Kakania IV at the Austrian Cultural Forum – March Thursday 26th 2015

The Kakania project closes its program for now with a grand event at the Austrian Cultural Forum, just off Hyde Park, in London. Four new commissions, and four new iterations of previous commissions blend poetry, avant-garde music, performance art and video art, all from contemporary artists and poets each responding in their own unique way to a figure of Habsburg Vienna around one century ago.

George Szirtes reads poems on Arthur Schnitzler
Ben Morris offers experimental music on Ernst Krenek
Joshua Alexander screens his video art on Paul Wittgenstein
Emily Berry reads poems on Sigmund Freud
Colin Herd reads poems on Oskar Kokoschka
Fabian Faltlin performs in response to Otto Wagner
Stephen Emmerson shares things in response to Rainer Maria Rilke
eff Hilson reads poems on Ludwig Wittgenstein

The event is completely free, but please do use this link to book your place
http://acflondon.org/literature-and-books/kakania-iv/

Both Kakania publications, the Kakania anthology with over 40 contributors, and Oberwildling: On the Life of Oskar Kokoschka by Colin Herd & I, will be available to buy at the event.

Once this phase of Kakania is complete, the remaining copies of the books will be available online and the anthology will have a special reading launch in June at the Hardy Tree gallery in Kings Cross, London.

Also in situe at Kakania IV will be books from the imitable Pushkin Press, who have generously supported the Kakania project and who publish some of the finest authors of the era we are emploring. http://pushkinpress.com/kakania/

Thanks too to Theodora Danek, Elisabeth Kögler and the team at the Austrian Cultural Forum and all those who’ve helped make the project so special. www.kakania.co.uk

Wrogowie: a Polish Enemies project - March 28th

Wrogowie: a Polish Enemies project   www.theenemiesproject.com/wrogowie

March Sat 28th :7.30pm : Rich Mix Arts Centre: Venue 2 : Free Entry
in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute http://www.polishculture.org.uk/

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Celebrating the great modern tradition of Polish & British experimental poetry alongside innovative collaborative practise, this will be an exchange between the increasingly familial nations of Poland and England featuring 16 of the most dynamic poets from those nations. This event will see brand new collaborations between the pairs of poets, asked to work together for the first time, specifically for this event at the Rich Mix Arts Centre.

Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese & Scott Thurston
Wojciech Bonowicz & James Davies
Malgorzata Lebda & Tom Jenks
Milosz Biedrzycki & I
Marek Kazmierski & Stephen Watts
Kamila Pawluś & Lila Matsumoto
Tomasz Mielcarek & Marcus Slease
Tasimbaradzwa Kanyangarara & Nik Way

Wrogowie year two is co-curated by Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese

a Cemetery Romance - March 28th at Kensal Green Cemetery

A Cemetery Romance   http://www.theenemiesproject.com/cemeteryromance

March Sat 28th : 2pm : at the Gates of Kensal Rise Cemetery : Free Entry
in partnership with the Czech Centre London http://london.czechcentres.cz/

To celebrate the visit of avant-garde Czech artist, and professional gravedigger, Miloslav Vojtíšek (otherwise known as S.d.Ch.) this special one off literary tour of the magnificent Kensal Green Cemetery, facilitated by a guide, will feature Miloslav explaining the art of exhumation while being joined by a host of British poets, who will also present their work on death and dying, including Emily Berry, Tom Jenks, Alex MacDonald, Scott Thurston & many more. We will visit the graves of JG Ballard, Harold Pinter and others, before exploring the Dissenters Chapel Catacombs.

