A note on : KLANG FARBEN TEXT in Munich

https://www.britishcouncil.de/en/klang-farben-text-visual-poetry-21st-century

Klang Farben Text: Visual Poetry for the 21st Century

TICKETS FOR EACH EVENT WILL BE AVAILABLE ON THE DOOR. 

Klang Farben Text is a three-day visual poetry festival taking place at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich on 3–5 March 2020. There will then be a follow-on event on 8 April 2020 at the National Poetry Library in London, which forms part of the European Poetry Festival.

Inspired by the international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s the exhibition celebrates how that movement has impacted a new generation of poets and artists. The printed word is transformed into film and performance demonstrating how concrete poetry has transcended beyond the book and printing press into an experiential art form for the 21st Century.

Curated by SJ Fowler and Chris McCabe, both poets, performers and editors of visual poetry, this exhibition aims to create an innovative and dynamic dialogue between UK and German poets and artists. The exhibition builds on the celebrated anthology The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century which was published by the Hayward Gallery in 2015, which was co-edited by McCabe and includes work by Fowler. Klang Farben Text (sound-colour-text) will take the form in performative collaborations between UK visual poets and contemporary German poets and a screening of concrete poetry films produced between the 1960s to the present day.

The UK poets are: Chris McCabe, SJ Fowler, Kimberly Campanello, Barrie Tullett, Robert Montgomery, Victoria Bean.

The German poets are: Gerhild Ebel, FALKNER, Angelika Janz, Michael Lentz, Benedikt Kuhn, Jürgen O. Olbrich, with special guest Eugen Gomringer.

“The international concrete poetry movement of the 1950s and 60s didn't end, it exploded into the work of a new generation of contemporary poets and artists. Klang Farben Text brings this UK and German generation together for a three-day celebration of visual poetry in sound, film and live performance" – SJ Fowler, Chris McCabe, curators

Concrete Poetry Films:There will be a looped series of concrete poetry films throughout the programme. These films document the development of concrete poetry from the 1960s to the current day, demonstrating how the form has extended out from the page into moving image and sound. The aim is to show how the current visual poetry scene remains true to the international focus of the original Concrete poetry movement.

PROGRAMME:THE FORMAT FOR THE FESTIVAL WILL BE:

• 3 March 2020: evening public event with Eugen Gomringer as ‘keynote’/guest speaker followed by tasters of each of the 12 collaborating poets

• 4 March and 5 March 2020 evening public events with the collaborating poets (six poets i.e. three pairs per night) One of the public events will feature a whole group performance

• One of the public events will feature a whole group performance

• Days set aside for collaborative work between the pairs of poets and as a group; organising a performance of a shared text

Each individual performance will also include a very short presentation / reading of a classic UK/German concrete poem. This will help join up contemporary practice with the original concrete movement, as well as enriching the poets by learning of other works from the UK/German culture.

Poets' films to run through the three days on loop. See the Lyrik Kabinett website  for more details.

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2020 - program announced

I'm delighted to announce the European Poetry Festival will return for 2020, and will present our most ambitious program yet. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 11 events over 2 weeks, April 3rd to 18th 2020, in 5 cities and towns across the UK and Ireland. A pioneering showcase of live literature, celebrating collaboration and performance, bringing together over 100 poets from across Europe and the UK. All events are free to attend, please click on the links below to find out more about each event taking place this April

April Friday 3rd 2020 - European Poetry at Writers’ Centre Kingston / Rose Theatre New publications launched for the opening event of the fest.

April Saturday 4th 2020 - The European Camarade / Rich Mix, main space, London The grand event of the festival. 32 poets, 16 pairs, brand new collaborations made for the night.

April Sunday 5th 2020 - Sound Poetry & Performance / Iklectik Artlab, London Innovative, sonic and conceptual poetry, made for liveness

April Monday 6th 2020 - Swiss Poetry in Collaboration / Candid Arts, London Swiss poets collaborate with British-based counterparts.

April Weds 8th 2020 - KlangFarbenText - German concrete poetry / National Poetry Library, London German concrete poets collaborate with British-based counterparts.

April Thurs 9th 2020 - Austrian Poetry in Collaboration / Austrian Cultural Forum, London Austrian poets collaborate with British-based counterparts.

April Saturday 11th 2020 - Polish Poetry in Collaboration / Rich Mix, London Polish poets collaborate with British-based counterparts.

April Monday 13th 2020 - Latvian Poetry in Collaboration / The Poetry Society’s Cafe, London Latvian poets collaborate with British-based counterparts.

