The poem brut was as it always seems to be, teeming with new people and ideas in a space and place that felt communal and generous but where proper intense and weird work was shared with a seriousness and play in balance which i am proud i somewhat curated. See all the videos and they are worth seeing www.poembrut.com/richmix
and I launched my NEMESES book again but this time alone, or self-partnering, until a mole helped me.
Generous of York University and JT Welsch to host a launch of Nemeses, my selected collaborations from Haverthorn press, https://www.haverthorn.com/books/nemeses-selected-collaborations-of-sj-fowler-volume-2 which was basically an hour long meta-performance with meself and Colin Herd, Prue Chamberlain Bussey, Harry Man, Tom Jenks and Nathan Walker. All these brilliant poets and artists are in the book, of course, but Harry Man was the anti-host, bewildering students with interruptions, and then the collaborations ranged from gift giving ceremonies to neverending introductions to sound poems to makeup application. It was weird and good. And we finished with a Q&A, which was actually lovely. We then all departed for dinner, after washing our faces. A lovely experience, as I always have when reading in York.
The second NEMESES launch, this time in Kingston upon Thames, performing collaborations with two contributors collaborators Karen Sandhu and Joseph Turrent. Two very contrasting performances, one about parasites and my live death, and the other about oranges, and perspective, and jars, and my live death.
https://www.writerscentrekingston.com/nemeses Loads of videos of the performances and amazing pics by Madeleine Rose at this link in what was a startling Camarade event.
So grand to bring a proper lineup of brilliant poets to kingston, for my students and the writers centre i run. so much of the work here was engaged and ranged widely and wildly, as is the best way. very much worth watching the performances
http://yesbutisitpoetry.blogspot.com/2019/11/nemeses-by-sj-fowler-collaborators.html ….
Steven writes: "It is always in compiling Nemeses that I really realised how many collaborations I have undertaken in the five year period the book covers. It presents excerpts of full collections alongside works made specifically for Nemeses. It draws from full feature films, exhibitions, commissions, installations and poems made for performances around the world. The book is finished with an essay which details, in basic terms, how it was constructed and what my thinking has become around poetry and collaboration."
Our text for 'The New War Machine' is edited from transcriptions of two semi-improvised collaborative performances enacted as part of the Arts Council-supported Yes But Are We Enemies project and 10-day tour of Ireland and London that I produced and co-curated with Steven in 2014 - the performances in question happening in Galway Arts Centre on 21 September and Rich Mix Arts Centre, London, on 27 September of that year.
Additionally, I'm proud to have played some part in a producing, curatorial or editorial capacity in bringing about or supporting some of the other collaborations featured in Nemeses: 'Subcritical Tests' with Ailbhe Darcy began at Yes But Are We Enemies and culminated in a book-length project which then became the first Gorse Editions title we published, in 2017; 'It Is What Is Love / It Is What Is Hate' with Rike Scheffler is also forthcoming in gorse No. 11; 'Beastings' with Diamanda Dramm is the result of a collaboration that began after Steven and Diamanda met at Phonica: Eight in March 2018 (where they performed storming individual sets) and with a full album release forthcoming later this month; and 'The Irish Character Study' with Billy Ramsell was conceived & performed as part of Yes But Are We Enemies.
You can read Steven's introduction to Nemeses on the gorse website. The book is available to buy from HTVN press.
Very happy the 7th of my series of new european collaborative poems published by spanish online interface magicland has emerged. Written with the swiss poet Patrick Savolainen
https://www.wazogate.com/questions-of-neutrality/
Do you journey for work, or for leisure?
You think, inevitably, about how simple the world would be if you could separate the two.
And then it occurs to you
you no longer know what the latter means.
Leisure. It sounds menacing to you now.
A concept with faint smells of totalitarianism.
But what you don’t know is you’re thinking that because you are a soft blurt.
A moaner.
You have read too much and been pampered so hard that you no longer realise how easy your breakfast is.
What gradually burns your throat is a lozenge of love of others. To most.
Your weather is patient, your pressure is light.
Your frog plays fair with the whims of small farmers and other peasants.
Your barely know what work means, so how could you understand leisure?
Do you, A, journey inward
or B, keep pretending, as you munch your pills, this is all working out for you
Into our fifth year of collaboration, Tereza Stehlikova and I will be screening our film WORM WOOD at the end of January 2020 at Whitechapel Gallery cinema. In light of that we are filming plenty now. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood
Began in 2015, Worm Wood has taken in publication, exhibition, event and the film, but really its about our collaboration and the levels on which that operates as something of a friendship expression / pedagogy / open method. We have just improvised our way, without end goal, without conclusion in mind or narrative, for years.
