London Symphony Orchestra is playing my soundpoetry boxingopera on June 30th

http://lsosoundhub.co.uk/blog/2013/05/24/fight-music/ Just thinking about it, on June 30th the London Symphony Orchestra will play my soundpoetry boxing opera, that I wrote / warped for the true author of the piece the composer Phillip Venables, at St Lukes in Old St. I've walked past that building so much. Now this piece will have been played by the London Sinfonietta and the London Symphony Orchestra. Mind blowing for me. Everyone can go for free, just have to email. St Lukes is another amazing space of London I am wrapping my memory tendrils around. 

The Blue Bus - reading with Sarah Kelly - June 18th, Bloomsbury

The Blue Bus is pleased to present a reading by matt martin, Nicolas Spicer and Sarah Kelly, with S J Fowler, on Tuesday 18th June, from 7.30 at The Lamb (in the upstairs room), 94 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1. This is the seventy-seventh event in THE BLUE BUS series. Admissions: £5 / £3 (concessions).

Sarah Kelly is recently back in the UK after a couple of years living in Argentina. She has contributed to the anthologies 'Better than Language' (Ganzfeld Press) and 'Dear World...' (Bloodaxe), alongside many magazines. She is the author of two chapbooks, 'locklines' (KFS) and 'Ways of Describing Cuts' (KFS), the latter a collaboration with Steven Fowler who will be joining her to read some extracts. Examples of her current work, exploring text and handmade paper, were displayed at the 'Visual Poetics' exhibition (Poetry Library).

S J Fowler, who will be reading alongside Sarah Kelly in the second half of this event, is a poet and artist living in London. He's published four collections of poetry including Fights (Veer books) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA press), and has collections forthcoming from Penned in the Margins and Egg Box Publishing. He has been commissioned by the Tate, the London Sinfonietta and Mercy and has read and exhibited across Europe. He curates the Enemies project, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, and Maintenant, a series of reading and interviews focusing on contemporary European poetics and collaboration. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck College and is an employee of the British Museum.www.sjfowlerpoetry.com www.blutkitt.blogspot.com www.weareenemies.com

Forthcoming events will include Johan de Wit and Antony John (16th July), Chris McCabe, Andrew Taylor and David Miller (20th August), Simon Smith, Anthony Mellors and David Rees (17th September), Laurie Duggan, Andrew Spragg and Peter Philpott (15th October), and Richard Berengarten, Cristina Viti and Michael Zand (19thNovember).

Vídeos de los enemigos

A very literary event, interesting to hear the translations in Spanish. The event was rescued by two lovely Spanish speaking poets living in London. Thanks to them. Jeff Hilson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iq9i8ao5ZoA

EVP Norwich

Strange it may be but Norwich is a poetry monsterland. The amount of good poets it has produced, through uea, and its cushy environs, of my generation, is really impressive / unnerving. A fine place for the last show (?) The town was Norfolk festivalled – quaint, yokelfest, saw morris dancing. The arts / writers centre is such a beautiful venue and lovely people throughout its tunnels, had some lovely exchanges with those people, and ate their food. Everyone on the tour seemed very balanced, calm, happy with what we’d done, still growing into those ideas, still critical, but neither nostalgic or overwrought. No worn out sentiment about the benemothian undertaking of EVP, which has been great and for me personally a success for all the challenges it posed were new, and I sucked in loads from those conflicts. Good to know..., consistently, adapting each night – learning all the time from my tour peers, the venues, the space, the techs, the producers, the work, the memorising, the acting, maybe even the audience (though still in general I believe what I always did – balls at them) Probably the end of this character too, a last dada hurrah for the retch acorah shaman bear host spine birdkiller.
To the show. This the end, may 25th, a date I have eyed some some suspicion for a few months, but it arrives First bits were a tiny bit wonky – I blame the conservative audience, gentility folk in the crowd. Norfolk arts festival. Then on in, pretty good. A good bear, my favourite of the Zamyatin story, the dragon. A nice going for it at the end came natural. Some spit up lung butter bedraggles, some fear, & I finished after hard ZIMZALLA BIM BIM BADA ZALADU ZALADIM by screaming ILL MISS YOU, ILL MISS YOU SO MUCH. A lot of warmth and respect for those involved. Started out without much ‘acted’ performed. Wrote whole 45 minute theatre piece. 2 month notice, national tour, sage, st georges hall rich mix, burgess centre …. 8 shows, 37 appearances. Went well. 

