Published : 90 world poets for 90 years Croatian PEN anthology

Very happy to have a poem in a new anthology published by Croatia's branch of PEN.

90 poets for 90 years of Croatian PEN, with works by artists Snjezana Ban, Tanja Skrgatic, Miriam Younis by Editors: Tomica Bajsić, Miroslav Kirin, Damir Šodan

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Poets: Don Paterson, Ron Padgett, Sandeep Parmar, Brian Turner, TJ Dema, Dominik Dombrowski, Jarkko Tontti, Anton García, Rita Dahl, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Valzhyna Mort, Kristin Dimitrova, Ilya Kaminsky, Patrick Cotter, James Byrne, Kim Addonizio, Sandra Cisneros, Martín Espada, Sinéad Morrissey, Milena Ercolani, Jacques Brel, Adam Zagajewski, Eugenijus Ališanka, Wolf Wondratschek, Yu Jian, Jack Mapanje, Joan Batchelor, Josif Brodski, Márcia Theóphilo, Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, Anne Carson, Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Raúl Zurita, José Emilio Pacheco, Najwan Darvish, Tishani Doshi, Xu Hudong, Gabeba Baderoon, Melissa Fry Beasley, Marco Fazzini, Maria Barnas, Tibor Weiner Sennyey, Nathalie Handal, Zbigniew Herbert, Tehila Hakimi, Cláudia Sampaio, Andreia C. Faria, Blanca Wiethüchter, Claribel Alegria, Leonard Cohen, Chiqui Viscoso, Alejandra Pizarnick, Alfonsina Storni, Ernesto Cardenal, Francesca Cricelli, Liesbeth Eugelink, Majlinda Bashllari, Claudia Gabler, Roberto Bolaño, Eugeniusz Kasjanowicz, Easterine Kire, Chenjerai Hove, Moira McAuliffe, George Mario Angel Quintero, Aurélia Lassaque, Rafael Alberti, Roque Dalton, Juan Gelman, Márcia Theóphilo, Shi Tao, Julio Cortázar, Eunice Odio, Manuel Bandeira, Vinicíus de Moraes, Ashraf Fayadh, Kätlin Kaldmaa, Shachar-Mario Mordechai, Yolanda Castaño, Yu Jian, Hans Till, Lim, SJ Fowler, Estevo Creus, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ostap Slyvynsky, Ming Di, Billy Collins.

My new poetry collection - The Wrestlers - due out this summer

I'm happy to say my next poetry collection will be out with Kingston University Press this summer. The Wrestlers brings together poems written over the last five years but finds it origin in a commission I was lucky enough to do for Tate Britain online, thanks to Sarah Victoria Turner - a suite of poems responding to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's eponymous relief and the nine consequent copies.

In a sense these poems, when I wrote them in 2011 and 2012 were a pivotal moment in my writing, a rejection / acceptance of Poundian modernism. Moreover they were about wrestling itself, something that was the primary activity of my childhood and teenage life, as well as the relief, and written upon request, that felt / feel strangely autobiographical (though you wouldn't be able to tell that by reading them).

I've revised these and then added many other works where wrestling has become an action verb in the mechanics of the poems, often just in the title. In a sense wrestling becomes a concept of imposition that acts like a dialectic between ideas or opinions. 

Like my last book, The Guide to Being Bear Aware, I think The Wrestlers is pretty traditionally poetry, its literary, because like my last book, it has come into existence while, organically, I have found other mediums to be the place of my experiments, like in art books, theatre or performance. So my natural instincts have changed too, in poetry, something I'm glad about, to always be changing tastes. If it was those European poets of the post-war new lyric tradition looming over me for my last book, now I'd say it has been a revisitations to pre-war poets which have influenced me. Mallarme, Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, Wat, Cummings have become ghosts in my new book, a bit. Reading them again, seriously, for a second or third time has of course disturbed some bones in my own work.

The book will have a London launch on June 30th at Rich Mix with other readings to follow.