I suppose its about the industrial and reclusive landscapes of these areas of London, a place that is not obsessed with itself. And how they are changing as the massive new old oak development has come in and begins to grow and terraform a beautiful ugly place into something ugly ugly new plastic shiny glass and valuable.
Tereza wrote a typically elegant piece on our latest filming day also on our site https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2019/11/04/wormwood-car-giant/
“It’s a Sunday, a rainy afternoon in November. Rather than a Sunday roast, Steve and I opt for roaming the liminal landscapes of Willesden Junction, our old trusted friend. It’s unpretentious spirit offers us great sense of solitude, with no pressure to know what we want, be goal oriented, be professional. Here we are, free.
It’s a year 2019 already, and back in the Car Giant’s territories, Steve and I have been fortunate to discover the entrance into the otherworldly Giant’s Diner. What joy! Steve appears ecstatic as he rushes into the doorway!
I follow him eagerly up the glowing staircase, a ship about to be launched into space. Soon enough, having entered what could be a new Punchdrunk set, I expect alternative realities behind every door. The universe here is plastic, blue, resembling the anonymous non-places of ferries, airports and train stations. Where are we sailing off to?”
Not so much a review as a travelogue, the quite astounding and idiosyncratic and powerful Russian poet, my friend, and one of those on the tour itself, Maria Malinovskaya, wrote a small piece on a recent project I curated. The Nordic Poetry Festival : Norway http://www.cirkolimp-tv.ru/articles/882/kamarade-v-norvegii
It’s so worth a read, if you read Russian, I bet. But also in English, via the translation software, for it makes its own poetry, does this bot. This is not what she wrote in Russian of course, but some tasty google translate morsels, about me, if I may be so indulgent to indulge:
“There, in his scarlet trousers, red shoes and a green jacket with two badges made in the USSR, Stephen Fowler met us, who arrived, of course, before everyone else. When I think about this person and especially when I see him, the clean and cold energy with which he does what he loves is surprising. He will never say compliments on duty, he will not smile simply because he needs to smile now, but at the same time he will find really important words for you as a participant in his festival. He doesn’t drink alcohol, in every new city he comes to, he tries first of all to run a cross - to feel people and a place, and if you forgot somewhere a package,………….
……. However, Stephen did not allow to celebrate the release of the book for a long time - ahead, despite the late time, there was perhaps the most exciting part of the festival, at least for me, was a boat trip from Aalesund to Bergen. “Don’t miss the boat for pictures”! - is heard on the documentary video made by Stephen, his voice when he, like chickens, drives us inside, and we resist and try to photograph the seven-decked ship outside. And even though it was already half past three in the night in small warm cabins, we all gathered in the hall, and the most daring, that is, Young and I, got out onto the open deck and swept along it, looking into the windows of the cabins. So, unexpectedly, behind one glass, we met none other than Stephen, who looked peacefully into the distance, talking on the phone,
The first half of the next day was to be held in rehearsals of the main event of the festival, but was held in solitary and joint contemplation of the fjords, lighthouses and rainbows from the ship. And, of course, in continuous photography. We had no idea that Stephen was filming a small documentary on his phone ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms8K87HEEMw ). But, perhaps, he did not suspect about this until the end of the festival. Sailing to Bergen, on the deck we talked about the success of the festival: Steven was pleased and worried. When there is a confrontation, it is clear where to move on, and when everything turns out, it is more difficult to force yourself to change something.
In Bergen, we had only an hour left before the performances. Someone especially stress-resistant managed to oversleep all this hour, someone rehearsed, someone procrastinated. I was rather the latter. Going to the window, I saw at the intersection of Stephen, who was running on the spot in anticipation of a green traffic light. It was raining, and people under umbrellas in coats and jackets looked curiously at the sweaty young man in a T-shirt, clearly breaking their slower daily rhythm. At this moment, despite the excitement, I realized that everything is fine and right, and will be so until the end……….
………..Needless to say, two documentary poets were again on the same flight, now Bergen - Amsterdam, only one after the transfer went to Dublin, and the other to Moscow. Three wonderful books flew with me - Christodulus Makris, Stephen Fowler and David Spittle. And also - one of Stephen’s two Soviet badges, removed from his jacket and pinned to mine. I think this is what will now accompany me on different poetic readings and remind me that they can be like that.”