Lucas Matthysse 'murderous puncher'

I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to copy Lucas Matthysse recently - in training, alone, on the streets, in the supermarket - the way he holds his guard, crouches, the way he punches. I want a rat's tail. Some boxers have qualities which make them appealing as personalities to the public at large, and some appeal to the afficionados before they become well known - this process has always fascinated me and was a huge reason why I wrote my books Fights structured around individual boxers and their personas. It is often said it is their backstories which captivate people, but I'm not sure it's that because they are often very similar. There's just something authentic about a human being who is willing to dedicate their lives to a sport that only financially rewards 1% of it's participants, and tends to damage the health of 100% of it's participants. Headaches, dementia, blindness, speech slurring, failing cognitive abilities await. Yet they plug on, making themselves into monstrous machines, human weapons. Lucas Matthysse exemplifies these characteristics - he is quiet as a man, taciturn, even dour, but as a fighter, he is a cannibal. Relentless Argentinian madness, he's knocked out 32 of the 33 men he's beaten. And when he was robbed in decisions against home fighters, he just came back, shrugged it off, and destroyed the next men he faced. He punches as hard as any fighter I can remember, with both hands, it is awful to watch him hit people, in the most exciting of ways and he is single handedly inspiring me to revisit some of my work on boxers, rejig it, and write some more. 

maintenant #97 – tadeusz różewicz

A poet who changed the face of twentieth century poetry, Tadeusz Różewicz is a giant of Polish literature and undoubtedly one of the most important poets the country has ever produced. Still writing in his 91st year, his lifetime engagement with groundbreaking poetry, fiction and plays has spanned, and often encapsulated, the seismic tumult of the past century in his home nation. His poetic is the rarest of things, an anti-art that resides still within the realm of the explicable, and the ethical, striding between the utterly personal and the political – often brutal in its beauty and intensity, it is an aesthetic that is wholly his own, unique and unwavering. His first poems were published in 1938, before he served in the Polish underground home army in WWII. His brother, Janusz, also a poet, was executed by the Gestapo. This desolate chapter in our collective European history produced few artists and writers able to even begin to make sense of such destruction, but the eruption of poetry and dramaturgy that followed the war experiences of Tadeusz Różewicz has set him aside as one of the most respected innovators and stylists in modern European history. In the decades since the war he has continued to produce extraordinary literature, winning the Nike prize, the Griffin prize and the European literature prize, and now, on the eve of a brand new translation, into English, of his work ‘Mother Departs‘ by Stork Press, we are proud to elevate the Maintenant series with the inclusion of Tadeusz Różewicz, our 97th poet.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-97-tadeusz-rozewicz/

Far and away this is the edition of Maintenant I am most proud of, Różewicz's work being so fundamental in the beginnings of my own. I want to thank and acknowledge the tireless work of Joanna Zgadzaj for making this interview possible, and draw attention to the extraordinary celebration of Różewicz's work and life that happened last Saturday evening at the Southbank centre, as part of their literature festival, and for the launch of the brand new translation mentioned above. Here is a podcast the Polish institute produced about the event I was so sad to miss, being in Norwich, finishing off the EVP tour 

EVP Stockton

mad maxville, the place the students used to call mount doom in durham. actually an enjoyable day, a train over Yorkshire from Manchester to start, to Thornaby. Then it was explained to me what MadeinChelsea was, sonic interruption, a t=rex swipe into buildings, half the shops shut, like depression shut, tattoos on the back of a man's head in caffe nero. The Arc is a beautiful theatre, like a roman outpost for art. Wandering Stockton for hours and hours. I'd been before but why? I did many circles. Lots of charity shops. Bought a blue crocodile, a pig and a whoopie cushion. Listening to arvo part, a mistake, too many ideas for novels. The show itself was good, nerveless again, swishing, seemed to be easier now. Even the closer wasn't too hurtful and draining, but enough. A couple talked in the front row, I cane pointed them, adlibbed the most since Brighton. Premier fucking inn again, but a privilege even that. Second to last. Such fast passing, sad, learned too much.

