Dennis Cooper is someone I read when I first started reading novels at all. His George Miles Cycle (an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) where startling. I remember reading excerpts to a friend while he ate chips and startling him. He has been writing, editing, organising and supporting others for forty years plus. His recent rundown of novels, poetry collections, albums he's liked from 2020 so far included my book I will show you the life of the mind (On prescription drugs) from Dostoyevskay Wannabe, which is really gratifying. There’s some brilliant works on the list around my depressing book also https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/
A note on : my writing for The Origin by Ben Judd at Stanley Picker
For the last six months or so I’ve been collaborating with the brilliant London-based artist Ben Judd. http://benjudd.com/ Ben very generously commissioned me to be part of his Stanley Picker Gallery Fellowship which is entitled The Origin. I’m writing new texts and engaging in others ways with Ben’s remarkable project, which will see a floating structure appear on the Thames. It’s a complex and generous enterprise, fundamentally about community, with more here… https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/exhibitions/theorigin/?_thumbnail_id=54880
The Origin will consider the importance of community within a large city and facilitate meaningful exchanges between strangers, aiming to reconnect people both to each other and to their environment. Prior to the physical version, an online version will run for six weeks throughout June and July on these pages.
For the online version, I am contributing works for one week, with writer’s I’ve asked, who often participate in Writers Centre Kingston (Julia Rose Lewis, Simon Tyrrell, Silje Ree, Maria Val De Los Rios) and writers from The Bradbury, an over 55s wellbeing centre in Kingston. Our texts are available to view here https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/uncategorised/week-2/
A note on: Sampson Low European Poetry Festival publications 2020
Very happy to have edited a new triple batch of publications for the European Poetry Festival Sampson Low publications scheme we started in 2019. Lots more information on the books and poets https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/sampsonlow
»My Haarschwund« by Franziska Füchsl
Alternative Title : BOOK by Max Hofler
The Patron Saint of Nightly Fire by Robert Prosser
These brand new publications by contemporary literary and avant-garde Austrian poets have been produced in limited editions by London-based press, Sampson Low. With both new translated volumes alongside conceptual collections, these are outstanding representations, in English, of three of the most interesting poets working across Europe, let alone Austria.
All can be bought https://sampsonlow.co/wck-pamphlets/european-poetry-festival-books/
Huge thanks to the poets, to Alban Low and to the Austrian Cultural Forum London and Kingston University, for supporting the books.
A note on : European Poetry Festival video-poems - part three
Likely the final bevy of brand new commissioned video poems that sit as a wee placeholder for the european fest moved to October from April. Some crackers here from Benedikt Kuhn, Andreja Stepec, Maja Jantar et al. It includes also a collaboration of mine with the brilliant Provokief, here below left. It’s a doc I found online about me haunting an american theatre and its me reading Juan Rulfo’s amazing novel Pedro Paramo, remixed with tunes.
www.3ammagazine.com/3am/european-poetry-festival-video-poems-part-three/ & www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/videopoems
A note on : The Erdinger Collective
A new concrete poetry collective - Barrie Tullett, Kim Campanello, Chris McCabe, Victoria Bean and myself - is an ad hoc society for the appreciation of legendary visual poets, beginning with our spiritual patriarch Raphael Erdinger. The collective will also produce collaborative concrete poetry and performances. www.stevenjfowler.com/erdinger
Published : Crayon Poems on Abandoned Playground
One month from the publication of my latest visual poem / artwork / poem brut collection - CRAYON POEMS with PENTERACT PRESS - Daniele Pantano’s brilliant online journal - THE ABANDONED PLAYGROUND - has published four of my crayons. https://www.theabandonedplayground.org/sjfowler
These works are not to be found in the book, which has 50 works and a new essay, as I created over 130 crayon poems / crayon artworks, over two years, for the project. The book is going to be genuinely strange and I’m really pleased with it. It’s been really grand working with Penteract.