April Tuesday 14th 2020 - Hungarian Poetry in Collaboration / Hungarian Cultural Centre, London Hungarian poets collaborate with British-based counterparts (to be confirmed)

April Weds 15th 2020 - European Camarade at National Centre for Writing, Norwich / Dragon Hall Visiting European poets collaborate with poets local to Norwich

April Saturday 18th 2020 - European Camarade at Riverbank Arts Centre : Newbridge, Co Kildare, Ireland Visiting European poets collaborate with poets local to Kildare and Dublin.

A note on : Museum of Futures opening with Performances

This was good. https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/futures20 A night of small chaoses. 18 performances by exhibitors in this always ambitious, DIY exhibition we do down in surbiton, at the ex shop gallery community centre, the museum of futures. I did a weird thing last minute, never getting to myself, but i found a mat and got to slap the floor. I watched some lovely readings from the floor and then 5 or 6 really outstanding performances, of great poise and skill. It was alarming. Like the room, packed out and hot on a cold night.

Pictures by the brilliant Madeleine Rose.

A note on : Teaching at Westerdals in Oslo

One of the most intense teaching experiences of my life and I have been trying to teach intensely, in martial arts before literature, for 20 years. A small week of time with the students of Bard Torgersen’s Westerdals Kristiania school course, which is designed so beautifully that I filled with admiration for it, and very touched to be asked. Bard has built a course around everything that everyone else does not do with such creative practise writing programs and the 30 strong group turned up every day to spend time with me. We actually made a film. So I won’t write further on what happened, but it became a really personal, strange, enriching experience.

A note on : The Language Art at Poetry School (July 2020)

https://poetryschool.com/courses/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry/ Explore the intersections between the post-war traditions of modern art and avant-garde poetry.

Over this intensive weekend, you will discover poets and artists who make use of language, sound, space, printing, and writing, to see how these practises are fundamental to both artforms. We’ll also bring light to some great moments in modern art and poetry that have enriched the traditions of both writing and art-making.

This is a practical course for people interested in developing their skills in either art forms, alongside furthering their understanding of experimental poetry and contemporary art; the onus will be on how these great moments in modern art and poetry can enrich writing and art-making, rather than dense historical analysis. Over the weekend we will focus on:

Saturday 11 July & Sunday 12 July, 10.30am – 4.30pm.

All classes will be in our offices at 1 Dock Offices, Surrey Quays Road, Canada Water, SE16 2XU. The venue is a 2-minute walk from Canada Water Station. Take the ‘Lower Road’ exit from the station onto Surrey Quays Road, then walk straight ahead, crossing over Deal Porters Way, and the Dock Offices come up on the left. The door for the school is at the far end of the building.

More information about how all our face-to-face courses work can be found on the Face-to-Face courses page.

A note on : 'The Unfinished', the Museum of Futures annual Visual Literature exhibition 2020

https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/futures I have had a great curatorial team to help with this staple of the Writers Centre Kingston program this year - Maria Omena, Gabriella Buckner, Aifric Kyne, Djahane Zair and Marcia Knight Latter - which made installing it easy peasy and made me rethink my thoughts of it maybe being the last time I do this, four years in. Some really great works came in too, new faces and old faves. The exhibition runs Feb 18th to March 17th

A note on : Robert Sheppard on collaboration, and The Enemies project

robert on the right, post camarade with jeff hilson

Curating collaborative events is a fundamental part of my work, as many people know me for this, and in October 2020 it’l be ten years since I put on the first Camarade style event. One of the incidental aims of the project, which I’ve written about a lot (it’s obliquity towards creating friendships and communities which means it does so almost always, it’s trojan horsing of experimentation because of the breakdown of the ‘singular’ poet voice in performance etc.) is to connect generations of poets. Because I found poetry in my mid twenties from nothing, I took from my previous profession that it was innate to seek out those who had been doing what you were aiming to do for many decades and ask them how they did it, why they did it, was it worth doing. This is why I sought connections and dialogues with poets like Iain Sinclair, Tom Raworth, Maggie O’Sullivan and many others very early on. I invited them, I corresponded with them. One of the most universally appreciated of these poets who had done the poetry for far longer than I was Robert Sheppard. Robert’s work stretches beyond his lifetime writing, and his unusually wide ranging and insightful use of poetics, into the many poets he’s influenced and taught. Me being one of them. He has recently been writing on collaboration and generously included a post about the enemies project https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/thoughts-on-collaboration-5-literary.html

It is in fact worth reading all of his threads on collaboration, and his blog in general https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/01/robert-sheppard-thughts-on.html

