Struga was my 51st poetry festival outside of engerland and often ive returned wishing I had documented these experiences better, being as they are often so idiosyncratic. I finally invested a bit of time in making a minidoc supercut of such a trip and Im quietly happy with the result. It captures just a touch of what it was like to be there.
A note on: Struga Poetry Festival travelogue
This can be read in it's entirety here www.stevenjfowler.com/struga (it's quite long but I hope worth a read...)
"With the opportunity to give the last reading of the festival, in Skopje's Daut Pasha Hamam, I said that I’ve had nearly 2000 weeks on the planet and this week was up there with the best. Embarrassed by the week behind me, I told the truth. 56 Struga festivals before us, behind me.
A week in Macedonia. The Struga Poetry Nights. Translucent time, hectic, furious but also gentle, diaphanous. This kind of altered rhythm of consciousness descends, a dislocated holiday from reality, a soft military excursion for poetry. The ether turned up, like a week on whippets.
The overriding feeling, reflecting upon it, a few days out, is about the sensation of sincerity without sentimentality that so marked the Macedonians running and steering the ship, and how that permeated into some really wonderful poets / poems / people / experiences.
Pedigree, an extraordinary history, coming into being during the early 60s and extending Yugoslavia’s idiosyncratic connections to independent post-colonial states and a myriad of political allies outside the Russia / US binary. Struga poetry is in Macedonia something that we in the UK do not have. It's important. I'm really happy to be invited, because not many english poets are, because its a cauldron of tradition that I feel bonded too. Global poetry. A friend who has been who has heard I'm invited tells me when he was invited it made the 2nd page of the national newspaper. In England not a single soul will notice. Good. All the better. Monkey in the shadows."
A note on: 4 of 8 performances in Struga
I gave 8 performance readings in 7 days in Macedonia. Below are 4 of them.
A note on: pics from Struga
Struga poetry nights is one of the world's biggest and oldest poetry festivals, which I'm super happy to have attended and performed at. Some beautiful piccies here from the in house photographers of me doing things.
Published: a poem a week Ep.33 - 'Old time wrestles New time'
so lovely to be part of lizzy palmer and david turner to feature me in the 33rd episode of their elegant succinct podcast, a poem a week, with a poem from my newish book The Wrestlers.
For more from them visit: lunarpoetrypodcasts.com/ www.facebook.com/apoemaweekpodcast
twitter.com/apoemaweek
A note on: The sex lost in Porn - an article on Versopolis
The theme of August on the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is sex and pornography. http://www.versopolis.com/column/656/the-sex-that-s-lost-in-porn
I have the same attitude toward a plot of the usual type as a dentist to teeth.
I built the book on a dispute between people of two cultures; the events mentioned in the text serve only as material for the metaphors.~
This is a common device in erotic things, where real norms are repudiated and metaphoric norms affirmed. Viktor Shklovsky, Zoo
It is impossible to track the increased frequency of masturbation through human history into the 21st century. But it is likely that it is at its most frequent in human history. It has to be. Even the most self-loving ancestor of ours, be they 100,000 or 10,000, or 200 years in the past, could not have possibly imagined the kind of sexual stimulation that immediate and unlimited access to pornography provides the average person. There are, of course, more humans than ever before, the world population has doubled since 1970, and in western societies, more people are without a partner than ever before, in context. These are grounds on which we must think of pornography and its ubiquitous but resolutely underground presence.
....
Pornography wants waste. It may be just watched. It may be something other to those who make it. It may tax the senses of those who use into ineffectiveness. It may permeate mainstream ideas and culture, though far less than people say. It may be a force for whatever moralising or shifting nihilism that breezes through too much theoretical consideration. But what it is, in all it’s remove, vivacity, anger, necessity, absurdity, sorrow and energy is a mirror. Perhaps literally, a computer screen reflecting the figure of human, spread legged or hunched over, trying not to see themselves and their own desire, placing it elsewhere, in pieces, in the past, into the excess of other bodies. Pornography need not insist upon itself then, it is the fantastical growth from the part of ourselves we are as ready to deny now as in anytime during our western past. It is an answer, not a question.
