decade, a new volume, Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91), once again edited by Alan Halsey, collects poems and sequences from a prolific period in Bill's life that originally appeared in very small editions. The 426-page volume, publication of which was enabled by subscriptions from 120 supporters, also includes a section of uncollected or previously unpublished poems. The editor provides bibliographical and textual notes.
The book will be launched on Saturday 1st March at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N 2AB. Selections from Bill's work will be read by poets Ken Edwards, Allen Fisher, Harry Gilonis, Alan Halsey, Mendoza, Geraldine Monk and Robert Sheppard. Copies of both Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91) and Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80) will be on sale at a reduced price. The event starts at 7.00pm, readings at 7.30.

If you would like to come to the launch please reply to this message or email info@realitystreet.co.uk. The event is free, but you need to book your place in advance.

If you would like to review the new book, please use the same email address to request a review copy, or call 01424 431271.

For fuller information about the book, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Thanks are due to Steven Fowler and the Enemies project for supporting the launch.

Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91)
2014, 978-1-874400-65-3,  426pp, price £19 £15 at launch

 

Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths was a poet, Anglo-Saxon scholar, book designer, small press publisher, biker, pianist, archivist and social historian. 

His poetry came to prominence in the early 1970s, when he was associated with the small press poetry movement in London.

Later in his career he moved from London to North East England where he reinvigorated the study of the region’s dialect. He died in 2007 at the age of 59.

photo: Robert Cassel

landscape architecture residency is going to be amazing

http://www.jlg-london.com/ So proud my residency at the continually inspiring J&L Gibbons landscape archiectects is really growing and taking shape. The work they are doing, and are about to do, is as cutting edge and important and dynamic as I couldve imagined, and Im really privileged to be involved. Do check out their website. 
"Welcome to a group of inspired, energetic and committed landscape architects. For over twenty five years, we have been working with local authorities, developers and community groups to vision and realise beautifully designed “green infrastructure”. We’d like to introduce you to some of our award winning work, and announce that throughout 2014 we will be collaborating with Steven J Fowler, poet in residence at J & L Gibbons."

Wrogowie - Feb sat 8th at the Rich Mix, London

Wrogowie: February Sat 8th at the Rich Mix Arts Centre:
7pm doors. Free entry.
Marcus Slease & Grzegorz Wróblewski
Joanna Rzadowska & Francesca Lisette
Ula Chowaniec & Amy Cutler
Piotr Gwiazda & SJ Fowler
Adam Zdrodowski & Philip Terry
+ Laura Elliott & Angus Sinclair

This saturday evening, the Enemies project presents Wrogowie: 5 pairs of poets from Poland & the UK premiering original collaborations, and beginning a year long engagement between contemporary Polish poets & their British peers in collaboration & translation. Featuring Polish poets travelling from America, Denmark and of course, Poland, this should be an exciting beginning to our focus on European poetry during the second year of Enemies. Wrogowie is co-curated by Marcus Slease and generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute http://www.polishculture.org.uk/ & UCL SSEES http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees

& on the afternoon preceding, Friday Feb 7th at 5pm, another extraordinary event will take place to celebrate Wrogowie as part of the Emigrating Landscape program, curated by Ula Chowaniec. http://emigratinglandscapes.org/events/grzegorz_wroblewski
The event will feature a poetry reading and discussion with Grzegorz Wróblewski, about Kopenhaga, the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by Grzegorz, one of Poland’s leading contemporary avant garde writers, and his translators, Piotr Gwiazda and Adam Zdrodowski, in the 4th floor Masaryk Senior Common Room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW. Not to be missed.

Володимир Білик (Volodymyr Bilyk) - a statement & collaborations

Very proud to call Volodymyr Bilyk a collaborator. Undoubtedly a pioneer in avant garde Ukrainian poetry, one of the finest visual and minimalist poets working in the world right now, I published some of his work on 3am, www.3ammagazine.com/3am/volodymyr-bilyk and since then we've been exchanging collaborative works, lo-fi jpeg poems. I've included two of our exchanges below. Recently, in the midst of the injustice violently overtaking the Ukraine, which he and his people refuse to stand for, he released this statement, recently translated into English. 
"At the present moment our language is on the long and winding road to simplification, abbreviation and restriction of itself. Language itself is turning away from expressing the things to bare notification of the objects. Instead of sense-concentration we got informal hollow. We got everything but the essence. Ain't that a shame? Not exactly, but you can hear Screaming Trees for Vengeance and the horde of the blots giving birth to the blobs.