Poems in the collection have been previously published, in one form or another, by Gorse Magazine, Test Centre magazine, 3am magazine, The Wolf, Poems in Which, The Honest Ulsterman, The Bohemyth, Wazogate and the anthologies The Long White Thread: poems for John Berger (Smokestack Books), The Other Room 4, Millets (Zeno Press), Dear World and Everything In It (Bloodaxe Books), Hwaet: Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe Books) and Shifting Ground (J&L Gibbons). It also features the suite Poems in which César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza wrestles Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda) which was commissioned by The Hay Festival : Arequipa, Peru in 2016 and a number of the poems in were created as part of The Green Infrastructure – a residency with landscape architects J&L Gibbons.

A note on: Poem Brut at Writers' Centre Kingston

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One of the things about curating an event is that you are fundamentally responsible for where it takes place. So when you arrive at a venue and it's locked and dark and down an alleyway next to the Thames off Kingston's market square, and it remains so for an hour, right up until people start arriving, you are aware that it might irk those who have made the effort to come out on a thursday night. That being said, as the event was a Poem Brut performance, it did seem to some that it was a deliberate act on my part, a conceptual investigation of what a literary event is. Some thought I planned it so performances would happen in the dark, in the cold, by the river. They were thrown when I walked the entire audience across the town like a grumpy pied piper to a new venue I had rustled up on the spot. To the endless credit of the audience, it seemed to do something positive to the proceedings, bonding people, creating a peripatetic unity. The performances that followed were brilliant, five new works in the poem brut style - challenging and inventing upon the possibilities of literature made live. Ink spitting, dog translations, mannequin pinning and canvas shredding. The poem brut events I have been running have restored my excitement for curating events, which I perhaps do too often, and it was grand to bring this energy to Kingston Uni for the Writers' Centre and the students. I'll do it again for the next year of events, as I realised, as the night unfolded in a rather clinical lecture theatre, that Iris Colomb gobbing ink onto a page and then reading it was perhaps the exact antidote to the lectures that had left there trace in the room. All the videos www.writerscentrekingston.com/poembrut

A note on: Museum of Futures: Scribbling & Scrawling exhibition ends

Another magic engagement with Surbiton's Museum of Futures, a unique community gallery that I've been able to work with through Writers' Centre Kingston and Kingston University. Students, local artists and writers, and those able to travel to the gallery nearby contributed to a brilliant month long exhibition of writing art, aligned with my poem brut project, on the theme of scribbling and scrawling. The work was uniformly good and once more, by taking on the labour of an open submission process, I had the chance to meet a load of talented new people, from Nicole Polonsky to Denise McCullough, there was some real discoveries for me. Moreover my students had the chance to see their work walled for the first time, and help me, significantly, in the curation of the show and it's events.

www.writerscentrekingston.com/futures lots more about the exhibition on the site, as well as the launch event here www.writerscentrekingston.com/making

A note on: performing for Club Alpbach at the Austrian Embassy

A more beautiful setting i have never performed within. The performance I was asked to present was in response to a set of carefully crafted questions that discussed the nature, and the future, of Europe, as a political project, and what it means to be European. This was an invitation from Club Alpbach http://www.clubalpbachlondon.eu/ who "want to create a space for a better Europe - Club Alpbach London hosts participatory events with leading changemakers from all sectors and awards scholarships to young people to attend the European Forum Alpbach, both in the spirit to address the most relevant social and political questions of our time." Hmmm a strange place for me to be, the fact that it was in a gorgeous victorian embassy was the least of it. Rather the feeling of it being political, professionally so, was fascinating. Either extraordinary fit and attractive young people, who looked like that had been engineered for a future europe, or elderly people scowling at me, or going on. There were canapes and dresses and I felt an imposter. The young all studied PPE or were art student friends of those studying PPE. It was all curiosly intense.