A note on: work in some upcoming anthologies
- We'll never have Paris, edited by Andrew Gallix for Repeater books - I've new short fiction in this anthology, entitled Laisse Tomber. It's an ode to Patrick Modiano in a sense, fragmented, open, about memories of being unhappy in that city. https://repeaterbooks.com/
- Battlalion, edited by Kirsty Irving and Jon Stone for Sidekick books - Some new artworks about bats and their charming personalities. http://sidekickbooks.com/booklab/
- Wretched Strangers, edited by JT Welsch and Agi Lehoczky for Boiler House Press- This one has just arrived or is about to be, collecting new poems that reflect or represent the experience of those estranged by england's divorce from its own continent. My poem is about the ubiquity of loneliness https://www.boilerhouse.press/wretched-strangers
- Queen Mob’s Teahouse anthology edited by Russell Bennetts and Erik Kennedy for Dostoyevsky Wannabe - I've a visual brut poem in this one, that celebrates the brilliant online journal. https://queenmobs.com/
- Counternarratives: an anthology of Experimental Writing edited by Lee Rourke for Dead Ink - new short fiction in this one. https://deadinkbooks.com/
A note on: the 57th Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia
I'm happy as a pig to have been invited to one of the world's oldest and most prestigious poetry festivals, Struga in Macedonia, starting in a few weeks time. Struga has been going since the early 60s and has had some of my poetry heroes amongst its attendees and its golden wreath award is seen as one of the top things an international poet can receive, with Auden, Brodsky, Ginsberg, Neruda, Montale, Senghor, Enzensberger, Adonis, Krleža, Amichai, Heaney and Tranströmer all having got it. Obviously I'm not getting that, it's Adam Zagajewski, but I am one of about 25 poets who got invited this year chosen from every country on the planet. Though that puts me in a group of probably around 1500 alumnus poets over the last 50 years, I think only a dozen or so have been English. I know Tom Raworth was one. Ted Hughes. Anyway it's validating in the way that means most to me, that my work is considered outside of any specific Circles, that it has a little bit of run in the world. My friend in Norway told me when he was invited it made the second page of the national newspaper. In the UK, no one will ever know that I have been invited. Not that I'm complaining, it's actually a great gift to me, to be able to do my own thing with poetry and not be fundamentally anonymous, even if I am a bit in my home nation. I sit in a quiet middle space which allows for more room in both directions. I'll get to spend 8 days by Lake Ohrid meeting great poets from all over the planet. Such things are very rare experiences.
A note on : my Lego concrete poem on Typeroom magazine
http://www.typeroom.eu/article/twenty-things-you-must-know-about-concrete-and-visual-poetry
I must have missed this brilliant article from Typeroom.eu a few years ago when the amazing New Concrete anthology arrived. It includes my Lego poem that I made on the night of that anthologies launch, live, in front of the audience. It also includes...."13. futura then futura now; Hansjörg Mayers’ publishing projects in the early ‘60s included prints, portfolios, books and the broadside series futura which featured his own work and that of many major practitioners of concrete poetry at the time - all set in the Futura typeface. Antonio Claudio Carvalho has recreated this series of broadsides under the name p.o.w – prisoners opposed to war, featuring The New Concrete contributors Roel Goussey, Chris McCabe, Sophie Herxheimer, Nick-e Melvile, Sam Winston, Simon Barraclough, Tom Jenkins, SJ Fowler, Hansjorg Mayer, Victoria Bean, Augusto de Campos, Peter Finch and Julie Johnstone."
A note on : Michael Jacobsen reviews two of my Poem Brut books
"Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is the more unreadable of the two. It contains mostly black and white asemic writing with the occasional "Picasso" blue page of asemic script. The art/writing has a storm like quality to it with lightning bolts of asemic writing. Other pages seem to contain illegible asemic animal tracks, and still others remind me of Morse code birch bark dashes. This book's main focus and general theme is the raw erotic power of creation of an excelled asemic mythology. AOAE is presented in a fine hardcover volume by Hesterglock Press and is limited to 40 copies.
I Fear My Best Work Behind Me is the slightly more legible of the two and is more colourful than Aletta. It has a spring-like playfulness and joy bringing qualities that makes me think of an asemic Kenneth Patchen crossed with finger painted art. There are a few more recognizable drolleries such as a deer's head and a crab, and the skulls on the cover art, but most of the text/art is nebulous. Fowler has acknowledged the influence of Christian Dotremont and Henri Michaux in this book, but from these predecessors he has developed his own calligraphic style and signature. The publisher Stranger Press has taken Steven's work and made an admirable codex which I will treasure.
Both works offer an excellent introduction to Steven J. Fowler's personal raw art poetry. This is Poem Brut in its finest form, a term I believed coined by Steven to describe the outsider poetry not created with a computer. It is refreshing to read/hold these handwritten books since they offer a respite and rest from the bloated techno-culture. Asemic books prove that we are not robots; they are the ultimate captcha. It is invigorating to read through these two works in a time when everything is being digitized, to have these two beautiful works of resistance now is essential. Find these books and you will know."