Short and simple messages are not bad at all. It can be understood in the matter of seconds and almost without an effort. But it works only in terms of communication. When you're exploring something - there's no way to be short and simple - you have to exhaust the thing.

But what's wrong with expression today? Nothing, it's ok. Nobody believes it. It's too dangerous and unpredictable. It can be provoked but can't be fully controlled. And we're making safe and stable unnatural world where any stroke of nature is marginalized for its own good - mostly as a possible threat. But we have to realize that the only thing left for us in this Brave New World - is swinging the chain. I don't think we have to agree with that.

Conceptual writing and concrete poetry can bring some fun. But are we here to have some fun for ourselves or are we here to bring some horror to the eyes and ears and hearts of the beholders? Matter of choice, question of time. Let's quote Mr.Pop and The Stooges - "No Fun" and let us quote Mr.Lydon and Sex Pistols - "No Future".  Or let us use other quotes from them - "We Will Fall" and "We don't care". And don't forget to sing-along "Ball of confusion - that's what the world of today!". 

Simonides of Ceos once said "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." - so we're up to let the beast out of the cage and to keep the nerve. We must remember that "Music helps to ease the pain" - to quote Mr.Waters and Pink Floyd. We must remember that "Anger is Holy". If not - we're lost.

Key to joy is disobedience. So why do we disobey all those common rules and guidelines? In order to be seen and read and heard? But why we fill it with greed and cowardice and shame? Is that what we're fighting for with all these orthodoxes and new-born-again conservatives? Or fight because we want to make difference? 
Power to Imagination."

Gorse issue #1 arrives


This is an extraordinary journal, the production value is breathtaking, removing it from the package it really strikes one as a wholly considered and serious arrival on the avant garde literature scene. It has the feel of something that might be remembered as a moment. Great credit goes to Susan Tomaselli and the team in Dublin, the contributors are all remarkable, but especially nice to be the only poetry in the magazine alongside Colin Herd. 

TŘYIE

Olga Peková - Zuzana Husárová - SJ Bearface
Very happy to announce the formation of the TŘYIE collective, an enterprise of electronic / performative / avant garde poetry across Europe, a stretch from London to Prague to Bratislava. It's an opportunity to root myself in a wholly new aesthetic, both formally, because of the expertise of Zuzana and Olga, and the brilliance of their practise, but also aesthetically - the dynamic of gender, of language, of approach in general should completely revitalise much of what I fall back upon when performing, which is endemically masculine I suppose. There should be a measure of trickiness, of wryness that comes through, and if anyone has watched the performances of Zuzana and Olga, then their ability to drag from the past the best of European avant garde history while being wholly considered in the most contemporary of ways, is the quality that is unmissable, and that I hope to leach from. Our performances this year, probably:

Prague Microfest on May 13th - London, Rich mix theatre October - Bratislava, Ars Poetics October

some brilliant new poets up on 3am magazine

One year to the day of Anselm Hollo's death

One year anniversary of the death of the great Anselm Hollo today. My tribute to him on  http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/anselm-hollo-1934-2013/  Really hard to imagine its been an entire since this happened. It completely transformed my awareness of my own writing, the poetry I read and in many ways my place in navigating this city. I poured over his works for many months afterwards, and gave his books as gifts just as much. The last reading Anselm Hollo gave, at my event in Bloomsbury, London 2012
Here's a link to my poem 'Wormwood Scrubs' dedicated to Anselm Hollo, published by Exquisite Corpse magazine http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=710&Itemid=32 & Im also very proud that all that reading bore fruit into actual poetry, and my collection with upcoming this year features lots of homage to Anselm, there are numerous epigraphs of his amongst other less obvious touches I owe to his work.

This extraordinary message was sent around today by Anselm's widow Jane http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/anselmhollo The post has some beautiful images too.

