The Hub at Wellcome Collection

To say I'm excited and proud to be part of this, the very first Hub residency at the Wellcome collection, would be an enormous understatement. The Wellcome is such an exciting institution to be working with and around that I can't quite get my head around it yet. In practical terms in means at some point next year I'll be spending months in situe creating new works and responding to the remarkable output of the wider team, more more more to come - http://www.wellcomecollection.org/the-hub.aspx
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/the-hub/current-residents.aspx

Exploration of rest and busyness announced as first project of The Hub at Wellcome Collection

The Hub - sm
The first residents of The Hub at Wellcome Collection, a flagship new space for interdisciplinary projects around health and wellbeing, will investigate the busyness of modern life. Bringing together a rich network of scientists, artists, humanists, clinicians, public health experts, broadcasters and public engagement professionals, the group will explore states of rest and noise, tumult and stillness, and the health implications for lives increasingly lived in a hubbub of activity. They have been awarded £1 million to develop the project over two years.












The urge to be busy defines modern life. Rest can seem hard to find, whether in relation to an exhausted body, a racing mind or a hectic city. Should we slow down, or should we embrace intense activity? What effects do each of these states have on the health of our bodies and minds? Such questions frequently find their way into media reports and everyday conversations, but there has never been any sustained interdisciplinary attempt to answer them. The Hub will gather international experts investigating hubbub and rest at different scales, to breathe new life into the questions we ask about rest and busyness.

The ambitious project will be nourished by the research resources of Wellcome Collection, the Wellcome Library and the Wellcome Trust and will embrace the noisy city beyond and the people who live in it. The group, selected from 55 applications, will have freedom to develop ideas and outputs over their residency.

The Hub space at Wellcome Collection will provide a base for the group to perform rigorous, creative research and to stage scientific and artistic experiments, data-gathering and public events. While neuroscientists study the 'resting' brain and mind, artists will explore the borders between signal, sound and noise, psychologists will track people’s bodily activity, and social scientists will map the city's noise and silences.

Felicity Callard says: "Our team is enormously excited to take up the first residency of The Hub, and to work with this extraordinary physical and conceptual space to showcase what can be achieved through experimental interdisciplinary endeavours. Our collaborative work on rest and noise will have members of the public at its heart and will create new possibilities for people from all backgrounds to find their own kinds of rest in the busy city. Through our research activities and creative adventures we want to transform how rest and its opposites are understood - and give us all an urgently needed intimacy with a hidden but vital part of our lives.”

The Hub at Wellcome Collection is a new dedicated space and resource for interdisciplinary projects exploring medicine, health and wellbeing. The Hub will provide resources and a stimulating venue for researchers and other creative minds to collaborate on projects that explore medicine in historical and cultural contexts. Residencies will carry an allowance of £1 million and cover two academic years, encouraging outputs that generate new insights, new forms of engagement, new methodologies and new interventions.

Wellcome Collection is the free visitor destination for the incurably curious. Located at 183 Euston Road, London, the venue explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. The building comprises gallery spaces, a public events programme, the Wellcome Library, café, bookshop, conference facilities and a members' club.  Wellcome Collection is growing. A £17.5m development will deliver new galleries and spaces in autumn 2014. Find out more.

Wellcome Collection is part of the Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. It supports the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities. The Trust’s breadth of support includes public engagement, education and the application of research to improve health. It is independent of both political and commercial interests.

The White Review Prize - MueuM nominated

http://www.thewhitereview.org/the-white-review-prize/
Really nice to be nominated for a prize I respect, that I entered in fact, so of course I respect, but specifically because it is doing the work that needs doing for the recognition of experimental short fiction. It's the only prize doing this really. The shortlist is really strong, Eley Williams and some really talented others on it, but its nice for me, if this is all it is, to have some recognition for my non-poetry. My work nominated, MueuM, is available to read in full online, link below
[ONLINE ONLY]