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The quite brilliant young curator Josef Huber had quite clearly invited me and my performance counterpart Daria Blum so that we would put the cat amongst the pigeons. Daria performed at eurobitch and so the freshness of any real shock was gone when I followed her. I did the second of what Im calling Powerpoint Performances, which are 70% improvised, so frightening, but also effective, if they go well. I poured through slides I had written on the day essentially satirising the philosophical fallacies beneath such open questions about europe and european identity, not being fair in a way, but perhaps too being quite satirical and cutting. Enough that people felt cut, at times. I got a few laughs, which Im not sure is good or bad, but clearly left an impression, even if it was one mediated by my britishness, though I did mention brexit relentlessly. This was followed by a Q&A which meandered and perhaps evidenced my initial response to the lofty ambitions of the event itself. But better it happened than did not, and once more my stupid performances allowed me entrance into a world that would've been forever closed to me.

A note on : May 11th at Burley Fisher books with Toby Litt

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Part of a new series of events I'll be doing around a new book I have out this year, this May 11th I'll be speaking at Burley Fisher books for the first time, talking about wrestling, and celebrating the release of Toby Litt's memoir Wrestliana

http://burleyfisherbooks.com/event/wrestliana-toby-litt-in-conversation-with-steven-j-fowler/

"Using the nineteenth century as a guide, Wrestliana asks vital questions about modern-day masculinity, competition, and success. It is a beautiful portrait of two men and their different worlds, full of surprises and sympathy, and a wonderful evocation of a lost place and time." https://www.galleybeggar.co.uk/shop-1/wrestliana

Published: Philip Venables' Below the Belt

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Delighted to have my poetry featured on the debut album from composer Philip Venables. Phil and I worked on a piece for the London Sinfonietta's blue touch paper scheme some years back, it explored boxing and fistic percussion, entitled The Revenge of Miguel Cotto. 

You can listen to five excerpts from our collaboration https://www.nmcrec.co.uk/recording/below-belt

Phil has created some remarkable work since we worked together so it's grand to revisit this project through this CD and I'm really pleased it has a second life forevery on disc http://philipvenables.com/2018/02/06/below-the-belt/

A note on : Poem Brut reviewed on Tentacular Magazine

Lovely to have this write up of my poem brut project appear on Tentacular Magazine, recounting some of the issues of the series on 3am magazine https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere-blog/brut

The sparkling Poem Brut

Poem Brut is a colourful and stimulating celebration of what lies at the intersection of the poetic page and the artwork.  Curated by SJ Fowler, it’s a series of events, exhibitions, and publications – but here I’ll focus on some of the 29 works (so far) represented online in 3am magazine. 

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What’s impressive is the reach of the community that Fowler has assembled and is playing an important part in creating, from Tallinn to Toronto and Trinidad.  Trinidad is the source of Andre Bagoo’s compelling ‘Scarlet Ibis’, where the placing of bright red rectangles over what we might assume to be lines of experimental text seems such a simple act, but invests the page with an animate quality, a jauntiness and inscrutability that may or may not be features of Trinidad and Tobago’s national bird. The work compels a kind of double longing, both for the text beneath, and for the identity and energy of pure colour, in what may also be a metaphor for (resistance to) the blood and erasure of a colonial past.........."

A note on: Poem Brut at Rich Mix III was a powerful night

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The third poem brut event I've held at Rich Mix continues the project's momentum, and in so doing, keeps restoring my faith in the concept which motivates these live happenings - that is, if we concern ourselves with the actual material of live performance, time / space / aliveness / physical presence etc..., what possibilities are there for the poem to become itself, and not some hackneyed, overtly controlled syphoning of experience into language? I had become, in a slight way, slightly overly familiar with the events I had been curating, it's why I instigated Poem Brut after years of The Enemies Project, and nights like this, communal, friendly, busy with people (nearly 100 in attendance again), led by particularly wide ranging and challenging work, keep my heart afloat that this is work that needs doing. The positivity from the audience and participants really meant a lot to me, really made me consider carefully what it is I've tried to build and what I should do in the future.