Published : I will show you the life of the mind (On prescription drugs)

My new book is now available from Dostoyevsky Wannabe. They have done a grand job creating a beautiful book with an especially ambitious text. Please snag one at the link below, thanks. I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK

From the publisher, "From the mysterious recesses of the mind (or is that brain?) comes the urge to fix our sadness! Drugs are the answer, allied with literature. Legal, prescribed drugs, by hurried doctors, which reroute synapses in millions of human beings consciousnesses. What is the poetry of this ubiquitous but hidden malforming of the already overblown 21st human mental experience? In England, of all places? Who knows?! But SJ Fowler’s inventive espousing of fiction, poetry, illustration and found-text, as one singular literary undertaking, offers up the mess and hope of searching. A choose-your-own-adventure novel into the pits of your cognisance, this truly original book of confusion and consolation, as generously vulnerable as it is challenging, is by turns sad, funny, abstract and painfully clear. What emerges is YOU: the writer, the reader, the patient, the doctor, the doubt and decision, and how to newly express this, a life of the mind…on prescription drugs." 
https://dostoyevskywannabe.com/originals/i_will_show_you_the_life_of_the_mind_on_prescription_drugs

The book will be launched on February 22nd, 23rd and 25th. http://www.theenemiesproject.com/dostoyevskywannabe

A note on : Poem Brut sharing day

Poem Brut is entering a new phase, trying to extend beyond just the live events and 3am magazine publications, into something more liminal but concentrated on the possibilities of each poet choosing their own form and method, as well as content, connected somehow to the project’s two real focuses - the mind and neurodiversity, and the possibilities of aberrant method (in light of the normal poetic tradition). This day was this happening - 15 poets together at rich mix, exchanging ideas, what we’re up to, sharing resources and considerations. Open ended, generous, electic, reflecting the genuine originality and difference of the people involved. It was just me pinging out invites to people to see if they were up for it, and then they came, and we chatted and that was it. But it was like what a course of study should be, i think. www.poembrut.com

A note on : Screening wormwood film at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema

Pretty heartening to sell out the whitechapel gallery cinema for the first screening of the film Tereza Stehlikova and I have made about willesden junction and 1000 other things. It was a really good night to show the film, the audience was generous. Watching a film i was in and around and a lynch pin of, arguably, but not feeling like its creator or filmmaker or writer, was wonderful. I was able to enjoy it objectively, admire Tereza’s achievement. It is a meditative, hypnotic, allusive, symbolic film. It flows with jarring imagery like the place it celebrates. We chatted after the screening with David Spittle about the film a little bit

Thanks too to Gareth Evans, for hosting us, and Dave for the conversation

Published : The Car Giant - Sampson Low

Really happy to have a new short fiction pamphlet out with the brilliant Sampson Low publishers. You can pick one up here for the steal of 2 quid 50 or so. https://sampsonlow.co/2020/01/29/the-car-giant-sj-fowler/ The story is part of my ongoing collaboration with Tereza Stehlikova, WORM WOOD, and will be launched at the Whitechapel Gallery for the premiere of our film of the same name. It’s another chapter in that project which has taken on a myriad of forms, from exhibitions to performances, booklets and the cinema. The story itself is a meta-narrative about Tereza and I walking down the canal, and Tereza going missing, and destroying corporate city planning and giant robot cars

A note on : BBC Radio 3, Ross Sutherland & Arthur Cravan

I am very happy to be a small part of an amazing radio essay program, in ten parts, by Ross Sutherland and Melvin Rickarby, exploring the life and mythos of Arthur Cravan. Ross is extraordinary in podcast and radio broadcasting, as in all his works, I’ve known and worked with Ross for 8 years now, he really is a special human. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dj0k

I actually talked about Cravan back in May 2013, a lot, for a commission I did, with Ross actually, on tour, called Electronic Voice Phenomena. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/evp It was perhaps the first time the really raw and nihilistic dada folk had a serious and deep affect on me, and my urge to provoke people, occasionally, in proper context. I also think I’m in the program because I boxed and have written about boxing a lot.