A note on: my selected Scribbling in Cordite magazine article
Tim Gaze is a visual and avant garde poet whose work I have followed for some years though we've not been in touch. I was therefore happy indeed that his recent article in Australia's Cordite magazine, which covers the gammut for Asemic poetry's entire purpose and history, mentions my selected scribbles, just before Michaux - http://cordite.org.au/essays/punk-calligraphy/
"Steven J Fowler’s Selected Scribbling and Scrawling (ZimZalla, 2018) is a collection of what Fowler calls ‘scrawlpoems, scribblepoems, asemic poems, pansemic poems, doodle poems and other messes’. His scribbliness is less extreme than some of the others listed above, and reminds me of handwritten visual poetry by the likes of Carlfriedrich Claus, Robert Corydon and Edgard Braga. Fowler takes handwriting for a run, and sometimes lets it off the leash."
Scribble can be bought from ZimZalla https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-selected-scribbling-and-scrawling/
Published: 4 poems on Asemics.com
One of the net's key hubs for Asemic poetry and writing, edited by the brilliant Michael Jacobson, has generously published 4 of my #poembrut works, 2 taken from Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire and 2 taken from I fear my best work behind me. both limited edition and available on those links
A note on : my page with Polimekanos design agency
I've had the pleasure with with the team at Polimekanos design agency on three occasions now, each time through my work with the austrian cultural forum. Three books we've produced together, my content and editorial work with their design, and in that intersection, I've learnt alot from them. On their site now there is a page where all three books are beautifully presented with sample pages and scans. It's well worth a look around their other projects too http://www.polimekanos.com/steven-j-fowler/
A note on: writing the intro to Federico Federici's Pithecanthropus Erectus...
This is a beautiful book of brilliant visual poems by one of Europe's most interesting writers. I was very happy to be asked by Federico to write an introductory text for the book, not so much a traditional lead but a creative text that opens the book. Federico has accurately described his work as a asemic note/sketchbook based on Charles Mingus' Pithecanthropus Erectus masterpiece. I highly recommend you buy it here
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/024499904X/
"The work is remarkable precisely because it works in a graceful, familiar space to do often stark and unfamiliar things. Like jazz that absorbs sound. This feels to me a faithful act towards listening and the intention towards possibility and inspiration. The roll, the smudge, the dead signature. The cut in the scrawl. The squig. The line, cards and bled ink. Sounds on paper." - SJ Fowler
and visit http://federicofederici.net/libri/
A note on: reading at Torriano
This was a really pleasant evening, what I wish readings always were - personal, unpretentious, lots of people I hadn't met before. People listened, chatted without snarkiness, were generous. The people who go to Torriano, given it has been going so long, seem to be local and connected to the space and it's past. I was welcomed by Susan Johns, who has run the Torriano with the late John Rety (whose work is legend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rety) since 1982 before meeting old friends like Robert Vas Dias. The readings from the floor were short and sharp, well appreciated as to avoid the oft quag of open mics, and then all the poets gave really engaging recitals, a beneficial contrast between Linda, Lynne and Russell.
This was what I think will be my last pseudo launch of my new book The Wrestlers and felt fitting, given that I am now a local to the Torriano and intend to return regularly. The night ended with my chewing the ear off of many who had come who lived nearby for decades upon decades and who shared with me a potted history of where I now live. For this alone, this was a memorable, intimate evening
Published: Bubble comb up on Perverse
Chrissy Williams has recently started a brilliant and innovative new journal / e-mag endeavour entitled Perverse. It's a really engaged, open, direct, clever, complex way of sharing and reading poems, typical of Chrissy's work. I'm very happy to be in the latest issue, 1c, with some grand poets, and to feature a visual work which will be part of my last Poem Brut book, Memoirs of a Hypocrite, due out in November with Hesterglock press. Click the link or sign up below to comb my bubble.
"Perverse 1C - Nelson / Moore / Gross / Fowler / O’Loughlin
Welcome to issue 1C of Perverse! There's a slightly different type of perversity at work in some of these poems than we've seen in the others. I hope you enjoy them. As before, these poems are best read sideways on a phone, or else as usual on a computer screen. You can also save them as a single PDF here if you like. (You'll find the previous micro issues here.)
Contributor Note on ‘The Bubble Comb’:
“'The Bubble Comb' is part of a book of art poetry, Memoirs of a Hypocrite (Hesterglock Press), which is part of a series of publications entitled www.poembrut.com It is about the potential poetic possibilities of handwriting, material, colour and composition meeting the semantic meaning of the written word.”
Please forward this email on to anyone who might like it - they can use the link below to sign up for future issues and updates:
http://tinyletter.com/perverse
Website (with an archive of previous issues):
http://perversepoetry.tumblr.com
A note on: The European Poetry Festival returns with a Camarade in October
October Saturday 13th 2018 : The European Camarade : Rich Mix, London
A standalone celebration of collaborative poetry, bringing together over a dozen pairs of European poets to present brand new collaborations as a mid point event between festivals
The European Camarade - October 13th 2018 at Rich Mix, London
35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA : 7.30pm - Free Entry
Poets from nearly 20 European nations present brand new collaborative performances, in pairs, with works made especially for the night.