We had poets visiting from Trinidad, Berlin, Estonia, Austria, America and it was gratifying they all said they had never experienced an event like this before. All the performances can be viewed https://www.poembrut.com/richmix3

Poem Brut is an exploration of poetry and colour, handwriting, composition, abstraction, scribbling, and illustration, affirming the possibilities of the page, the pen, the pencil - in a computer age - generating over a dozen events, multiple exhibitions, workshops, conferences and publications.  3am magazine, a partner in the project, is also running open call for new works that fit within the tradition

A note on: English PEN Modern Literature Fest III was a grand night

The third time I have curated this mini-fest alongside / for English PEN, whereby contemporary English writers present works written in tribute to a writer who is part of the Writer's at Risk programme, writers living under oppression around the world. http://www.englishpen.org/ This time we slightly scaled down the rather grand one day festivals of past years, bringing it to Kingston and the historic All Saints Church, as part of my Writers Centre Kingston programme.

8 authors presented pieces of writing, some new, some from past years. The spirit was one of considered celebration, of sadness, in places, of frustration, but moving beyond the somewhat stifling requirement at the heart of the event, asking authors who are generally safe and sound to speak about those who are not, and who are not because they chose, in most cases, to refuse silence. This contradiction has often led to overloading, with writers unable to express themselves, stopped up by a kind of shame. But in a more intimate setting, with a group students, volunteers and local people watching on, this felt more like a community taking note, making sure there was something, instead of nothing, to mark out those suffering were being thought of. All the videos are here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos

A real highlight for me this year is that it spawned Kingston University's first Student PEN Centre, led by Alan Boyce. I'm happy to say this relationship will continue and next year's English PEN festival will be just as good I'm sure.

There's a nice report of the event here too, by Tice Cin https://www.englishpen.org/campaigns/english-pen-modern-literature-festival-2018/ 

They event featured MONA ARSHI FOR ZEHRA DOGAN / TONY WHITE FOR AHMED NAJI / HELEN PALMER FOR ME NAM / SARA UPSTONE FOR DAWIT ISAAK / ADAM BARON FOR CAN DÜNDAR & ERDEM GÜL / PRUDENCE CHAMBERLAIN FOR  PATIWAT SARAIYAEM & PORNTHIP MUNKHONG / ELEY WILLIAMS FOR TSERING WOESER / DAVID SPITTLE FOR AHMEDUR RASHID CHOWDHURY

Writers poets, novelists, playwrights and artists come together to continue English PEN's relationship with innovative contemporary literature. Each of the ten British writers will present poetry, text, reportage, performance on the day. The new works celebrate and evidence the struggle of fellow writers around the world, in solidarity.

The event is intended as a call to membership for writers, artists and readers in a time where we face perilous challenges to our freedom of expression and fundamental rights and hard fought liberties, both internationally and here in the UK. As the world changes so remarkably, and so rapidly, and on a global scale, it is vital the political will of our time and this generation of young, dynamic writers is directed purposefully to the work of English PEN, the writer's charity. The hope is this festival, away from creating new members of PEN, begins involvements and connections which will have exponential resonance for decades to come. www.theenemiesproject.com/englishpen  Curated by SJ Fowler and Cat Lucas.

Please join English PEN You can join English PEN here http://www.englishpen.org/membership/join/ and if you are a writer, poet, artist, or someone who is passionate about defending our fundamental freedom of expression in the UK and around the world, please take the time to do so and become a part of the future of this extraordinary organisation.

European Poetry Festival is launched

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www.europeanpoetryfestival.com

April 5th to April 14th 2018
over 50 poets from 24 European nations
9 events in 10 days

THE EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2018 BRINGS TOGETHER SOME OF THE FINEST LITERARY AND AVANT-GARDE POETS OF THIS GENERATION, TO LONDON AND ACROSS THE UK, TO COLLABORATE, PERFORM AND SHARE THE BRILLIANCE OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Programme  Click the event for further information : All events are free to attend

April Thursday 5th : European Poetry at Writers' Centre Kingston : Rose Theatre 
Opening the festival by the River Thames with readings from nearly a dozen European poets.