The event is completely free to attend but please RSVP at info@czechcentre.org.uk

http://london.czechcentres.cz/programme/travel-events/miloslav-vojtisek-cemetery-poetry-reading/

The group will meeting at 2pm in front of the Kensal Green Cemetery main gate, near the intersection of Harrow Road and Kilburn Lane http://www.kensalgreencemetery.com/ With thanks to the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery​

http://london.czechcentres.cz/programme/travel-events/miloslav-vojtisek-cemetery-poetry-reading/

The group will meeting at 2pm in front of the Kensal Green Cemetery main gate, near the intersection of Harrow Road and Kilburn Lane http://www.kensalgreencemetery.com/ With thanks to the Friends of Kensal Green Cemetery


Month one in residency at the Hub: Wellcome Collection - February 16th 2015 {#4}

I've got my rhythm now, and finding my purpose amidst the immense possibility of the Hub. Somehow I assumed I would be able to land here and spark collaborations immediately, but what I've realised, being here a few days a week for over a month now, is that's not even desireable, even if it was possible. At root this is because it's still hard for me to comprehend the freedom we have to explore new work on our terms, the real space we have to create interdisciplinary works. Anyway, my work with the Hub is evolving into these areas:

- Some experimental classes that take my martial arts teaching and develop them as wholly process orientated practises, to emphasise the students knowledge of their own bodies possibilities, integrities and corporeal limits / potentials. That is to say these classes will be about motion, mental focus, muscle memory and not about harming other bodies, through the developed exercises and techniques that originate toward the product of hurting bodies. 

- Video art performance pieces of me training, hitting the punchbag so far, and which emphasise the rest periods between this exertion in order to create vistas of human perception when altered by this exertion. A long time preoccupation of mine, this is taking form for me in the realm of video, which is exciting, and at the moment I'm tinkering with making these pieces glitchy and kitsch.

- A new series of collaborative sound poetry performances, called Soundings:
"Soundings in the Reading Room is a series of collaborative avant-garde sonic art & sound poetry performances which will present site-specific writing, composition and performance that explores how noise and silence mediate the relationship between the city and the text, artwork or musical score. Receptive to the unique surroundings of the Wellcome Collection Reading Room, Soundings will be an exploration of the potential poetics of sound amidst city noise and the profound effect it has on our experience of restfulness."

This last one is really an extraordinary platform for me to work with artists I admire in a beautiful new space.

I also helped build a hammock and have made lots of new friends.

Reading American poets at the Whitechapel gallery with Chris McCabe amidst American cinema

This was a really lovely evening, expertly curated by the generous and eloquent Gareth Evans, putting myself and Chris McCabe into a program of some amazing contemporary American experimental cinema, reading American poets. The Whitechapel is always a good place to read, but to have cinema sit up close with poetry, and to be reading work like O'Hara and Starr Hamilton made it feel completely new to me. A very generous feeling between the filmmakers and film curator Jamie Wyld and us too, this is the kind of thing I'm always happy to be doing. 

Kakania at the Horse Hospital - February 19th

Another extraordinary lineup of contemporary artists presenting new works responding to figures of Habsburg Vienna one century ago marks our third Kakania event, this time taking place at the iconic Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, London. A host of artists I am very proud to present, coming from Vienna, Paris, Zagreb & elsewhere just for Kakania. Doors 7pm, for a 7.30 start.
 
Caroline Bergvall on Gustav Klimt
Martin Bakero on Arnold Schoenberg
Colin Herd on Oskar Kokoschka
Marcus Slease on Max Kurzweil
Damir Sodan on Gustav Mahler
Joerg Zemmler on Karl Kraus
Stephen Emmerson on Rainer Maria Rilke
 
Tickets, at £8, on the door, with info available here: http://www.thehorsehospital.com/now/kakania-iii/

More news soon on the launches of the Kakania anthology and Oberwilding: on the life of Oskar Kokoschka, both original publications made for the project, now in print and presented for the first time at the Freud Museum. As well as our last event on March 26th at the Austrian Cultural Forum, who must be thanked for their generous support of this project. www.kakania.co.uk / www.acflondon.org
 
I would also like to draw your attention to the awful news that the Horse Hospital, an endlessly innovative and generous home for avant garde artwork in London, for 20 years now, is in the process of being sold off. There is a campaign against this http://www.thehorsehospital.com/horse-hospital-to-be-sold/ Please support the HH in anyway you can.

1000 Proverbs

The Liverpool Camarade event on Feb 18th 2015 will also serve as the launch for my new collaborative publication, 1000 Proverbs, written with the brilliant Tom Jenks and published by Knives Forks & Spoons press. I've been excited about this for a very long time. Tom and I have read from the work on multiple occasions and every time people seem to enjoy it. It is because he is talented and funny.