Lord of the Fleece
Happy Medium
Logogrammatic Crayon Glyphs
Burning Biscuit Factory
A note on: 9 years of 3am magazine, latest Brut publications
I took over the mantle of poetry editor at 3am magazine in the summer of 2011. It’s been a tidy 9 years of getting brilliant work from all over the world, because the reputation of the magazine is so longstanding and excellent, thanks to Andrew Gallix. I recently opened subs for the poem brut series I’ve been running for the magazine, some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen came in. So I’ve been publishing loads of new works on the site, all worth a look. www.poembrut.com/3am
Richard Marshall poem brut #95 – lung hysterics
Enis Yucekoralp poem brut #94 – lymph odes
Sara Louise Wheeler poem brut #93 – operation yellow hammer & other poems
Michael Sutton poem brut #92 – music / lyrics
David Spittle poem brut #91 – portraits
Carolyn Hashimoto poem brut #90 – the chips are down here in lockdown
Kayleigh Cassidy poem brut #89 – to do man and other poems
Kimberley Campanello poem brut #88 – you are here / asemic family origins
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad poem brut #87 – flashback to aesop
Phoebe Power poem brut #86 – the earth fainted: pages from a future fire
Sasha Stiles poem brut #85 – terms & conditions
Leo Fitzmaurice poem brut #84 – totems
Cecil Touchon poem brut #83 – long-haired asemics
A note on : 11 years since I started, the Writers Forum
I’ve been spending some lockdown time archiving. My website is being archived by the British Library Web team and it’s a decade since I organised my first event, exactly, in May 2010, at Rich Mix, with Romanian poets in London. I started writing, sharing, being out in the world with poetry, then fiction, art etc… almost exactly 11 years ago, after suddenly discovering reading serious work as a thing a dozen years back.
I began through pure chance. I was studying philosophy at university of london and happened to find out about the contemporary poetics research centre from a poster in a hall. I went to meet stephen mooney and he said come to the writers forum. The writers forum that bob cobbing had begun in the 1950s still ran, and still runs now, upstairs in a pub in farringdon, then in old street. My first ever public reading of anything was there, surrounded by some old school poets. bob’s widow, jennifer pike cobbing was there, and some great people, like matt martin, jeff hilson, wayne clements and others. It was formative, because while I read a lot in the year before going, genuinely 5 to 8 hours a day, sometimes more, the poets were sharing sound poetry, concrete poetry, performance. There were some bad things about it too, but who cares. I learned from both.
My first ever publication was about 10 years ago, and it was, to my knowledge, the last publication of the writers forum while it was still united (it split into two, who cares). It was a hand-made, hand-folded set of Concrete Poems, intended to be read aloud as an English person not speaking the language they were built of. They are shaped chunks of text in a language I found and thought looked interesting to shape.
I was encouraged to publish them, helped to make them and became part of the over 1000 pamphlets, booklets and books that make up the remarkable history of the WF press. The forum had published John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin alongside so many important poets from the UK, including Cobbing himself of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writers_Forum
I found a few remaining copies of this pamphlet in my trunk and some Cobbing publications too, that he had made, that were in a box before I asked for them. It’s good to remember where one started when thoughts of stopping are relatively frequent. I’m not nostalgic at all, almost the opposite, but connections like this aren’t useless perhaps.
A note on : Writing on the film Limbo, by Lotje Sodderland
A few years ago I was asked by the film-maker Lotje Sodderland, whom I met and worked with many years ago on our A World Without Words project, exploring the brain, neuroaesthetics and aphasia, to write a draft of a short film screenplay for an idea she had about the care of the elderly in London and the kind of people who do that work. I spent a summer toying with the work and learning a lot about the process, submitting lots of drafts, working with the producers and we were even shortlisted for a big BFI scheme. As ever with film, the process has been knotty and lengthy, but Lotje has perservered and the film has been shot and is close to being finished. In these stages some really world renowned filmmakers have been helping Lotje work on the last touches and I’ve spent some of my lockdown time doing rewrites, playing with ideas on the script with Lotje. Having seen snippets of the work, and given the affect of the recent plague on the very people this film celebrates, the isolated elderly in the city, its a powerful piece.