I pop up a few times in the program I think, here and then, but especially in this boxing episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dj0j

A note on : Dostoyevsky Wannabe launches, a small tour

My new book is imminent, one I laboured at for a long time, that brings together lots of material in an ambitious choose your own adventure collection exploring the mind / brain problem against the affect of prescription drugs on our age. More soon on that. For this book I have the pleasure of putting together three events in quick succession. All our free, please note the dates and come along, and find out more http://www.theenemiesproject.com/dostoyevskywannabe

Dostoyevsky Wannabe Celebration February Saturday 22nd 2020 : 7.30pm at Rich Mix, London

Dostoyevsky Wannabe : a literary event : February Sunday 23rd 2020 at Torriano Meeting House

Delusions of Grandeur : a literary event on the deluded February Tuesday 25th 2020 : 7pm - Museum of Futures

A note on : The University Camarade V

This was a really lovely night where 22 students from 7 unis from all over the country descended on east london to collaborate, begin friendships and connections, perform, be scared, be relieved and do something they’ll remember. It feels worthwhile, organising things like this, when they obviously mean a lot to those who do them, who are younger in their writing, and who are sometimes overlooked for the fact of being students of writing. Good also to see friends and colleages from york, edge hill, lincoln. / Some good performances on video https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/#/unicamarade20/

A note on : Streetcake Patron

After judging their inaugural prize for experimental poetry last year I am very pleased to have been asked to be a patron of Streetcake Magazine and all the great work they’ve done and do to make space for organically innovative ways of writing, and supporting the young writers who do it. Who are genuinely made to feel outside and strange for writing in anyway that is not emotionally insightful or sentimental or self obsessed etc… sometimes. https://www.streetcakemagazine.com/ Here’s to trini and nikki

A note on : Korean Book Club - The White Book

Once more the Korean Cultural Centre in London asked me to lead a discussion on a contemporary Korean Book, this time the White Book by Han Kang. The bookclub actually took place at my uni, kingston, and was massively co-organised and led by Eugene Kim, an amazing academic at Kingston. The book is a dense, sad, allusive, complex, beautiful work and the students, staff and local folk who came along were open to taking it on at its deepest. Was a really resonant night https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/#/whitebook/

A note on : Neo futurism in Ambit

My work was included in an article by Astra Papachristodoulou in Ambit magazine http://ambitmagazine.co.uk/reviews/on-neo-futurist-poetics-by-astra-papachristodoulou worth a wide read as its complex legacy stuff but

“Steven J Fowler has also produced a range of works that could be considered as Neo-futurist in some ways. Fowler’s work often examines the possible end of the Anthropocene as a moral intervention by an uncaring and non-personified universe. His engagement with animals in his The Guide To Being Bear Aware and The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner provides a critique of anthropocentrism by placing emphasis on self-identity. The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the reconstructions of self – an experiment that can help or hinder our selfhood. Fowler explores this in his poem ‘Looper’ from The Guide To Being Bear Aware in a dark and humorous way:

         Maybe they look away
         because I’m ugly,
         like a lizard.
         Or because I live in my underwear.
         Or because of my fertility.
         Or because I can regenerate limbs.
         Or because I insist on tickling everyone.
         I’m a good lover though.

Formally, Fowler has explored technological innovation through his series of groundbreaking collaborations with material engineer, Thomas Duggan. My favourite piece of theirs is a recent collaboration in which Thomas Duggan and Steven Fowler printed a poem in silk fibroin, an entirely new biodegradable material developed using the very latest design technology. It’s one of these ideas that you see and wish had thought of first. Fowler’s poem ‘Silk fibroin’ is 3D poetry at its best – innovative and sustainable. The most fascinating part about it, is that its production involved a robot – yes – it was Duggan’s KUKA Robot that printed Fowler’s poem onto silk.”

A note on: English PEN fest VI at The Bishop, Kingston

This was the 6th time I’ve curated an event which aims to do no more that create something where there might be nothing, knowing our limitations in writing for and in celebration of, the writers at risk around the world whom English PEN supports, and whom each writer on this night wrote about. All the brilliant readings by Sara Upstone, Adam Baron, Paul Ewen, Sam Jordison and all are available online here

https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/#/pen20/

My piece was for the Sri Lankan writer Shakthika Sathkumara, whom you can find more about here https://www.englishpen.org/campaigns/sri-lanka-release-award-winning-writer-shakthika-sathkumara/ and his short story, which i discuss in my performance and write a response to, even a new version of, a further meta version of a meta story, is here to read in english http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/65191

alexander frater 1937 – 2020

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/alexanderfrater/ You cannot live a fuller life and come out kinder and wiser than my friend, Alexander Frater, who died just upon the new year, after a time of illness. With his passing we witness the departure of a true luminary in a grand generation of travel writers, based in the UK, who reinvented, or invented, what we now take to be travel writing. From Norman Lewis, Freya Stark, Bruce Chatwin and Eric Newby, to Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and Patrick Leigh Fermor – Alexander Frater was a light amongst them, and a key figure in this remarkable era, commissioning, inspiring and instigating many of his peers while editor at the Observer magazine in the 70s and 80s.