MUEUM

Since I have worked at the mueum I have published, and I have written 486 pems. I have seen people drawing freehand maps of accuracy been talked to like they are pieces of dogshit. I have seen shutters shuttered like windows in the face of so many wokers that all blinds have drawn into a darkness like an eclipse. I have witnessed rosetta stone backpacks, launchboxes of the great wave. I have seen prayer rug mousemats. I have been a witness of Commerce. I have been bystander to a five pound coffee. M is Muster, the passing od. You can get a sudden attack of nausea by staying too long in an art gallery as well. It must be some kind of illness – museumitis – unknown to medical science. Or could it be the air of death surrounding all things man-made, whether beautiful or ugly? (Gustav Heyrink) I have lists of people who were colleagues. The rise of the Temporary work in our century, and I have one avowed to those who are trapped in the hotbed of sexual discrimination and harassment because if they complain, to those inculcated with the ones making the advances, they can lose their work immediately, and without reason. Sweeps of the young like pograms, I remember them and make an effort to stay in touch. To have Grigor in shadow of men, a lunaticuntil moonlit then, a dwarf of melody, a celestial harmony, some tiny child model perfection below, a debut in the untertow. For not much. How young fashion students? Seen too robed; roof of the Nile, ark of the covenant, baby hercule as asp, a thesp, a guided tour of softcore smeared all over faces to make the time pass, for it is boring work.. In the endless dead hours of a dead work the sevens go to the tens, the fives to sevens, and you find yourself chasing them physically to express to them against yourself a desire to not only be bored but to be with them, when you are aloud to be so. And more shame for that because for the ones in charge, the honest, are the ones who will sack the girls if they don’t at least smile back. But am I was I a refuge or just blind that I was another of those unwelcome men when some person is trying to just pay their rent anymore? A witness of my record, 3 in a day. But which of those 3 is a life tired, to temper hard to soft, mean to kind? But always open pursed to me? Friends, there are shadows in any case. Even if the morass of the faceless are not looking into that case for an objett they’ve never heard of and will never remember. One cannot hide beneath head’s hair. I awoke from my nightmares with an erection, penetrated the sleeping Claire, went limp, and fell asleep again. (Peter Handke) ...............................
http://www.thewhitereview.org/fiction/mueum/

Aletta Ocean Empire published in Osmics by Annexe press

Yet another wonderful and innovative publication from Annexe press and Nick Murray. A thing called the Pheromone Party (where people are asked to sleep in a shirt for a week, then bag it, and then given to others attending the night to sniff, blindly, and then choose who they'd like to meet based on the smell - a dating thing I think) commissioned Annexe to produce two zines for the events, as souvenirs, or things for people to read, I assume, if it all gets a little bit awkward. I was delighted to be asked, having a predilection for the olfactory, having done commissions for Lush before etc...I wrote poems called Aletta Ocean Empire (if you don't know who Aletta Ocean is then don't bother looking her up) which were accompanied by an inkblot that looks like the thing the poems are about, and then split into two, and the two lost halves published in the different zines. I have reunited them above, folding the separate zines together for a reunion. 
WWW.ANNEXEMAGAZINE.COM


the Hidden Door festival

Another very special time in Edinburgh. The Hidden door festival was an extraordinary undertaking, clear from the outset that it was entirely community based, built on people's sweat. Yet unlike so many things that emerge from this kind of DIY spirit, it was amazingly put together - well organised, beautiful to look at with some fantastic artwork, performances and installations, and vitally, it provided remarkable audiences. Both the walking tour and camarade event were concepts, imported in, that I had no way of controlling in that environment, so I had no idea how it would play out: it couldn't have fitted better. The poets were uniformly excellent, a wide range of tonalities and poetries on display, with a lean towards the energetic and intense, and funny, and the atmosphere was welcoming and as communal as the festival itself. For me it was lovely to idealise a city I don't live in, and need not experience the downside of, through the hospitality of the unusually innovative and original poets who inhabit it. So good to see old friends amidst making new ones, and for an event this like, a little bit special for all who witnessed and were part of it.
Colin Herd & Iain Morrison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yENlEGqBvW4
Graeme Smith & Anthony Autumn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x178S_I8mS8
Daisy Lafarge & Anne Laure Coxam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKJRX-hTeXQ
JL Williams & MacGillivray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmlcIs2I344
Greg Thomas & Lila Matsumoto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7J2491JF-0
Ryan Van Winkle & Sarah Kelly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNI5bAl5R-8
nick-e melville & Ross Sutherland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3shpmr-hCKA