April Saturday 7th : The European Camarade : Rich Mix
The grand event of the festival. 30 poets in 15 pairs present brand new collaborations made for the night.

April Sunday 8th : Performance Literature & Sound Poetry : Parasol Unit
Celebrating innovation in live literature with new solo performances by a dozen of Europe's most considerable avant-garde poets.

April Monday 9th : Lithuanian Poetry in collaboration : The Poetry Cafe
Lithuanian and British poets collaborate and share new works at the home of The Poetry Society in London, joined by many other festival poets.

April Tuesday 10th : Versopolis poets in focus : London Bookfair
Lithuanian and British poets celebrate the pan-European poetry platform and review, Versopolis.

April Wednesday 11th : Polyphonic at Romanian Cultural Institute
A multimedia poetry show celebrating the Centenary of Greater Romania with readings by ten of the most talented Romanian poets.

April Thursday 12th : Austrian Poetry in collaboration : Austrian Cultural Forum
Austrian and British poets collaborate and share new works just off Hyde Park in the heart of London, joined by many other festival poets

April Friday 13th : The European Camarade in Liverpool
The festival leaves London and presents a night of new collaborations between poets local to Liverpool and those visiting from across Europe.

April Saturday 14th : The European Camarade in Middlesbrough : MIMA
The festival closes in the North East of England, where once more European poets will present collaborations with their English counterparts, many local to the area.

Poets presenting at the festival in 2018 :
Max Hofler, Daniela Chana, Robert Prosser (Austria), Damir Sodan (Croatia), Tomas Pridal (Czech Republic), Helianne Kallio (Finland), Iris Colomb (France), Rike Scheffler, Dagmara Kraus (Germany), Theodoros Chiotis, Astra Papachristodoulou, Katerina Koulouri (Greece), Erik Lindner, Hannah van Binsbergen (Holland), Kinga Toth, Orsolya Fenyvesi, George Szirtes (Hungary), Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (Iceland), Christodoulos Makris, Ailbhe Darcy (Ireland), Alessandro Burbank, Livia Franchini, Serena Braida, Giovanna Coppola (Italy), Sergej Timofejev, Inga Pizane (Latvia), Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Marius Burokas, Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (Lithuania), Jon Ståle Ritland, Endre Ruset, Henriette Hjorthen Støren, Vilde Valerie Torset (Norway), Simona Nastac (Romania), Olga Kolesnikova (Russia), Colin Herd (Scotland), Ana Seferovic (Serbia), Martin Solotruk (Slovakia), Muanis Sinanovic (Slovenia), Daniele Pantano (Switzerland), Anastasia Mina (Cyprus) Harry Man, John Clegg, Jen Calleja, SJ Fowler, Helen Michael, Simon Pomery (UK) and more...

European Poetry Festival is curated by SJ Fowler

The Written Eye : The Photographer's Gallery

The Written Eye : a course exploring Poetry & Photography
https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/whats-on/course/the-written-eye
Wednesdays 25 April - 30 May, 18.30 - 20.30
in The Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 2LW

I'm delighted to be teaching a brand new course that explores the post-war traditions of modern photography and avant-garde poetry in both practice and concept in one of the world's foremost institutions of photographic art.
 
From the course description - "As forms of artistic expression, both poetry and photography are apt to convey a narrative or story without certainty or mere description. However both the poetic and the photographic are often still perceived as a solitary acts, occurring in isolation. This course will reveal the connections, potentials and co-habitations of poetry and photography, where collaboration both enhances each medium and evokes what makes them so uniquely compelling.  
 
