I was very satisfied with this collaboration, not only given that Patrick and I wrote and planned it entirely on the day, but that it emerged, live, as far more subtle, layered, and playful than we could’ve thought. My instinct is often, in these events, to resist the entirely written, given liveness is a material, but it was such a good move to root this work in a text, and then to formulate it, first with my suggestion that we explore the theme of Neutrality and then with Patrick’s that we make it a strange, blunted and open ended Questionnaire. The final touches of the mimicry and dead pan gestures closed things perfectly. / more of my writing on the fest at www.stevenjfowler.com/epf19
EPF 2019 Event #4 - Swiss Poetry in collaboration at Poetry Cafe (April 8th)
An event to remember, entirely stuffed with people, we crammed nearly 100 into the basement venue of the Poetry Society, it’s cafe, in Covent Garden, for an event long mooted and brought together, thanks to Pro Helvetia and the team at Literally Swiss in London, finally, for the fest. Five new collaborations were at the core of the night, with six Swiss poets, that followed short solo readings by various poets visiting for the fest.
The range was really distinct, most especially across the collaborations, which were absorbed as representations of friendship and strangeness, which depicting the relations of the two poets in poetry and were embraced as this, in both directions. From Pantano and Fehr, close friends, but who mashed up entirely unconnected works, to Steinbeck and Calleja, close friends, who read diaries about first meetings of each other, to the clinical irony of Savolainen and I, to the fused fiction of Addonia and Bianconi, it was fascinating to watch these readings connected in one evening.
All the videos and loads more amazing pictures by Alexander Kell https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss and more of my writing on the fest at www.stevenjfowler.com/epf19
EPF 2019 Performance #3 and a half - Being asked to choke Ida, Astra and Lina
Of course poets know if I do choke them, they will survive. I must take it as a compliment that someone would put their neck in my hands, and thus I was asked twice, two nights running, while organising / announcing / performing to also stand up, during performances, in Ida’s case without any warning, completely improvised, and either slap on a rear naked choke or hold a pink rope around two poets’ necks.
With Astra and Lina, I really didn’t have to do much but not look like a douchebag. With Ida, who read part of a nighttime correspondence we had been writing since connecting last summer in macedonia, it was resisting the temptation to gently guide her into soft darkness. Some beautiful pictures of the act by Alexander Kell too.
EPF 2019 #5 : Event #3 - Celebrating sound and performance at Iklectik Artlab (April 7th)
Three events in, returning to the magical Iklectik artlab, which I find easy to find, but others must search to discover, hidden in plain sight, but intimate and unique, wedged between Lambeth and Waterloo. Last year’s sunday night performance event here was grand, this one was better. Another full house, packed out with people, standing room only. Over a dozen new live works made for the night, from poets from every corner of Europe. It was a really easy, energised and playful night, it really followed the camarade so well, and evidenced how important working with the actual material of liveness in contemporary poetry is a concern for those making the exciting work in the continent now. Moreover the fusion and range from the purely conceptual, to the talking performances, to the tech enhanced, to the sound orientated and language concerned - there is so much happening in this field right now and it’s why I put this event on, though it’s a hard one to curate and manage. Worth checking out all the performances.
All the videos are available https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/performance and some beautiful pictures by Alexander Kell as ever before.
EPF 2019 #4 - Performance #2 : collaborating with Maja Jantar
Maja Jantar is an inspiring poet and artist, a considerable influence on my work. She is as uniquely talented as she is a pleasure to be around. I began collaborating with her years ago to learn, actively, as a form of pedagogy. So it was special to work with her on this enormous Camarade event, with a mass audience and so many peers around.
We shaped something which lay between our two areas of performance, with my yapping conceptual improv turns and Maja’s remarkable sound song tech nobility regal dramaturgy. We unveiled a giant handwritten poem and shaped it like architecture before blinding dancing around the place. It was an hour long piece shaved into 9 minutes and the product of a real friendship for me.
EPF 2019 #3 : Event #2 - The behemoth ... The European Camarade (April 6th)
I think it’s the biggest event I’ve ever put on. Near 200 people. 34 poets, 17 performances. 17 new collaborative live works. Folks travelling in from all over Europa. It was massive and loopy and exciting and easy and fun.