& the Walking tour in the vaults themselves.

my performance in a Parisienne circus for Festina Lente

I've read in Paris before, but I read, and I hope, relatively speaking, those days are temporarily coming to a close. Now is a time to read in public far less, and perform more. So this was an invitation I was grateful to receive from the amazing and intense Chilean poet Martin Bakero, who lives in Paris and curates the Festina Lente in the Circus Electrique, part of the Pantheon of Poets festival in the city. This was all sound poets and sonic artists, and as I've felt with the art writers of my generation in London who've influenced me so much, and are now friends (Pat Coyle, Holly Pester, Hannah Silva etc) this is a real community in Europe. After meeting Jorg Piringer and Heike Feidler last year, here I got to connect to Julien d'abrigeon and the wonderful Maja Jantar, whose performance was spellbinding and I learnt masses from just by watching. It's a privilege to be part of that community, if even peripherally, it is defined by exciting work, by real exploration and intensity and I feel very welcome by the people who seem to be defining it.

My performance piece, mort & homme, was an attempt to utilise mantra like repetition through different vocal ranges, beginning with something like murky song into ulluation and finishing with doom. That was to be contrasted against electronic chinese music, and then a conceptual element Ive wanted to do for awhile, book sawing. I don't really care if the result is a success, but it was a satisfying experience, as I had to go out of my comfort zone, and that's all I want to do at the moment. The piece was new, an experiment and a departure with the only goal that it didn't seem that way. I'm not interested in thinking about the quality of the work, just the experience of making it. I had a wonderful time. Video below. I also managed to snag some videos of some of the other amazing performances that made up the day, one of a series now set up in Paris over the next few years.
Maja Jantar & Martin Bakero https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rdM9zGA2hY

Tapin2 :- my soundpoetry profile in Europa

http://tapin2.org/ Really fantastic to have a profile up on Julien d'abridgeon's remarkable Tapin2. Its an online repository for some of the best contemporary European soundpoetry and a resource Ive used often. So nice to be there alongside friends and those I admire like Heike Feidler and Jorg Piringer. So far I have a new, simple sound piece on there called EEVE and a video of my Yiddish performance at liverpool music week back in the day, but more to come! http://tapin2.org/spip.php?rubrique97 The list of poets on the site is amazing, you can spend hours listening through the work! check it

on the Lettretage Soundout! project longlist

www.lettretage.de/soundout   Really nice to be one of the best losers for this remarkable enterprise in Berlin, pioneering new forms of literary events, alongside friends like Ryan Van Winkle, Iain Morrison, JL Williams and Jorg Piringer. Together we shall cry from the distance of the longlist. http://lettretage.de/soundout/kuenstler/longliste

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Iordanis Papadopoulos
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Wordpharmacy readings at the Hardy Tree gallery

The second part of Fjender was as satisfying as the first. Where the event at the rich mix had the energy and the speed of the best of the kind of events I try to experiment with, this, at the Hardy Tree gallery, had all the familiarity, community and intimacy I hope my events always have. It was a genuinely considered and friendly and engaged reading, with the British poets writing new work that responded to Morten Sondergaard's remarkable Wordpharmacy installation and exhibition. Morten is such a sweet man, so so remarkably nice, it was a proud moment to see him touched by the efforts of the readers and the audience, those 50 or so bodies packed into the intimate space. The evening was defined by a series of intense and rewarding conversations with other poets for me, and a lot of whom Id not had read before expressed the feeling that they felt welcome and that there was a noticeable lack of standoffishness or posturing, which is what I want to always be the case. All 8 readings were wonderful, huge thanks to those who made it what it was, and who did so collectively and generously 
David Berridge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb0DUkjvGLo
Claire Trevien https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peVSIUyhu28
Alison Gibb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYa-TltihTA
Andy Spragg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35v4Rp_LvGY
Prudence Chamberlain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Enn-vUR38
Mark Waldron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXozGut3-NE