EVP Manchester

Maybe the most involving performance, maybe. The Burgess foundation was an intense environment, inspiring for me http://www.anthonyburgess.org/ His spirit was about, I waited between sets in his library, filled with first editions, signed copies, weird books that must've been his. I sprinkled his ashes on stage. 1985. I felt quite warmed by the presence of friends in the audience, Holly Pester (who I beared, hoovered, retched and flicked), Tom Jenks, Scott Thurston - poets I respect, fun to show the stuff before them, and it was packed, and dark, and I felt stranglely nerveless beforehand, and so it did flow, lots of heavy pukkke. Exhaustion can relax, can afford funny rifts in a character. I returned the morning after, to buy some books, and I had a open, meditative afternoon waiting before, in central Manchester, confused and enlightened by its bleak newness and unfinishedness, like my performance and my piece. I worried I was a little too ebullient after, too loud and sharp in conversing etc...but our hotel was bizzarre, like the overlook, shining-esque, and that returned me to ground. 

poetry in Recours au Poeme in French translation

http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/ Thanks to the efforts of the excellent translator Elizabeth Brunazzi and the tireless and extraordinary editorial efforts of Matthieu Baumier my work has appeared in the respected French journal Recours au Poeme in both English and French translation. The work is taken from my meditations on scent sequence. http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/po%C3%A8tes/sj-fowler

 http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/flub-ambergris
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/were-it-not-i-then-were-it-not
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/fog
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/i%E2%80%99m-smart-enough-make-my
http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/sj-fowler/cleansing-compliment

 Recours au poeme has an almost unmatched width, frequency and quality, and Matthieu's work is truly both inclusive and ambitious. 

Recours au Poème
Poésies & Mondes poétiques
 Nouveaux articles en ligne cette semaine
Sommaire 51 / Issue 51 /Sumario 51
Pour toute proposition ou demande : 
Focus     Nikola Živanović, 6  poèmes
PoèmesJoël Bécam Anne-Cécile Causse Margaret Beston Roger des Roches SJ Fowler
 Chroniques 
Vu du Sud (3), la poésie d’ Abdellatif Laâbi, par Nasser Edine Boucheqif
Lecture (s), autour d’Eva-Maria Berg, Jigmé Thrinlé Gyatso, Danièle Faugeras, Dinu Flamand, par Paul Vermeulen
 Essai
Tête d’Or, la force et le sens (Paul Claudel), par Claude-Pierre Pérez
Ecrire en situation mauricienne : l’obscurcissement de la perspective ontologique, par Catherine Boudet
CritiquesLa doublure de R. Roussel, par Lucien Wasselin
Brocéliande, de Gilles Baudry et Pierre Denic, par Pierre Tanguy
Anthologie de poésie canarienne : ontologie visible pour archipel inventé, par C. Boudet
Toucher terre de Vincent Pélissier, par Matthieu Baumier
Sur deux récents ouvrages de Salah Stétié, par JP Gavart Perret
  RencontreRencontre entre Sege Nunez Tolin, Marc Dugardin et Jean-François Grégoire
 Directeur de la publication  :
Gwen Garnier-Duguy
Rédacteur en chef :
Matthieu Baumier

Fight music: an evening celebrating the work of Philip Venables

I'm really delighted to say on June 30th at the amazing LSO St Luke's on Old Street in London, at 7.30pm, there will be a portrait concert of the recent work of Philip Venables, who I worked with for the London Sinfonietta Blue Touch Paper project on our piece the Revenge of Miguel Cotto.  The concert will be one hour and is free to attend.

The concert features five recent pieces, all focusing on muscular music, spoken text and themes of violence, socialist protest and memory.  Performers will include the Ligeti Quartet, Ashot Sarkissjan, The Warehouse Ensemble, Melinda Maxwell, Leigh Melrose, Richard Baker and The London Sprechchor.  The concert is being supported by LSO Soundhub, the Esmee Fairbairn Charitable Trust and Arts Council England. 