2 poems in the Quietus

http://thequietus.com/articles/14302-two-poems-by-sj-fowler

Two Poems By: SJ Fowler 
Karl Smith , January 26th, 2014 08:24

New writing this week comes via interdisciplinary polymath artist, poet and editor SJ Fowler
SJ Fowler is a poet, artist, martial artist & vanguardist. He works in the modernist and avant garde traditions, across poetry, fiction, sonic art, visual art, installation and performance.
He has published five books, the latest, Enemies, published by Penned in the Margins, and has been commissioned by the Tate, Mercy, Penned in the Margins and the London Sinfonietta. He is the poetry editor of 3am magazine and is the curator of the Enemies project.
The liver fluke cometh
though I'm dead & so very game from you
there are tugs on the seastrings running from the sea
stitched gut goggles to swim through in order you
inherit the next breathing please on in
to the next so I'm still keen as a mountain
as quick up as quiet falling off wood bars between
two quiet high points in space shuffling
rivalling the tory in the actual event, the manmade
is fielded with fat burs & begins to crank until stop
the liver fluke cometh, pack the ready bags
Though it hasn't gone very well
pity gutted in the hotel built on a wall
& though it hasn't gone very well I am afraid
if I go out my tail will freeze in pre-penicillin
wars with crows cawing in the forests
were this the past where the male version
& the not born children should elicit sympathy
sad I am to not remember that perfect line
for this poem that I had dreamed oh well
on with the end of the german basics
the lean to a spider you are afraid to become

Knowing your Enemies by David Berridge

http://davidberridge.wordpress.com/2014/01/15/knowing-your-enemies-thoughts-on-thoughts-about-collaboration/

"Over at Sabotage Reviews David Clarke has written a fascinating review of Enemies: The Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler. Drawing on Bakhtin’s arguments around the dialogic text Clarke (as I understand it) argues that the dialogic elements are actually most evident in texts that refuse a clear sense of who wrote what, maybe even of form and subject. Without this certainty, the reader has to get involved, and the possibility of the text as a multiplicity of possible and actual voices emerges.

I found myself relating Clarke’s ideas to some of the decisions Steve and myself have been making regarding the book form of our collaboration, forty feet, an extract from which appears in the Enemies book. Something of the process Clarke describes has been evident in our ongoing and changing decisions about how to arrange the text on the page, what kinds of sections and designation to give the writing, to what extent the text should indicate the presence of two authors, and/or a more general process of exchange and response by which the book’s writing unfolded.

Originally our text had forty distinct sections, in which we took turns as author. Although we never had a manuscript that named our respective contributions one early idea was to have two distinct fonts for our respective writings. For the extract in the Penned in the Margins book, sections were cut up, placed in columns, our separate contributions mashed one to the other. I thought the book might take this further, but instead it seemed right to go back to 40 numbered sections, although now those numbers broke up some our existing sections, whilst the text itself no longer had each section starting neatly on a new page.
cyril-connollyCyril Connolly Enemies of Promise (1): Getting Blocked in By Your Own Book Collection

Reading what we have now, I no longer know who wrote what. This isn’t entirely true, of course, but there are specific lines and sections where I mean this literally, and the whole text has moved, in my reading of it, beyond that sense of two alternating voices as its organising principle. This unknowing in the face of my/ our own text made me think of Maurice Blanchot’s comment about the text that removes itself from its author. I could only remember Blanchot’s view in these most general of terms so I went back to The Space of Literature and read on page 24:
The writer cannot abide near the work. He can only write it; he can, once it is written, only discern its approach in the abrupt Noli me legere which moves him away, which sets him apart or which obliges him to go back to that “separation” which he first entered in order to become attuned to what he had had to write. So that now he finds himself as if at the beginning of his task again and discovers again the proximity, the errant intimacy of the outside from which he could not make an abode.
All I have said here, of course, is from the writer’s point of view. Clarke’s review focuses on the experience of reader and reading and how the knowledge that a text is a collaboration (more particularly in the case of Enemies: some sort of couple) relates to the sense of voice, location and exchange that is  named or intuited by that reader in the text’s form and content. The (currently) final version we have made of forty feet seems one where writer and reader find some sort of equivalence.