A giant proof of concept, not only for the collaborative methodology with poetry but also the focus on what’s happening now in poetry in Europe. Very few of the poets were from London of course, so it was the concept that brought people in, it would seem, and this energy, this enthusiasm, really encouraged play and experimentation in the works themselves.
In a way, everytime such a seething happening takes place with my events I feel surprised and validated. These things are not to be taken for granted. 2020 will be ten years for me curating live poetry, at the Rich Mix too. To have evenings like this, so memorable and yet still ephemeral and experimental, it’s a really considerable thing. / All the videos are https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade19
EPF 2019 #2 - Performance #1 : Euroobear
My small short talking performance for the first EPF event was a celebration of the entity that is eurobear. I tried to stick to my recent constraint of pure improvisation, having a familiar / object / prompt, and then just aiming to elucidate some random talking poetics from it / on it. It was funny doing it with my friend eurobear, as I had planned to be souffle light but once i was talking I had to finish early because darkness began spilling from me mouth. I think my desire to hide my opinions was becoming perforated around my own festival, that people now use europe, being pro europe, as an armour, at times. As though it makes them good because they like Europe. Europe of war, Europe of etc… Euroobear saves though.
EPF 2019 #1 : Event ~1 - Opening the festival in Kingston (April 4th)
A brilliant opening to the 2019 European Poetry Festival. This fest has become my primary focus in curating live literature, and it has been the source joy for me, bringing so many brilliant poets to the UK, hosting them, showing hospitality, coming up with new ways to make live poetry happen, to write more, to collaborate, to build a cross continental community, to make friendships that are active, kind and lead to new ideas and travels. This event was a chance to overlap my work at Kingston Uni, and directing the Writers’ Centre of the university, with the festival. The focus was Norwegian poetry, and we launched four brand new books, translations and first time publications, amidst readings by visiting and local Europoets. The Rose Theatre room was packed out, full housed, which is not easy to do. The beautiful pictures by Alexander Kell below attest to how lovely the night was. Loads more info and videos www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/wck
Published : Nemesia #5 with Morten Langeland
BRIEF AND INACCURATE NOTES ON SLOVENIAN POETS (2019)
Very cool to have fifth instalment of my series of new collaborations with European Poets up on the unusually gregarious spanish online journal Wazo. https://www.wazogate.com/nemesia-5-brief-and-inaccurate-notes-on-slovenian-poets-2019/
We wrote this work in Ljubljana earlier in 2019 and will return to it, in an entirely new guise in just a week or so in Norwich.
Published : The Dot and The Void - an article on social media
Published by Versopolis in their e-book Anti Social Media, free to download and read read https://www.versopolis.com/multimedia/ebook/720/versopolis-ebook-anti-social-media An excerpt from my contribution below
“Constrain your linguistic and pictorial experience of existence into one dimension, and that’s just to begin with. This is of course, normal, for most. Adding a second dimension can be troubling. Opening the cover to a pit you might fall into. Do some even have that pit to worry about? Maybe it’s for them to choose, or maybe it chooses them.
I have a memory that comes back to me often, from when I was a child. Someone older is speaking as though I were also an adult. They express envy towards those who can be happy with simplicity. This recollection is pierced by watching a couple at a restaurant, both on their phones.
The endless idiosyncratic experience of existence in one dimension. It can be perfectly flat. You cannot even perceive its flatness. That’s how flat it can be. Now we can try and make the surface area of that expression as small as possible upon that which is flatter than flat. We do this not for the virtue of its smallness, what we might call restraint, rather than constraint. Not for minimalism’s sake either. Not to ally ourselves with the profundity of simplicity, for that is far rarer than people like to admit. Most often simplicity is stupidity. Stupidity is reduction. Stupidity is taking that which is innately complicated and forcing to not be so. Stupidity is not knowing what we do not know. What appears simple, is not, and that which is proud of its simplicity, outwardly, garishly, is actually the course of someone, something, which does not have the capacity, or the inclination towards labour, experience, growth, sacrifice, to be complex.
Complexity is the shape of the jug. Water can only fill that which it is poured into. There is always a receptacle. We choose our vessel.
So, we have more humans being on the planet than ever before. Double since the mid-70s. Many times more than ever before.
So, we have expression in one dimension and it’s within a small space. Everyone can join in now. Everyone can have at this space. It’s easy to carry around with you. Here, in our space, everyone is equal. Equality in this space. An addictive equality one might not think possible. For example, if life seems never equal, at its root level, historically, essentially, consciously, then perhaps this equality – the equality of the small, flat space - might be illusory? No.