It will include a performance of the Revenge of Miguel Cotto, so my sound poetry and words will grace a really incredible stage once again, something I am very proud of. 

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool

Pictures from EVP in Liverpool. The same site also published a review of the show, which was rightly glowing about Hannah Silva and Honor Favin, and included this snippet "The evening was compered by London-based poet SJ Fowler (main image), who through a series of vignettes attempted to channel a retching spiritualist's progressive decline into suicidal despair. While amusing, and Fowler has obvious talent and performance skills, it was impossible to banish images of Derek Acorah from my mind (albeit during his little documented laudanum phase), and although thematically relevant, we found it hard to understand how the piece contributed to the promised exploration." An amazing link, Acorah is the kind of underground avantgarde television personality whose authenticity I often have felt I am aping on this tour.
http://www.peterguy.merseyblogs.co.uk/2013/05/electronic-voice-phenomena-fea.html

EVP review on a younger theatre

http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-electric-voice-phenomena/      Have you ever been to a séance? Have you ever been tempted to try to contact the other side? Have you ever felt the presence of some ethereal being? Or have you always been the sensible, cynical type that thinks all of that is rot? Well, either way, the boundary-pushing, ground-breaking and dimension-rattling cabaret that is Electronic Voice Phenomena will certainly make you question the beliefs you hold most dear. Electronic Voice Phenomena combines experimental technology, literature, music and performance in a show that focuses, quite bluntly, on death and the afterlife. The project is inspired by the notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments conducted by Konstantin Raudive in the 1970s, where he captured voices-from-beyond in electronic noise.
This show is unique. It is not easy, not always clear and certainly not easily comprehensible. But it is fascinating. The wordsmith SJ Fowler acts almost like a compere, being the through line, almost a reference point that keeps the audience anchored into the proceedings. This is very useful, and makes the show nicely coherent. He tells us that he is a conduit the spirits use to contact the living, flipping the perception that it is only the living that tries to contact the dead. He also introduces the idea of a kind of electronic empathy that the living can find with the dead. These are complex concepts that are gradually elaborated on........
........The show always comes back to SJ Fowler. He really stands out of the crowd as an extraordinary performer and poet. The climax of his show comes in a mind-blowing, deeply unsettling and ultimately haunting moment when he is overwhelmed by the bottled resentment he has in him and by the voices of the ghosts that are taking over his head.
It must be said that this show is an acquired taste. There are moments when the art is more about the artist than it is about the audience, and this can make it hard to find a way in. That said, the experimentation in this show is amazing to watch, and the way it deals with such a difficult subject in a head on way is commendable. The show makes the audience feel in a way that most theatre doesn’t. It accesses a fundamental, animalistic emotional response to the material that is hard to explain. And this kind of experiential theatre is incredibly rare. If Electronic Voice Phenomena comes to a theatre near you on its tour, don’t miss it.

Sarah Lester's article on Electric Dada

http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/the-voices-in-the-radio-sj-fowlers-electric-dada/ ....... click to read the full whack
As the centenary of Cabaret Voltaire looms ever closer, poet SJ Fowler has been adopting Dadaist methodologies as a way of questioning our own preconceived notions. Drawing on Dada’s own sense of terror and menace, Fowler’s “Electric Dada” asks the audience to consider what it might actually mean to make contact with the dead. Or, rather, what it might mean for the dead to contact us. Far from hearing the comforting voices of our dearly departed, Fowler conjures up a profoundly more painful and unsettling affair. “Death has a language”, he sinisterly declares onstage, then, without waiting for an invitation, continues: “I will give you that sound.”

As Dadaists superceded formal language to engage with subjects that could not be understood outside of the abstract or the absurd, Fowler’s own sound poetry urges the listener to make their own connections between word, sound and meaning.   Transcending a language concerning death that is overfamiliar to us, Fowler’s ritual-esque vocalisations evoke magical incantations and otherworldly seances in words from a language of his own invention.  Fragmentary phrases, fields of invented words can bypass the author’s own associations and trigger new ones in the listener – it’s a Dadaist technique that was deployed in an attempt to overcome the subjective (bourgeois) ego.