Participants will discover poets from around the world and many photographers who have exhibited at The Photographer’s Gallery as the course covers ideas surrounding composition, language, light, sound, space, printing, narrative and writing, revealing how these practises are fundamental to both arts. Collaborations between the mediums, from Dada to John Berger and Jean Mohr, will be shared and analysed throughout.
 
Sessions are based within galleries themselves and participants will have the chance to engage directly with concurrent exhibitions … and be offered the opportunity to publish their own Poetic / Photographic works on Viewpoints, the galleries online blog. 
 
Primarily a practice-based course, complimented with discussion and theory, this course will offer anybody interested in the visual or literary a chance to develop their own skills and understanding of new and original ways of simultaneously seeing and reading."

Email stevenjfowler@yahoo.co.uk with any questions.

A note on: The University Camarade III was brilliant

A very special evening at the rich mix, the third time ive put this event together, with students from all over the UK. As ever, collaboration absolutely engenders friendships while producing challenging, idiosyncratic poetry. The students involved were universally excellent, brave, bold and the evening left a real impression on the audience, and I think, I hope, on the rest of their poetry / writing / performing lives. I believe sincerely that opportunity is what shapes people's journey and growth, and this event gives people young in their experience a real urge to go into new spaces. 

I was especially content with the showing of my students, who we and are markedly their own, which is all I want from them, to expand and explore their own paths, with some erratic guidance www.theenemiesproject.com/unicamarade / www.writerscentrekingston.com/richmix

Published: Animal Waste

Animal Waste : The second of a set of five cinema-poetic collaborations with the artist-filmmaker Joshua Alexander.

Animal Waste spreads itself over the lands of London which seem to have inspired a re-understanding of the city's literary and psychological history, from Limehouse to Wapping, Rotherhithe to Ratcliff. Mutely nodding to this profound and now taken for granted reexamination of these once were slums, Animal Waste sets itself against the confident and touristic glean of that history, instead aligning itself with the suffering sediment of the actual past. Shot around Wellclose Sq and Hawksmoor's St Anne's, and hiding from the Thames, the film evokes Falk, Swedenborg, Linneaus in all their intelligent menace.

'Manichean visions revive disputed and despoiled London ground. Poetry in light and stone' Iain Sinclair

The animal films explore the particular, baffled and morbid character of English attitudes to mortality, along with the specific influence of place and conformity on the quintessentially English deferral of emotion and melodrama. The films aim to capture the ambiguous menace of an often accidentally humorous resolve, manner, apology and understatement so prevalent in the English character. 

Published: a subcritical test in Poetry Ireland

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Trumpet Issue 7 / Winter 2017/18
Roger McGough celebrates the fiftieth birthday of The Mersey Sound, still one of the best-selling poetry anthologies of all time; Duke Special writes about putting Michael Longley to music. Máighréad Medbh uses fragments of the everyday to compose her poem 'The 2nd of April'; Noel Duffy explores the literary device which makes a poem quintessentially a poem: the line break. Grace Wilentz reviews six of the best pamphlets;  John W Sexton reviews The Poetry of Pop. Other contributors include Tara Bergin, Sue Rainsford, Aifric Mac Aodha, Elaine Cosgrove, Ailbhe Darcy and SJ Fowler.  

http://www.poetryireland.ie/publications/trumpet/current-issue/

Published: Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire

I'm happy to announce the release of my new art book, from Hesterglock Press, released in limited-edition hardback first-print of just 40 copies, 20 of which have sold so far. The book is available to purchase here - Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire from my bigcartel page.

"A book that asks, abstractly, are letters shaped like bodies? Can words evoke faces, captured in a screen? Who, or what, is assimilating, who or what? Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is a collection of art poems, hand wrought in black, grey, silver and white, fashioned with indian ink, paint and pen, worked with techniques that edge around writing, vying with abstraction, constantly harrying semantic meaning and legibility. 

Five years in the making, conceptually this is a book about sex, poetry and pornography and the disconnect between the former and the latter. These pages explore technology in its absence and aim to evidence the power of materiality and the body, and our hands, that are still required for touch."