The small space is addictive, perhaps, because it is unreal? Not to be taken seriously. We’ve been here before though. Something to get you through the night. What’s the eventual consequence of the prescription drug that saves your life on the night you need it? What if you might’ve survived anyway? No space for small regret in the small space. Keep on tweeting.
One day, in 2020, we all wake to the death of the internet. I’ll have plans.
Oswald Spengler’s highly popular theory began a whole branch of sociological and historical thought, that human history is cyclical. That it is arrogance to imagine we are evolving in an upward curve. Around the corner, then, for us, is more autocracy. Dictatorship. War. These are our histories. The populace, on social media, during a world war. Imagine. Spengler predicted, specifically, that around the millennium, Western civilization would enter its death throes and on the edge of complete annihilation, we’d have to put in place a kind of Platonic benevolent overlord, to rebalance what is best about our societies. Maybe a group of people, Oswald? Maybe a conglomerate, or a corporation? They are popular, aren’t they? The argument of quality through popularity. This is the best thing because it was bought most. Though wildly popular in his day, Spengler was dismissed as an amateur and his theory unscientific.
Puritanism, filling the space provided for it, as a return. Those who think themselves good are ready to do battle with those they think bad. What kind of battle? Not physical, it’s a phone, it’s a computer. Glass houses remain intact, amazingly. As does the small space, flattening still. One might even observe it getting smaller. So small, in fact, that it squeezes itself into a tiny ball. We’re into microscope territory.
Spengler also said, ‘Optimism is cowardice’. “
To read the full essay visit here please https://www.versopolis.com/multimedia/ebook/720/versopolis-ebook-anti-social-media
A note on : The Soul Referendum - a performance with Iris Colomb
The second phase of my otherworldly collaboration with Iris Colomb took place at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury. With complete autonomy of will a month or so ago Iris volunteered to sell me her soul for a tenner in Surbiton. Since then I’ve been holding it close to my heart. She has made continued attempts to drag my horns through the european legal system and win it back on a technicality. This performance was the culmination of that….
A note on: the not-Brexit Camarade at Gulbenkian Foundation
Had a blast opening the unofficial program of the European poetry festival 2019 on the night that was supposed to be the official brexit date in Canterbury, Kent. The Gulbenkian is a special place, a theatre and arts centre on the local uni campus and I brought some local poets and many Euros from London to the cafe space where we presented six new collaborations in pairs. All the videos can be found https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/gulbenkian
Plenty of highlights, great to see my old friends, two of the most underrated poets in the UK, Stephen Emmerson and Lucy Harvest Clarke, along with some of the UK’s best non-UK writers like Theo Chiotis, Simona Nastac et al. I also had a blast helping Astra Papachristodoulou and Michal Piotrowski out of their performance with scissors upon tape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0taEQOyG4vk&t=1s
A note on: Liberated Voice exhibition opens at Palais de Tokyo
I’m very lucky to have a sound poem in this exhibition, which recounts the great poets and works of the history of the field in Paris and runs from 22/03/2019 to 12/05/2019. Check it out if you’re in francais. Pics from the opening below https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/event/liberated-voice
A note on: A performance for those who pretend to have read
Another talking performance I came up with on the day, a stricture I’ve been putting myself through for over a year now, to maintain a sense of liveness and improvisation and roughness.
This time I had only in mind that Krasznahorkai is indeed an author that everyone pretends to have read but hasn’t, especially in the bourgeois london circles, and I also had some props, which is cheating. A spider. Some weird mirror paper that makes the looker look. A pirate costume.