One other point that I found useful in Clarke’s review was his sense of why the book – and Steve’s collaborations project as a whole – should be called Enemies, a title I realised I had responded to primarily as a provocation that cleared away a certain complacency about what might be involved and at stake. For Clark, again, it is best understood through how we read:
His collaborations are not friendly: neither in the sense of seeking to arrive at a position of harmony between those producing the work, nor in the sense that a finished artistic product offers the reader any easy answers. In fact, these collaborations are the opposite of a ‘finished’ product: they remain open to a dialogue with the reader, indeed to many dialogues (as in many re-readings) with the reader.
Steven’s own introduction to Enemies can be seen here. Forty Feet will be out soon from Knives Forks and Spoons Press.

on Enemies by Christodoulos Makris

http://yesbutisitpoetry.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/on-sj-fowlers-enemies.html 


"On SJ Fowler's Enemies

It wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to say that SJ Fowler has charged the poetry scene in London (and elsewhere) with a fresh vitality. Since he entered the ring of writing, editing and, particularly, event-organising some years ago, the diverse factions that poetry habitually splinters into seem to have converged that little bit. The scene(s) have brightened that little bit. It's probably for his relentless curatorial efforts that he is known best - for Steven a worthy and totally valid way to grapple with poetry. The byproduct being that he has created fertile ground for those working under the umbrella of avant-garde and literary writing to begin conversing anew.

His poetics, residing squarely in the avant-garde, are not altogether distinct from his role as event organiser. Enemies, his recently-published book from Penned In The Margins, which collects extracts from his numerous collaborations, is a comprehensive statement on his perspective on writing. Benefiting from coming to poetry on the back of what are on the surface unrelated longstanding concerns, Steven's nonlinear and outward-looking approach offers a route out of the insularity typifying much of it. It punches a hole through poetry's preciousness. His commitment to collaborative practices is also a way out: out of the poetic ego - as he writes in his introduction to Enemies, "a testament to my refusing to be alone in the creative act." It's also a "record of friendships." Steven refuses to see writing as a way of separating himself from other people, whether these people are fellow artists or readers/audience.

His numerous collaborators over the years, some featured in Enemiessome not, range from poets to visual artists to photographers, musicians, illustrators, sculptors, filmmakers... He strays not only from English (linguistic & national) territories but also from accepted literary patterns of expression in order to seek appropriate modes for a confluence of form and content - in what seems to me an attempt to get closer to something crucial. There's a healthy lack of respect for convention; at the same time there's deep respect for the avant-garde tradition. He is frighteningly prolific. The seemingly inexhaustible energy he pours into arranging events - the list seems to be lengthening year on year - to showcase the work of so many of his contemporaries and forerunners in experimental poetics, and to encourage innovation with processes of composition, is also evident in his publishing endeavours. Humility and generosity are recurring themes. The quickness of mind he displays on stage, whether in the role of producer or performer, is a vital element of his writing. Fretting about inserting the right word at the right place seems not of overriding importance or interest: if an element doesn't materialise at the primal compositional stage then there's probably no reason for it to be there at all. In this sense, his work is as close as you will get to live literature on the page - and the results are incisive, exhilarating and bursting with potentiality. The key lies at the pre-compositonal stage: already pregnant with a conceptual turn, and with a mind in perpetual take-and-give-back-in-spades mode, the act of writing becomes, in Steven's work as much as anybody else's, the content itself. This is at the core of what we get and what's inspiring in this book of collaborations, as has also been the case with previous books like Minimum Security Prison Dentistry or Fights.

Since he wrote to me a few years ago seeking to feature my work in his 'Maintenant' series for 3:AM Magazine, Steven and I have worked together several times (apart from one or two occasions, our relationship consisting of him showcasing or promoting my work...) so much so that on greeting me at the book's launch the publisher ofEnemies congratulated me on being part of it, which I'm not. "Probably better off not being associated with me," according to Steve! Nevertheless, plans are afoot for us to work together as curatorial partners and, in extension, as writers: in Yes But Are We Enemies?, part of the 2014 programme of Steven's extraordinaryEnemies Project, we will be bringing poets in/from Ireland together with poets in/from England to produce and perform new work in rolling cross-border collaboration. Format, dates, venues and participants TBC. Watch this space."

Simon Howard 1960-2013

I just heard, a month after the fact, that the poet Simon Howard died in December last year. Unlike recently departed poets whom I knew, even if briefly, like James Harvey and Anselm Hollo, I cannot say of Simon that we ever met, or even came into close contact. We did correspond, as I tend to try to do with anyone whose writing seems to maintain the erudition and innovation that Simon's did, and our writing itself crossed over more than a few times, sharing space on the lists of presses and zines that often define the community of British vanguard poetry in the 21st century. 