Livia Franchini & Orsolya Fenyvesi / Krišjānis Zeļģis & Nadia de Vries / Serena Braida & Iris Colomb / SJ Fowler & Diamanda Dramm / George Ttoouli & Theodoros Chiotis / Tatiana Faia & Agnieszka Studzinka / Anastasia Mina & Helen Michael / Astra Papachristodoulou & Ellie Tsatsou / Karin Hendersen & Elvire Roberts / Bob Dela & Christian Patracchini / Flora Nicholson & Simona Nastac / Harry Man & James Parkin / Eva Tomkuliakova & TBC / Haris Psarras & TBC
A note on: Wrestling as movement for Vital Signs
I had the pleasure of spending a day at Salford University working with Scott Thurston and Sarie Slee in a rather unique role, as a kind of consultant, sharing wrestling techniques and movement aesthetics to compliment a long term dance/poetry collaboration they have been developing, which will be performed at Moving Words, a festival in Salford this November. I have always tried to keep these two areas of interest - wrestling and poetry - separate, for many reasons, most of all that they are entirely incompatible aside from in the most banal way (a poem about wrestling for example) but in this case the experience was not only really fun and open and playful, but also I think a gift to me as a route into movement as a concept and possible practise. I have used wrestling and martial arts movement in a few collaborations as a way of interrogating the poetry audience's proximity, perhaps most well known would be my work with zuzana husarova, but never considered movement or dance itself something I could explore, even though friends like Scott, Sarah Kelly, Christian Patracchini and others have done so in a really inspiring way. I think this long lovely day, where I shared hours of wrestling ideas, might be a beginning for me, somehow. A note from Scott below: http://www.vital-signs.org/vital-signs-wrestling-with-steven-fowler/
"Today we were delighted to welcome the prolific writer and artist Steven Fowler, whom Scott has known on the UK poetry scene for many years, having been involved in a number of the extraordinary international collaborative projects that Steven has made his name curating. Steven has the distinction of having practised wrestling since the age of three, and it was this expertise – as well as his knowledge of and commitment to poetry -- that led us to invite him to Salford. As our theme of ‘wrestling truth’ has taken hold, alongside our interest in the Biblical story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis, we felt it would be valuable to begin exploring the movement language of wrestling itself – and we were not disappointed! Steven took us on an amazing journey through a whole host of techniques including pummelling, underhooks, knee taps, single leg, rock step, shots, wrist grips, the neck tie and Russian tie and each move opened up new ‘movement worlds’, as he described them. In his notes shared with us before the session, Steven described wrestling in the following terms:
Wrestling is essentially the technical development of utilising the human body to manipulate and move another human body. It is an art predicated on using balance for balance destruction, understanding body motion and mechanics in order to nullify these things in your opponent and the development of force, motion and power generation through the body with technique.
It is the consolidating of an a priori act, a means of establishing social dominance through non-lethal combat – one prevalent in children, instinctively, and pre-dominant in the animal kingdom. It is a miniature war without death, culturally.
It is the aspect of non-lethal combat that makes wrestling highly suggestive for our developing poetics of embodied ethical critique, and we were deeply excited to be able to engage with this movement language. We can’t help but feel that it will have a decisive role in the development of our performance. Thank you Steven for all the gifts you brought us today!"
A note on: Launching TheWrestlers at Burley Fisher bookshop
I had the pleasure of launching my new book on the kingsland road at the beautiful Burley Fisher bookshop this last week, alongside two friends Vahni Capildeo and Zaffar Kunial, who were also launching books. It was a lovely night, for while I always feel a little sponge when launching my own works, launches tend to be disappointing, inevitably, perhaps, on this occasion it felt more intimate, communal, relaxed. We gave some short readings and enjoyed the long summer evening in a warm and book filled corner of the city. Burley fisher is a grand place, I sincerely recommend anyone visiting the city pops in to find things that havent yet heard of, as i do, and big up to zaffar and vahni's books, both of which are brilliant. I was grateful too to so many friends who showed up in support. www.burleyfisherbooks.com/
A note on: reading at the legendary Torriano on Sunday July 29th
I went to the Torriano reading series on Sundays for the first time in 2011, basically as I started writing and reading poetry. For the first time I'll be reading there this July 2018, alongside the excellent Linda Black, Russell Bennetts and Lynne Hjelmgaard, all of whom are united in being local to the Torriano itself. Kentish Town poetry quartet. The reading starts at 7.30pm at 99 Torriano Avenue, Kentish Town, London NW5 2RX
Worth reading about the history https://torrianomeetinghouse.wordpress.com/history/ and the Locale https://torrianomeetinghouse.wordpress.com/where-we-are/