Video of Emigrating Landscape panel talk on Migration

20 June / Polish eMigrants

Debate on contemporary Europeans, new ideas about borders and “Being Elsewhere – Migrating Stories” 

Maria Jastrzębska and Marek Kazmierski in dialogue with SJ Fowler
The event focused on Maria’s latest collection of poems At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013). It also featured the official launch of Marek’s new book Damn the Source (OFF_PRESS, 2013)
Link to video here

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Fjender

Without doubt one of the best events I've put on, the best of 2014 so far, Fjender at the Rich mix was an intense and across the board brilliant evening of contemporary European innovative poetry. I was continually blown away by the quality of the original work and the performances of the poets I'd asked to contribute and the atmosphere of the evening was really generous and open, as it always should be. It was an epic two hour, twenty poet + event. I was really gratified to show the visiting Danes, all of whom I've admired and whose work I have been trumpeting for years, the quality of the poetry scene in London. 
Cia Rinne & Chrissy Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JwIWWX5ezk
Peter Jaeger & Martin Glaz Serup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osVyEpJ0jHI

 It was really a joy to read with Morten too, though difficult at times to maintain the prosaic difficulties of organising and introducing such a complex array of events along with reading, but once the event was in full flow it really felt like everyone was in on it together, and it was easy to relax into it. 
And those dozen who've been kind enough to attend my Maintenant course at the poetry school gave a really beautiful reading of an immense collaborative, constraint heavy text, which just added to my feeling that the synthesis of organising / reading / writing / teaching can be fluid and organic if attended to openly. 

Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq

Really happy to say for this year’s Niniti literature festival in Erbil, Kurdistan, I'll be reading, doing some workshops and some mutual translation projects with Iraqi poets over a week spent in Iraq, thanks to Reel Arts and the British Council. I'll be keeping a blog of my time there, to be found here of course, when I travel out there in mid April.http://www.reelfestivals.org/reel-arts-returns-to-erbil 

 What is perhaps more amazing than just the opportunity to go to one of the most rarely traveled countries in the world, all covered, to chat to poets and artists, for a week, is the fact that also heading out there are friends in Ryan Van Winkle, Nia Davies and Dan Gorman. Not only will I be immersed in an unforgettable experience of poetry and culture, but Ill be doing so with good peoples all round. Now I just have to find out if Erbil has a zoo..

Translation Games at the Poetry Library

From the moment I came into contact with Translation Games, through the unusually considered and energetic work of Ricarda Vidal and Jenny Chamarette, I knew it was the kind of project I wanted to be involved in. The kinship it has with what Im trying to do with the Enemies project goes beyond the similar contextual concerns into the very culture of the project, it's openness, it's direction, it's appreciation of complexity. translationgames.net
ALL IS CIRCULAR, LIKE THE SUN. AND ALL BURNS US, EVENTUALLY.
I came into Translation Games at the beginning of it's second phase, as Ricarda and Jenny were expanding the scope of the program and working towards an event, which happened just a few days ago, at the Poetry Library, as part of their special edition series. The process involved 3 artists translating a selection of concrete poems from Antonio Claudio Carvalho's amazing POW series, into their own mediums. They had just a week to do so, and the results were unveiled at the event, with a general presentation of the project and its aims, as I sat in the dark, at the back of audience, live translating the translations and the general goings on.
THE NEEDLE THAT BOWS THE MUSCLES BEFORE IT PIERCES.
There was a Q&A after the works were presented too, where I got to share the stage with Ricarda, and with two of the artists involved, the film maker Anna Cady and the artist Sam Treadaway. Both their work really was a joy to witness, and being so familiar with the POW series, I felt I had an inside track to the roots of their process. Anna's ethereal filmwork highlighted the potential of realising certain paradoxes about death and expiry which cannot be attained in formal language, and Sam's transforming of Simon Barraclough's sun poetry into scent was breathtaking. Sam handed tiny discs to the audience, which were miniaturised renditions of the poem and were infused with the scent of leather, oranges, cedarwood...it was remarkable. You can, and should, read more about it on the translation games website.
7 MINUTES OF LENGTH
IS LOOPED
CUT
LIKE FILM
So much came out of the discussion and the work, but perhaps pivotally for me, I was really forced to consider the lines between translating and collaborating, and how intention defines the difference between these ambiguous concepts when they are deployed as I deploy them, which is, hopefully, a test to traditional boundaries. The live writing was a pleasure, because the event was a pleasure, and I tried to inculcate a meta-dialogue (humorous, I hope) alongside actual expressionistic poetic response. The words, as I was spilling them out, appeared on a screen so the audience could read as the event unfolded. The entire live writing text has been published online and if you liked the excerpts here, you can read it allll http://translationgames.net/?page_id=295