 What bonded me closest to Simon was his engagement with music, classical music you'd say (if you knew little about it, as I do) and the fact that his incredible expertise in that field had brought him close to many contemporary British composers and musicologists, and had led his poetry being brought to music by Philip Venables, before Philip and I worked together extensively for the London Sinfonietta's blue touch paper project. Simon's work, and his expertise, and his genuine brilliance in this ever challenging collaborative realm, was always on my shoulder somewhat, as a spur, or an inspiration. 

 Simon was very close to others I'm proud to call my friends, Mark Cobley, Richard Barrett amongst them, but to me, his presence was defined by his poetry and not his corporeality. In a time where mystery is an almost impossibility, when writing is often defined first by its psychology, its explanation, in the form of the human who has produced it, Simon was absent, defined wholly by his poetry and the vacuum of all else. Naturally this led me to respect that decision, to wonder, but also, frankly, to overlook his work at times. Reconsulting his output over the last week, I have come to rue that decision. Such is the speed of life. 

 His books from Oystercatcher http://www.oystercatcherpress.com/books.html The Red Ceilings http://www.theredceilingspress.co.uk/chaps13.html and the remarkable Numbers from http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/numbers.html and you can find much of his work on his brilliant blog http://walkingintheceiling.blogspot.co.uk/, the last poem he published, just two months ago, sits, waiting for you to read it. 

 I know nothing of the details of his life or his death, only of his work and his interests. I will do my best to keep it this way, sad to have lost a voice like his. We actually wrote together once, for his brilliant Plus-que-parfait project, put together by him and Emily Howard and Mark Cobley. Here is Linguistically Fluent in Targoviste, a deluge that will now stand as a personal testament, for what my memories of him through his poetry, are worth http://plusqueparfaitblogspotcom.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/linguistically-fluent-in-targoviste.html

WEDNESDAY, 9 FEBRUARY 2011

... linguistically fluent in Targoviste


I hate it when you get angry with me.......

Euro Literature Network & discovering Peirene Press

I had an immense time visiting, and speaking, at the extraordinary Euro Lit network meeting at the Freeword centre, organised by Rosie Goldsmith this past week. Honestly feeling as though, in the best way possible, a lot of my curatorial activities are best served by a singular vision, where collaborations emanate from my approaches, this evening, the brilliance of the other organisers who attended and their generosity of spirit, made me think there is so much to gain from sharing resources and projects and ideas laterally, with those already well established in this field. Rosie Goldsmith is an immense centre to this activity, and I really feel great optimism to what seems the start of many friendships and relationships with people who represent presses, festivals, venues and so forth. http://eurolitnet.wordpress.com/

 One of the most distinct, of a very many brilliant presses in attendance (those like Arc I have worked with before), was Peirene press and the work of Meike Ziervogel, whose own work is very interesting (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/30/not-booker-magda-meike-ziervogel), and who has published Hamid Ismailov amongst a many brilliant others http://www.peirenepress.com/ "Peirene Press is an award-winning boutique publishing house with an extra twist, based in London. We are committed to first class European literature in high quality translation. Our books are beautifully designed paperback editions, using only the best paper from sustainable British sources. Affordable, timeless collector items. And because literature - both reading and writing - can be a lonely affair, Peirene hosts a wide range of regular literary events, from informal coffee mornings to exciting literary salons and tailor-made, exclusive events."

2nd edition of my 1st collection: Red Museum

http://knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/redmuseum.html As is the poet's prerogative, this, my first book, was somewhat declaimed by me over the last few years. Coming into this year, it's gotten a little attention and reconsulting it, it suddenly seems to have its own 'value'. Not sure what that is exactly, that it is so big and dense to be a reading challenge, that it maintains its intensity of language...Anyhow, very happy Knives forks and spoons press have gotten to the point where the first print run has gone, and a new one needed doing, with really beautiful production values. It looks better than ever, a lovely thing to receive in the post.

Anatol Knotek's postcards

Really priviliged to receive a set of Anatol Knotek's new postcard series. He is genuinely a groundbreaking presence in the Visual Poetry scene, and a new generation, one who is not afraid of turning back to work and collaborate with more lingually orientated poets, like myself. Im very proud to call Anatol a collaborator too, and I think our work together will have increasing opportunity in the public realm this year. Here is one of the postcards "nothing lasts forever" http://www.anatol.cc