"Searching AOAE online (Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire) shows a YouTube clip of Japanese cats mating. What's a word in any case if not a monster? A monster that eats words. The toner explodes on the office carpet spilling out a perfectly formed oeuvre. Serifs skywrite like migrating gannets. The rorschach accidentally tells you what to think. The printed facsimile becomes original when the world goes JavaScript. The dollar sign is a duck walking backwards into a lake. The ATM dispenses glyphs. How do we know people have faces when they take the day off work? The tank rolls over the charcoal leaving a map of Iraq or a new version of Cathay. We're back in the world of Artaud's final journal where, thank fuck (and at last) we're not being told what to think. Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is an almighty triumph, a well-earned relief. Picasso said it took a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Or, for that matter, like the mad." Chris McCabe

A note on: reading boxing poems at Cambridge University

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A resonant experience on multiple levels, I had the chance to read at Cambridge Uni thanks to Oliver Goldstein and his Sweet Science event in the Faculty of English. It was another entry in my experience of a small, welcoming community of writers and poets who care passionately about the sport and aim to reflect it in works as complex as the culture itself. Oliver is one of the world's leading boxing journalists and really fine poet, and as well he and I, there were multiple excellent readers and a really healthy and interested audience. Discerning you'd expect, but friendly with it too. I read some poems from an upcoming book, a sequel to my 2011 Fights, entitled Rematches, due out with Kingston University Press this year. I also got the chance to pop a balloon with a left hook. 

Perhaps the most unexpected highlight was meeting a cambridge english undergrad who told me they were doing their dissertation on my work. A first, as far as I know, and actually really warming and encouraging, it actually really touched me. It's very easy to feel one is wasting time, serving my own interests and no one gives a shit (which is true) but then a small thing like that happens, and you feel less in a bubble.

Published: Liberating the Canon anthology ed. Isabel Waidner

So nice to be included in this anthology, with a piece of fiction, never seen the light of day before, which is part of my Museum series. https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/experiments/liberating_the_canon

Liberating the Canon is an edited anthology capturing the contemporary emergence of radically innovative and nonconforming forms of literature in the UK and US. Historically, sociopolitical marginalisation and avant-garde aesthetics have not come together in UK literature, counterintuitively divorcing outsider experience and formal innovation. Bringing together intersectional identity and literary innovation, LTC is designed as an intervention against the normativity of literary publishing contexts and the institution 'Innovative Literature' as such. More widely, if literature, any literature, can act as a mode of cultural resistance and help imagine a more progressive politics in Tory Britain and beyond, it is this.

Contributors

Edited by Isabel Waidner, Liberating the Canon includes contributors working at the intersections of prose, poetry, art, performance, indie publishing and various subcultural contexts:

Mojisola Adebayo, Jess Arndt (US), Jay Bernard, Richard Brammer, Victoria Brown, SJ Fowler, Juliet Jacques, Sara Jaffe (US), Roz Kaveney, R. Zamora Linmark (US), Mira Mattar, Seabright D.Mortimer, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Rosie Snajdr, Timothy Thornton, Isabel Waidner, Joanna Walsh and Eley Williams.

272 pages
ISBN: 978-1999924508
Dimensions: 5 x 8 inches
Cat No: DW-391

A note on: first commissions up on The European Review

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So far executive editing The European of Poetry, Books and Culture is pleasant pleasant, working with some really remarkable writers to shape new pieces. Online already are articles by the authors below, all of whom have produced really striking pieces, with dozens in the pipeline.

A note on: latest poetry on 3am magazine

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It's been a good time to be getting submissions for 3am's poetry section. Seems what I've been trying to do over the years has stuck a little, and so much of the work I'm getting is brilliant. So more than usual has been published, and this is in no small part down to the Poem Brut and Duos series, being the only poetry I'm accepting at the mo. As ever there's a big backlog, so much more to come soon. Since September 2017...