A note on : Babel Between Us = Ethnography
Code word visual tree
One of the biggest projects of my 2020 is Babel Between Us, a first of its kind collaborative fiction enterprise, where I write with 17 other writers around the world, creating and responding in a specially made online interface. www.stevenjfowler.com/babelbetweenus
Perhaps the most remarkable element of this ambitious undertaking is the team of ethnographers who analyse the writers texts between phases of writing. As Jakob Skote puts it “The ethnography plays many roles within this project. One of them is to explore if the ethnography can be an aid to the collaborative process among the writers. In this sense the ethnographers become a part of their creative process, by providing a constant reflection of the collaboration. The texts are the only representations of the collaboration that we have access to. By treating these texts as a subject of ethnography in itself, the ethnography focuses solely on the results of the collaboration, and does not take into account outside influences and the writers’ individual personas. The texts are in this way treated as a representation of the writers’ collective consciousness, in its own right.”
It’s an immensely complex undertaking, but explained in great depth here https://bbu.world/t/ethnography-report-iteration-1/1005
When reflected upon, it’s a naturally a process rare to writing at all and I’m trying to somehow embed this knowledge into my future participation in the project.
A note on: My website going into The British Library UK Web Archive
My website has become an archive, rather than a cv, or calling card, which is understandably the normal purpose of writer / artist sites. I know it's not as easily navigable as it might be, but it's a metaphor for my approach in general. I see my website as kind of a work itself, though it can be a neverending process, keeping it updated, like cleaning a house, and can make me feel like the volume of what I do is pointless, it's something I invest time in. This seems to have paid off.
I'm happy to say the British Library UK Web Archive will be archiving my site as part of their digital program that aims to 'make accessible and preserve web resources of scholarly and cultural importance from the UK domain.
My site will be in the Open UK Web Archive which "has been collecting websites by permission since 2004 and is the smallest of the three collections. Its selective nature means that the sites are of high quality, and the archival copies have been manually quality-checked and carefully annotated. This curated collection covers aspects of UK life and culture, as well as specific events such as general elections, the 2012 Olympic Games, and the commemoration of the centenary of the First World War."
In response I’ve undertaken some long overdue updates and restructuring for the site and how it records my work.
A note on : my bear reading for SAND
Commissioned for the SAND Virtual 10th Anniversary Festival, a reading of a series of bear themed poems which features in the #21 issue of the magazine. The video appears as part of the opening night's performances / readings, available to watch in full https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lEVxDk5zGU
SAND youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCirANcSB_Efl_8z9mgJ9_9A https://sandjournal.com/sand-virtual-10th-anniversary-festival/
A note on : filming Worm Wood as lockdown unlocks
Off the back of screening Worm Wood at the Whitechapel Gallery this january 2020, Tereza Stehlikova once again headed to industrial west london to document, and interact with, the strange environs of willesden junction and the grand union canal.
It was a swampy, murky, sweltering day. We saw clouds in the distance of a fire we couldn’t find. For the first time ever we could see the canal water clean through, with fish shoals and thick waterweeds. Cyclists ignorantly drove past us at reckless speed. We traced the route we’ve down so many times, for the first time, filming, in 2020, from Mitre Bridge, over to Hythe Road and around Car Giant, dipping in and out of alleyways and tunnels. I had on my flimsy breathing mask, walking stick and parrot outfit and though we were somehow tracing old steps, it felt new, full of the usual unexpected minor idiosyncrasies and weird melting boiling summer heads.
You can find out more about the film here www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood
A note on : Hosting Online Korean Literature Night - DMZ colony
Brilliant to be working with the Korean Cultural Centre UK for the third time hosting and moderating their Literature Night, this time, inevitably, online https://kccuk.org.uk/en/programmes/korean-literature-nights/online-korean-literature-night-dmz-colony-choi-don-mee/
Event Date: Thursday 25th June 7-9pm
“The Korean Literature Night (KLN) is a monthly discussion group that explores various themes and topics relating to that month’s chosen book. We will read 'DMZ Colony' by Choi Don-Mee for June to mark the 70th anniversary of the Korean War and to maintain social distancing, we will post a copy of the book directly to your home. Apply to info@kccuk.org.uk with your name and contact details by Monday 1st June. The booking system utilises a lottery-based system that picks names at random.”