It went alright. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/europeanwriters
A note on: The European Poetry Festival Camarade is almost upon us
THE EUROPEAN CAMARADE www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade19
April Saturday 6th at Rich Mix 7.30pm - Free Entry
EPF 2019 presents The European Camarade : April Saturday 6th at Rich Mix
7.30pm - Free Entry : 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA, UK
34 poets in 17 pairs from 25 countries present brand new collaborations of literary and avant-garde performance, made especially for the night at Rich Mix, near Brick Lane, London. The grand event of the European Poetry Festival. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade19
Pierre Alferi & Christodoulos Makris / Maria Malinovskaya & Jon Ståle Ritland / Leonce Lupette & Alessandro Burbank / Iris Colomb & Fabian Faltin / Maja Jantar & SJ Fowler / Sophie Carolin Wagner & Harry Man / Patrick Savolainen & Serena Braida / Muanis Sinanovic & Amadej Kraljevič / Vilde Valerie Bjerke Torset & Simone Lappert / Robert Elekes & Ricardo Marques / Olga Stehlíková & Simona Nastac / Cosmin Perta & Yekta / Astra Papachristodoulou & Lina Buividavičiūtė / Tibor Hrs Pandur & Andras Gerevich / Frank Ruf & Frank Keizer / Morten Langeland & Ida Borjel
A note on: László Krasznahorkai celebrated at the HCC
A really considerable night at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Covent Garden, the first of a new series celebrating european literary artists of the 20th century from Hungary, starting with the incomparable László Krasznahorkai, who has been important to my own writing because his kind of roving, ambiguous, menacing, incomplete completeness is rare in UK novelists. I commissioned 7 poets and artists to respond to Krasznahorkai, knowing them all to be fundamentally innovative with purpose, without indulgence, artists who worry about liveness, the people actually in the room, to create an event that at the very least would be memorable and polarising, especially when set against the luxury of the venue. It was a really energising and generous night, and the hospitality we were shown by our hosts was wonderful. All the performances can be viewed here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/europeanwriters
A note on: Robot toy performance at Second shelf bookshop
Had the chance with no room to breath to do a wee performance to mark the launch of two beautiful books by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, of which I am in one, the Queen Mobs Teahouse anthology, at second shelf bookshop in Soho. The shop was tiny but beautiful, the audience seemed a little cool / afraid and doing this, I didn’t feel it, but on video it looks better I think - neat and fine. I used a robot rat, mouse and teeth to time very short randomised readings. These creatures were found on the day and I gave them away afterwards.
Also the night featured some other rapid and wonderful bursts of poetry from the likes of Nadia de Vries and Astra Papachristodoulou, videos of whom are below.
Published: a poem in Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book anthology
Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book is a collaboration between Queen Mob's and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. It’s a big and beautiful tome. I have the last word in it. Yes but it’s not a word, but a bird. A wakabird. A bird that is a letter. A bird that is an asemic, pansemic, geometric, wormy lined poem. It’s a vispo, and it’s taken from my upcoming book Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit, to be published by Hesterglock. But anyway, this huge anthology book, buy it below
https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/queen_mobs_teahouse_teh_book/Original
“There couldn’t be a more exciting book, or not one containing mostly words, or not for people who want their wordage talent-flushed and electrifying. Teh Book is extra proof that Queen Mob’s Teahouse is the crux of almost everything that’s literary and/or happening.
Dennis Cooper, author of The George Miles Cycle
Guest Editor, Contributors Queen Mob's Teahouse: Teh Book was edited by Russell Bennetts
Published: Hotel issue #5 featuring Iain Sinclair's poem about my film
I would (but yes Im biased) highly recommend picking up a copy of the fifth print edition of Hotel, one of Europe’s most considerable literary journals. It’s a beautifully produced anthology of works, featuring a unique collection of writers. Generously it’s got one of my poems from my film The Animal Drums, but perhaps more extraordinarily, scanned to the right here, it includes Iain Sinclair’s new text written in response to the same film and read at the premiere at Whitechapel Gallery in December 2018. Worth getting the journal to read the full version and works by Jenny Hval, Isabel Galleymore, Thomas Bunstead, the legendary Akutagawa and many more
A note on: my collaborators for European Poetry Festival 2019
As part of the oncoming European Poetry Festival I have the opportunity to collaborate six times with six poets from six places. With Maja Jantar, Patrick Savolainen, Fabian Faltin, Morten Langeland, Krisjanis Zelgis and Tom Jenks. From April 6th to April 13th, one week, I do six new performative collaborations. It is one of the most exciting parts of the fest, this constant collective creative output, in live settings, making new things, writing them, negotiating in cafes, changing plans minutes before the event starts, having to also announce the lineup, help all the other poets, work the venue, then perform too. Making new friendships also, I have never worked with Patrick, Krisjanis and Fabian before. Cementing friendships too, Tom, Maja and Morten are all very close and dear friends. It is obvious terrible for them they have to work with me but sacrifices must be made on the altar of poetry.
Check out when and where here www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/programme