If art appeals to civilised sensibilities and genteel good manners, Dada is the opposite. Dada – anti-art – was intended to offend. The performance experiments at Cabaret Voltaire (and beyond) did not lend themselves to polite rounds of applause, rather they stood for a rigorous critique of prevalent systems. Even so, when Fowler outlines the specific details of an artist’s exemplary suicide case for the benefit of all those in the audience who have refrained from committing suicide “for fear of making a mess” there’s no riot exactly, but there’s more than a ripple of nervous laughter. Like the audience of Henning’s performance of Totentanz, we’re not quite sure how to react.

EVP Bristol

Time for the city again, so important, back so soon after the enemies, and the cube is a truly exquisite space. How could this not be in the shadow of something as immense as the night before? It was different rather than lesser. A space to truly test the 'new day new work'. The greenroom was an attic bricabrac holecave of joy for me to play in, dance in, while Outfit shellacked. We all felt homely in the space. I could've felt really exhausted, body jaded, and with the material at times, unable to call down the spirit of the shaman animus monster lock bodywar, but I just smoothed that sideways. The first signs of tour cosh, tiredings, but not really. Such a joy to be around everyone on this thing, so much gentle brilliance, brightness, intelligence, creativity. Nice to be collaborating with Ross too, at claw, bear wrestle, and flesh out ideas on trains instead of reading / writing. Weird monolithic, premier innn, i name checked it live, but no one was hooked on that. Not everything can rattle like a sword inside of a stick.

EVP London

Bethnal green road back + forth twice. Another day beginning before it really began. This is the show that means the most to me. It happened, certainly, and a breaking point, where I no longer have a clue how it is. Others are positive, so it is all positive. I committed to it. I felt the (in)famous frost where I was used to some rictus chuckle from elsewhere audiences, there was less. a lesson here, but it was pressure, so familiar the ground, and the expectation. quite big actually. a night waiting on stairs, feeling tremors and then letting loose, realising niceness was needed to really spear. i did spear. people in lifts, im told, saying they wanted to run, that it made them feel ill, afraid. I fell back on what I can do, to eat up that drop. I had plenty of use for the disdain early accrued. All tied together in the end, I think, more than before, it fused, my works across the night, all the work really. We hoped it would when it should and it did, I suppose, if I can be any judge of that, which I can't. The less I know of this stuff the better, for I cannot know. When it does not die in childhood we can seal it off, return to the next. But still, some weight and I ended up with pub threats and massive eviscerating expellation of the gullet. The pints of cold coffy, lukewarm strawbshake and oliveoilberrysmoothie did not see the light of day. Other things did. Slept in my own bed.

EVP Brighton

One of the nicest walks of my life, strolling of the Laines to Kemptown with my shamanic cloak on my left shoulder. Friday evening and 100s see me, only a few notice, and they speak to me, with warmth. I love your coat, sweetie, I get in Kemptown. A car of girls, on their way out makeup, beep and then stop when I smile and ask me what it is. When I tell them, they are impressed, but seemingly not surprised. ub40 back to back on my shuffle. earth dies screaming and don't break my heart. powerful throwbacks. i listen to the full songs, more than once, which is rare with my impatience.you shoot me down in flames / You put me down a lot / But I'm giving you my heart / Go on take it / Please be careful not to break it / Just remember it's the only one I've got / It's the only one I've The expected perished at the basement, but it was a joyful experience, a stop between points in terms of my work, but the Pit in the Basement is that, and the intimacy welcomed a lot of adlibs. Apparently I've done the Brighton fringe and the Great Escape festival now. I was gentler, more responsive. I came here, Brighton, to recover after a big car crash, have family I love in the city too. A place that has been generous to me. Despite what people (cynical people, like me maybe) might think of as a veneer of falseness, it is a genuine place. I went with things for the performance, and things went with me. Had 2 grubbs vegiburgers. Holiday. The hotel was beautiful too.