Soon the book will be available here: http://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/

& you can see some of the many times Tom & I have shared our proverbial wisdom over the last few years here:

The cover is by the artist Theo Kaccoufa.

Liverpool Camarade - February 18th 2015

I’m happy to announce that on February 18th the Enemies project will travel to Liverpool for a special Camarade event featuring 16 poets. Some of the northwest’s most exciting vanguardists will present brand new collaborations in pairs, written for the night. The event is being co-curated by the Wolf magazine.

Details below, entrance is free but please book using this link:
http://www.eventbrite.com/e/liverpool-camarade-tickets-15406896442

 

 

7.30pm, Wednesday 18th February
Upstairs at the Fly in the Loaf. 13 Hardman Street, Liverpool, Merseyside L1 9AS

Tom Jenks & SJ Fowler
Robert Sheppard & The European Union of Imaginary Authors
Scott Thurston & Steve Boyland
James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar
Patricia Farrell & Joanne Ashcroft
Steve Van Hagen & Michael Egan
Lindsey Holland & Andrew Oldham
Elio Lomas & Luke Thurogood

Please come along to support another Enemies project foray outside of London.

Rottweiler's guide ... reviewed in Poetry London : Spring 2015

Pleased to hear, as a surprise, that Adam Piette reviewed my 2014 collection the Rottweiler's guide to the Dog owner in the latest spring issue of Poetry London. I shan't lie, being attributed Mayakovskian bounce pleases me deeply. I've had Mayakovsky's 'A few words about myself' stuck to my wall, ripped from an anthology, for five years, next to my bed. The opening lines, 'I like to watch children dying,' Anyway, get the new Poetry London, a fine magazine indeed.

http://poetrylondon.co.uk/magazine/spring-15

Test Centre magazine : issue 5

http://testcentre.org.uk/product/test-centre-five/ well pleased to be inside this. my poems wait for you towards the end. they are the end, the buttress, the bookmark, six of them, from my upcoming book {Enthusiasm} which Test Centre are kind enough to be publishing.

The fifth issue of our fiction and poetry magazine, with new work by Test Centre regulars and an exciting selection of contributions from writers published by Test Centre for the first time.

Released in a limited edition of 250 copies, the magazine is A4 and stapled, with cover artwork by A. Selby and H. Dunnell.

Contributors: Sophie Collins, Rachael Allen, Harry Burke, Sam Riviere, Declan Ryan, Patrick Sykes, MC Hyland, Russell Walker, Thurston Moore, Tom Clark, Mark Prince, MacGillivray, Damian Le Bas, Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, Paul Buck, Iain Sinclair, Chris McCabe, Tom Chivers, SJ Fowler.

£8 + p&p. A4. Stab-stapled. 44pp. 250 copies. Cover: A. Selby and H. Dunnell, Untitled, 2014. Printed on Risograph by Studio Operative. Designed by Traven T. Croves.

Lettretage - a conference of literary activists : January 2015

I was properly excited to attend this unique conference of literary organisers and activists, hosted and led by the extraordinary Lettretage - Tom Bresemann, Katharina Deloglu, Moritz Molsch & co, in Berlin, precisely because, absurdly, it seemed wholly focused on the extremely niche thing that I have found myself doing in poetry - that is organisation, curation, innovation, but also something more fundamental than this - the two extensive days of discussion in a room in Kreuzberg were about action. and the possibilities of doing that across Europe, with ambition and energy, while maintaining consideration and ephemeral sensitivity to what literature might be, rather than what it should be.

Lettretage itself is cutting a path for things like the Enemies project. It is doing what I've often inadvertently found myself trying to do. This conference was the best possible example of this, having been around near a decade, Lettretage is now innovating ways to grow and centralise a network of similarly minded people and organisations. They have secured fantastic funding support from creative europe and many others to create a tour of Europe, through their CROWD project and to develop things like an app which will allow visitors to new cities to get 'local' information on readings and performances. Always their emphasis is on the ground up outfits, the artists and curators who are building up from communities and live, contemporary cultures of poetry, literature and performance arts. Rather than shutting up shop after their successes, they are aggressively searching out those who share their mission and their general attitude of openness and innovation.