He was a brilliant, distinct stylist – a writers’ writer, crafting absorbing, truthful, droll and enthusiastic books on travelling the earth through the later half of the 20th century. Always full of insight and wit, his books are very often subtle in their complexity, drawing portraits beyond the characters within them, beyond the places, anecdotes and experiences, beyond details of Alex’s own life, to lure the reader into meditations on culture, history, birth, death, illness and writing itself.

He was perhaps best known for his book Chasing the Monsoon and I met him in India, in 2016, at a literary festival. I watched first-hand how revered he was for this work, and how surprised he was, and slightly discomforted, by the attention it brought him. In India his book still sells hundreds of copies a month, years after it was published. I watched Alex shine light on others as he was praised. His charisma, his distinct charm and verve, were evident from seeing him speak, but getting to know him I found he possessed the kind of measured, honest humility that was palpable, balanced with his marked intellect, which he wore lightly. He was a man who had travelled to, and written about, almost every single country on this planet, through warzones and dictatorships, tracing history across generations and wore this experience in his personality. It occurs to me that if travel grows the soul, well then that explains Alex.

It was only after we began to meet regularly, after India, in Alex’s home of Richmond, I discovered just how considerably he had travelled and written, meeting him after his years as chief travel writer at the Observer and a three time winner of the Press Awards travel writer of the year. He had done too much to know anyway. Even as poured over his books, reading them back to back and being stunned by their adventure and ambition, he was casually mention a trip to North Korea, Vietnam during the war, meeting Idi Amin in an airport. His behaviour was so unaffectedly generous, always interested in you and deflecting questions on his own work and life, that he altered those in his company, lifted them to his own indelible decency. His friendship meant the world to me, not just because his respect, forty years my senior, was hugely affecting, but because what Alex taught me is that you can learn to be calmer, more considerate, more decent, by proxy. We are the company we keep. We often are our friends, when our friendship with them is aspirational. Alex allowed me no choice in his company to be embarrassed into sincerity, attentiveness and thoughtfulness, lest i be embarrassed thinking what he thought otherwise. All this with a sense of humour that had you in stitches.

My favourite of his books is Tales from the Torrid Zone. In it Alex recounts much of his own remarkable life, being born in Vanuatu where his dad ran a hospital and his mother built its first school. Alex then travels the entire tropical regions of the planet, through civil wars in Africa to a leper colony. At times the book is mesmerising, an enormous achievement, where tropical heat, the only part of the earth to pass direct beneath the sun, alters consciousness, language and experience itself. It will forever remain one of my favourite books.

Once, after many months of meeting, he told me he had to cancel his planned trip that year to Vanuatu because he had fallen ill. You could not tell from his company. I promised him if he were to aim to travel to the island ten years from our first meeting – where he was born and his mother and father worked, and where he returned a church bell, made in Whitechapel, as a gift to the church, and where his surname was still known so keenly – I would travel with him, and write a book on his life. I said I would accompany him there and back. It’d be one way, he said. Though he told me the deal was a touching thing to offer, I now regret making the term a decade rather than a year.

He was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met and as powerful an influence on those around him as I have witnessed. He was an ideal I had before I met him that I didn’t know I held until I saw it in him. I can’t help but feel in his passing, something more than his life is lost. That I am witnessing a generation of remarkable people pass by, of which we will not see the like of again. But this isn’t true, solipsism and idiocy on my part. It’s just because Alex was so immense, it feels this way.

Do read some of Alex’s books here and here

A note on : Tickets for Whitechapel Gallery premiere of Worm Wood film - Jan 30th

Please buy a ticket https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/tereza-stehlikova-and-steven-fowler-worm-wood/ Thu 30 Jan, 7pm

Film

A cinematic witnessing (63 mins, 2020) of London living through aberrant, awkward, ugly change, but mostly dying in the process. Filmed over the last half decade, exploring the overlooked aesthetic power of Willesden Junction, Wormwood scrubs, Kensal Green Cemetery and The Grand Union Canal, the film strives to see a closer place, alien, idiosyncratic and yet familiar. It enters into dialogue with its genius loci, capturing and preserving on camera and in word, before it is transformed beyond recognition by the notorious incoming Old Oak redevelopment. The film is part of an ongoing creative collaboration between poet Steven J Fowler and filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova, a project which also includes poetry publications, an exhibition and various public events.