DMZ Colony by Choi Don-Mee - Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders…
A note on : a poem in Poetry Kit's Plague Year anthology
I signed up to the Poetry Kit in 2009 I think. It is the kind of thing that poetry does well, like the Torriano meeting house, open to all comers, unpretentious, have-a-go. I used the call for submissions page early on, sending poems from my first book. Jim Bennett runs it, it’s been going 20 years and I love the website.
They did a call out recently for poems for an online anthology - Poetry in the Plague Year. I couldn’t resist the directness of the title. They published my poem A SCALE and here I am listed between Finnegan and Freeman
https://www.poetrykit.org/py/00133.htm
an excerpt…
on fingers of even tiny animals
we wash
for what is our ocean
but a sock
to rub metal from the feet
of people forced in homes
A note on : Mercuries series at Mercurius
Thomas Helm has started a new journal and project based in Barcelona entitled Mercurius. “The idea behind Mercurius is to create a fellowship of creative people and journalists to share their experiences/analyses/thoughts/objects on a regular basis in a spirit of shared adventure and creating something together” and I have a new series there bringing focus to some of my performances, entitled Mercuries. https://www.mercurius.one/
The first edition, Mercuries #1: Sculptural Poetry is here https://www.mercurius.one/home/mercuries-1-sculptural-poetry and it features my TROUBLEMAKING sponge poem performance at the Lyrik Kabinett In Munich “I'm interested in three dimensions and poetry, and what we might term sculptural poetry. Why is language two-dimensional when it is objective material? Why does this bleed into what we take the social engagement of reading, and speaking, to be? The head, the mouth, the tongue, the ears: objects in the world.”
A note on : SAND magazine 10th anniversary online launch
SAND magazine are a very good magazine. Based in Berlin, SAND is a nonprofit literary journal published twice a year by a team from the city’s international community. Yes and i had poems in issues 4, 5 and 6 I think, many years ago, including a collaboration with Monika Rinck. The SAND people very kindly have asked to reprint one of those, SPECIES, about types of BEARS, for their 10th anniversary issue. The 21st edition of their magazine. There will be a virtual launch with video performances, to which I have contributed a reading with actual BEARS, this Friday 29th May 2020, live online, at this link https://sandjournal.com/sand-virtual-10th-anniversary-festival/ A trailer has been prepared too
A note on : my Stephen Spender Trust reading online
The video of me reading three poems, in german and spanish, is now online for the Stephen Spender Trust. It follows this http://www.stevenjfowler.com/blog/spender
“Poet SJ Fowler discusses how poetry in other languages inspires him and reads out three poems (two in German and one in Spanish). Learn more about Fowler’s thoughts on listening to poems in other languages and his experience of reading the three poems aloud:
Featured poems: SJ Fowler, Meise (translated by Konstantin Ames) Thomas Bernhard, AN H. W. Octavio Paz, Casa Real SJ Fowler is a writer, poet, and artist who lives in London. He is the director of the European Poetry Festival.”
It looks a little like ive been churned by the sun, tanning myself like a lizard, but that’s what you get when you make a video by a window on your phone and I clearly do not speak these languages and pronounced them poorly and that makes me a kind of idiot, but that’s fine, you have to push on
A note on : poems in SPAM, megabus edition
The last edition of SPAM in print, almost 100 pages, over 52 contributors, I’m chuffed to have two poems in there. You can buy it here for 5.50 which is cheap https://shop.spamzine.co.uk/product/spam-10-millennium-mega-bus-double-issue/30
I have a poem poem in there, which is about animals used by humans as symbols to represent how people think of people as single ideas while demanding others think about them as many things, and a crayon poem! The crayon poem is from my big series of crayon poems which will be published by the amazing Penteract press as a full book this summer.
You can read more about SPAM here https://spamzine.co.uk/about
A note on : Poetry School course online this July - The Language Art
Happy to working with the Poetry School again, this time working an online programme exploring the intersections between the post-war traditions of modern art and avant-garde poetry. https://poetryschool.com/courses/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry/
Over this intensive Studio+ Course, 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.
This is an expanded Studio Course, or Studio+, featuring a Portfolio of preliminary reading and 4 Assignments, to be completed over 5 intensive weeks of reading and writing. There are no live chats on this course, meaning it is suitable for both UK & International students.