I have waffled about so many theoretical notions that gel perfectly with their approach, it was genuinely gratifying and made me feel wholly at home visiting them. So I trotted out these ideas again in Berlin - people before poetry, process over product, respect in the world, disrespect in the text... The guerrilla nature of Enemies was brought into sharp focus here, how reactive I am, and how grounded Lettretage and the many other organisers here are in their worlds and communities. I realised London is different place to organise, in a sense wonderful and anonymous and incremental because of its sprawl. The participants here are more rooted, they take responsibility with deeper ties, and all the while they maintain these positions of giving space to mostly avant garde, or contemporary, work and supporting artists while reaching actual people with that work. 

I came across so many artists and organisers I had never met before and felt a genuine kinship with so many of them. I got to know the brilliant Daniela Seel and admire her incredible editorship of Kookbooks, I met the committee from Forumstadtpark in Graz, with the immensely charming Max Hofler leading their poetry program, Andrea Inglese too, who runs Nazione Indiana. Valgerður Þórodds from Reykjavik who has revitalised the poetry scene in Iceland with her ground up, community led, handmade press medgonguljod. Sasha Filyuta, Lily Michaelides & many more - it was such an intense two days, 10 hours of talking and listening back to back, it's not yet really sunk in how the environment was such a gift to someone like me, because really its purpose to was affirm the notion of mindful, self-orientated activity that stakes out the ground of our generations literary spaces. This has always been in my mind curating Enemies, but as an emphemeral notion. Lettretage solidified this idea, gave it back to me in a way.

I'm sure this will be the beginning of many relationships that Lettretage provided me, friendships I would venture to say, and I hope my work intersects with theirs often, for they are lighting a path I want to follow. www.lettretage.de

Reading for the Tomaz Salamun memorial - Feb 3rd

Ales Steger and many other generous souls, very many very close to Tomaz and not having met him in passing as I did arranged for there to be a 11 hour reading in celebration of his life and work at Ljubljana's Miniteater theatre on February 3rd, to which I had the chance to read, via skype. It was strange to do so looking into nothing, through a computer, but in anyway I could contribute I was honoured to do so, to make public my affection for his work and person and life. 

I read two of his poems, Nice hat. Thanks and Frontier. The latter closes with these lines.

Children bring it milk on handcarts
so the co-op pays him for gas.
It exults in rain, when it's needed.
And sunshine, when it suits the grain, not him.
It's free.

Kakania at the Freud Museum - January 22nd 2015

A more beautiful, more fitting setting could not be found for Kakania than the house of Sigmund Freud during his last days in London, now a museum. The Freud Museum showed us the same generosity so many have around the Kakania project and we were allowed to commission five new works, each by a contemporary artist, each taking place in a different room of the house. It's very rare to be able to present works in such a rarified space, one curated so carefully, but also one that maintains a fluency that would us to walk nearly 60 people from room to room on a tour of performances.


​We began with Emily Berry reading beautiful new poems appropriated from Sigmund Freud's beautiful correspondence before moving onto Tom Jenks new conceptual work on Otto Gross, read in the exhibition room, Eros around him. We then moved into Anna Freud's study, where the remarkable performance artist Esther Strauss was asleep on Anna's original couch. Esther had stayed up for a whole day to make herself tired enough to sleep, to dream in Anna's room. It was a mesmerising and unforgettable performance. We then moved downstairs where Dylan Nyoukis resurrected Raoul Hausmann in the dining room before Jeff Hilson finished the event, reading his Wittgenstein poems in the landing. 

A major highlight for me, as the first Kakania had been, as a curator. To be able to work with such a calibre of artists, thanks to the Austrian Cultural Forum's generosity, and to launch our two new original Kakania publications too, it was a satisfying feeling. I've long wanted to perform or organise in the Freud Museum also in fact it was a motivation for me to develop Kakania to work in that space, having had a long relationship with Freud's text. In the light of these artists works, the museum became something new to me, and Im sure the audience too felt this was a special evening.