Celebrating Bill Griffiths

Without doubt, Bill Griffiths is one of the most powerful, impactful and deeply underappreciated poets of the post war era in England. It was an honour to put together the reading that celebrated the second volume of his collected poems, edited by Alan Halsey and published by Reality street. The turnout was lovely, and the readings excellent, some coming from living legends of the avant garde, the friends and peers of Bill, like Alan, Geraldine Monk, Allen Fisher and Harry Gilonis. It's extremely important to me to try and connect the lineage of my writing, and the culture of 21st century British vanguard poetry, to those figures of the recent past and present who have already walked that path that I am somehow, often accidentally, blindly stumbling down. Clearly the prolific and dynamic use of language, and the subject led, innately innovative poetry that Bill Griffiths produced is something I am often aping, and hoping to come close to achieving. He died just before I came onto the scene, in fact the launch of the 1st volume of his collected poems was the first reading i attended in London. Read more 

a new review of Enemies by Sarah Gonnet

Nice to still be getting reviews for Enemies nearly six months after it came out, a testament to the book, or to the publisher perhaps. Either way, lovely to read this write up from Sarah Gonnet, she goes into a few areas others haven't, most specifically the humour of the book, as quoted below http://imaseriousjournalistyouknow.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/enemies-the-selected-collaborations-of-s-j-fowler/  
"Although it sounds like ‘Enemies’ is so overcrowded that it couldn’t possibly have any space left for a sense of humour; the collection is actually incredibly funny in parts. Overall it certainly empahsises an absurdist perspective on modern life and art. Questions and statements are often made and asked that unsettle the mind in a humorously absurdist way. For example: “Why should I be proud of reading many books from which I have derived little learning but much distress of mind?” and “It is a buffoon who calls Walt Whitman rubbish because he made some of it up”.
Many of the pieces have their own linguistic logic. Some also have blog-like spelling mistakes and some are delivered in a raw stream of coinciouness. These bouts of spontaneous expression can become uncensored rambling; but mostly they have a purpose. The pieces either highlight the degeneration of language due to technology, or examine abstract expression with words (as opposed to paint).
Several of my favourite lines from the collection are in the poem “1000 Proverbs” (written in collaboration with Tom Jenks). This list of nonsensical proverbs includes lines such as: “A cat in a warehouse is worth two in a call centre”; “We are all as individual as individual fruit pies” and “People who live with pandas should not build with bamboo.” As the collection draws to a close it begins to rely more and more on fast paced humour such as this."

Ahsan Akbar talks 21st century British poetry in the Dhaka tribune

I had to pleasure or corresponding with Ahsan Akbar recently over an article he was penning for the Dhaka Tribune about contemporary British poetry and the trends, or lack of, that define this moment in poetry when Im about and abounding. It's a really fine article, and Ahsan was kind enough to use a little fragment of my Recipes book taken from the Dear world anthology edited by Nathan Hamilton. 

In the collection, the poets who rang my bell were SJ Fowler, Rachael Allen, Sandeep Parmar, Sam Riviere and Joe Crot. From Fowler’s ‘Recipes,’ we get lines that take you far from gastronomy, such as
(from a recipe for Caeser Salad)
a weak wrist, nobel peace prize for two Liberian women
a suckling fix, cutting it out of the stomach to determine its gender
a limp salad marriage;
You can read the article here http://dhakatribune.com/arts-amp-culture/2014/mar/02/letter-london & the whole issue http://www.dhakatribune.com/sites/default/files/issue/2014/03/Arts_&_Letters_2_3.pdf.pdf