A note on : Cafe Oto October 1st for Feral Concord & The Seen

MONDAY 1 OCTOBER 2018, 7.30PM

CONFRONT RECORDINGS PRESENTS:THE SEEN + FERAL CONCORD

£12 £10 ADVANCE £8 MEMBERS / A grand scale, massed bands, first time collaboration between these two London based large ensembles - each with a fluid membership - led by Mark Wastell and Phil Minton.

THE SEEN Mark Wastell has been organising larger formations of musicians, collectively known as THE SEEN for over a fifteen years. Using predominantly improvised material with occasional instructions or themes distributed to individual musicians just prior to performance. No formation has ever been repeated, THE SEEN never stays static.

FERAL CONCORD A group of London based vocal improvisers, sometimes under the misdirection of Phil Minton

Lauren Kinsella  Illi Adato  Luke Poot  Dylan Nyoukis  Sharon Gal  Tim Fletcher  Veryan Weston  Elaine Mitchener Jenny Minton  Steven Fowler  Kay Grant  Alan Wilkinson Jim Dvorak

A note on: a film by Emanuella Amichai translating my poem

Emanuella is an amazing film maker and artist who I’ve had the pleasure to correspond with for years. She made a film of my poetic sequence - Meditations on Strong Tea - which was in my 2014 Rottweiler’s guide to the Down Owner book, and written for tom and val raworth. It’s a beautiful example of abstract intermedia translation, a removed but potent form of collaboration. Her work is wonderful, worth seeking her out.

A note on: The Animal Drums screens Dec 13th at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema

A project many years in the making, the screening of my film made with Joshua Alexander, my first feature length art film, The Animal Drums, will take place for the very first time on December Thursday 13th at The Whitechapel Gallery cinema.

The film began in 2014, Josh and I having met at the British Museum, where we both worked, with both of us wanting to somehow explore what film and poetry could do together, and more pivotally, what it was we were experiencing, being boa constricted by a London we both loved, but facing 22000 visitors a day at the Museum before returning to our overpriced rented rooms on the periphery of that human mass. This began our meetings, to film and write and piece together what is now a large puzzle, a fusion of techniques and ideas that have centred around the notion of development that seems to presume London needs changing to be something impossible, in the future, as things crush and disappear. The film is about tracking the ghosts squeezed into the ether by all this.

Published: a poem on Berfrois

Struga

I think to hide something under the bridge. Then to hold a balloon. Then bubble. I’m always picked last, paddling, having children read me back my animals.

Am I pretty much the same, sand without intention, whispering, as those who work for years on every word? When I copy, at least I mean it. I help no one, though.

https://www.berfrois.com/2018/09/struga-by-sj-fowler/
A new poem up on the brilliant Berfrois...

A note on: European Camarade, collaborating with Diamanda Dramm

The next instalment of the European Poetry Festival will be a one night camarade with 28 poets from 20 countries presenting new collaborations in pairs. It's going to be grand, so many really interesting writers coming together and many European poets living in London and across the UK, and this is key to my aims with the fest. Lots of poets brand new to my events too, which is another important facet to what I try to organise.  https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/eurocamarade

I'm always delighted to announce the next full festival will happen in 2019 April 5th to 17th.

For my own part I'll be collaborating with Diamanda Dramm, one of the most exciting young musicians in Europe.

We've been working together for over six months now, Diamanda creating new pieces with texts that I've written for her. October 13th will be the first night we'll work together live. I met Diamanda in Dublin, both of us performing, and she's doing really exciting things with the use of poetry alongside her magical music talent, which is pretty remarkable.

A note on: minidoc about Struga

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

http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/2018/08/2-great-new-asemic-writing-poem-brut.html

"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

http://asemics.com/4-asemics-by-steven-j-fowler/

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