Thanks to Lili Spain for all her support. Pictures below by Wanda O'Connor.


Stateland: reading Feb 12th at the Whitechapel Gallery

So pleased to be reading some American poetry to tie in with this remarkable screening of contemporary American artist filmmaking. I'll be reading alongside Chris McCabe on the kind invitation of curator and poet Gareth Evans, smashing out some O'Hara & more.
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/stateland-american-artists-filmmaking-now/

Screening some of the most creative and groundbreaking artist-filmmakers from the US; including Laida Lertxundi, Luciano Piazza and Ben Russell plus live poetry readings by Steven J Fowler and Chris McCabe. Curated by Jamie Wyld for Videoclub.

Thursday 12 February, 7 - 9pm Zilkha Auditorium

the Auld Fold! 1st publication of 2015

As part of Kathrine Sowerby's beautiful Four Fold publication series, five of the core touring poets also produced this collaborative poem that was published in January 2015 as the Auld Fold, featuring nick-e melville, Colin Herd, Ryan Van Winkle, Ross Sutherland and SJ Fowler. https://fourdotfold.wordpress.com/

Review of the Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner by Jonathan Catterall in the Wolf magazine : issue 31

Considering the prodigious work of SJ Fowler, I find myself wondering whether I (and the rest of the poetry world) aren’t maybe subject to a brilliant and utterly benign hoax? In the first place surely one man can’t, in four years, with five collections, and hundreds of collaborations, with hundreds more shows, events curated and web-pages written for the leading online magazine 3 AM as its Poetry Editor, not to mention a flourishing mixed martial arts background, a doctoral thesis bubbling under with said Carol Watts, a course in avant-garde poetry he’s just beginning to deliver at the Poetry School, and a job at the British Museum, just be one man? Does he cook too?

And secondly, because try as I might, with antennae quiveringly extended, I can’t, reading his latest collection, The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner, quite grasp many of the poems, the mystery of their underlying principles of construction, or explain to myself, initially at least, why I find them so goddamn superb. Yet finding, occasionally, poems among those impenetrable ones which seem completely transparent in meaning, makes me feel like an idiot who ought to ‘get’ the rest. So let’s wrestle awhile with this Renaissance uomo, this human dynamo, this arch-channeler of the Zeitgeist, setting to one side whether the S and J are identical twins or an entire collective, in deference to a Barthesian insistence on the text(s) being father to the man. In their exquisite phrasing, their ear for the sublime and the ridiculous, their seemingly frictionless absorption not only of the Poundian mien but, according to the Poundian mantra, all human life, Fowler’s poems at their best are jewelled masterpieces, constructions that thrill with endless possibilities and no one dominating as in ‘Unicorn Baby Shower’:

unison singing future family folkbank
a herd of buffalo’s trying to fly is AIDS apparent heir
we’d never go to marry new york when it was enough for
mexico
heat & even the women said she looked beautiful dressed
as curbs of terror
are all the more risk of horror now
DON’T RUIN it

Even the apparent typo of ‘buffalo’s’ here is intriguing as to its purpose, those wayward buffalos being sternly corralled by the capitalised and underlined announcement on one of the frontispiece pages that ‘ALL ERRATA IS INTENTIONAL’ (itself a slyly self-mocking grammatical error).
In tone mandarin, limpid, hard-edged, amused but curiously accepting and resonant, Fowler’s poems are redolent of the early Pound of Lustra, seeming almost to find their subjects as luminous details by the wayside, yet wiped clean of Pound’s belittling scorn and democratised for the twenty-first century. More surreal than Pound though, elements occasionally seem to belong to a decidedly private language. Unlike the approach of Watts, where one is cast straight among the wonderful tendrils of language as if bathing, swimming for a shore that is always shifting, arrived at for just long enough to catch one’s breath, only to recede, I return to the jewel metaphor for Fowler. I think of surfaces, endless reflections. Depths that are found only by living with the jewel-poem and returning to it, until one’s imagination perhaps projects something into the crystalline structure.
                                             Jonathan Catherall