Happy to be part of this group exhibition at Westminster Library just literally on Leicester sq amazingly, behind the National Gallery. It’s an amazing space and holds a grand collection, and thanks to curators Astra Papachristodoulou and Lisa Kiew, I am one of around ten poet-artists who have been asked to respond to the Yellow Book.
The Yellow Book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Book was a British quarterly literary periodical that was published in London from 1894 to 1897
My work is about Aubrey Beardsley writing about Salome whacking off a unicorn and Joris Karl Huysmans fake occult sexyness in one of my favourite of his books La Bas. It’s a poem brut piece, writing in indian ink with poundland yellow paint.
Very good to be along friends and peers like Imogen Reid, Karen Sandhu, Luke Thompson et al. Check it out, it runs
November 1st to 27th 2019
Westminster Reference Library
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/library-opening-hours-and-contact-details#westminster-reference-library
35 St. Martin's Street, London, WC2H 7HP
some beautiful pictures by Madeleine Rose https://madeleinerose.photography of my selected collaborations launch this past saturday night from a windswept gothic st john on bethnal green church in east london.
the weird theatre magic of the night has been well captured in madeleine’s images, and im particularly happy to have these portraits of me and my collaborators / friends, and the animals i gave them in thanks too
https://www.haverthorn.com/books/nemeses-selected-collaborations-of-sj-fowler-volume-2
7.30pm - Free Entry - 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, Shoreditch, London E1 6LA = www.poembrut.com/richmix
New performances and commissions by Kathy Pendrill, Richard Marshall, Jacqueline Ennis Cole, Khaled Hakim, Lizzy Turner, Paul Hawkins, Martin Wakefield, Mischa Foster Poole, Saradha Soobrayen, SJ Fowler and Lisa Alexander.
Poem Brut explores the fundamental and innovative potential of what a live poem might be. It asks poets, writers and artists, working in their own traditions, to present new works, made for the night, as performance. These live poems might explore language against space, time, mess, colour, writing, speaking and moving. We aim to expand and embrace what a poem might be by exploring how the mind formulates the writing arts, engaging neurodiverse poets alongside those simply pushing against the walls of traditional literature.
The event will see the launch of Martin Wakefield’s Zugunruhe from Hesterglock Press alongside a launch for SJ Fowler’s selected collaborations 2014-2019 : Nemeses, from Haverthorn Press
In 2020, as Poem Brut enters it’s third phase, a new series of commissions will define the project, aiming to provide some of the UK’s most original poet-artists the opportunity to develop new pieces of work. Thanks to the Serendip Studio and Arts Council England, these commissions will not only explore the possibility of the handmade to create new ways to making, sharing, presenting and understanding literature, but will increasingly explore how our minds operate, and how our brains shape our writing and reading and performing and listening, and understanding. Poem Brut as an exploration of neuropoetics. The commissions are as open to the poets in form as they are in content. They support time for making, thinking, teaching or sharing. More to be announced in 2020 www.poembrut.com/commissions
I am well aware that no one will, but these performances are best watched in order, in their entirety. This is because this launch was really a kind of meta-play. It was a performance in the fuller sense, that I was messing with the audience through my collaborator Harry Man, who played an anti-host, who thought I was messing with him, who then messed with the other generous collaborators. The levels of messing, duckery, grew throughout the night, as a series of minor legit disasters built a paradoxical victory. I very very much enjoyed doing it, anyway. Each performance was grand to do, so much was improvised around plans. The texts worked out and to work with friends like this, its satisfying.
Basically I read with seven collaborations to launch my selected collaborations, NEMESES, which is absolutely beautiful. The book is so beautiful, Andrew Wells and Haverthorn have done an amazing job. And we were in an amazing gothic east london church during a rainstorm.
Happy to be in this unique anthology of poetry interviews, the book is immense, over 500 pages, so a bargain. Aaron created this out of the ether, an ambitious thing and we pinged back some interesting poems as questions and answers https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/poetic-interviews
“Poetic Interviews features fifty-five ‘Poetry interviews in the form of poetry’, eschewing the staid format of the plain text interview for something more radical. Poetic interviews began life as a blog and features interviews with diverse and illustrious figures such as Amanda Lovelace, Luke Kennard, Siddhartha Bose, George Szirtes and many more. An awe inspiring project that takes the heartbeat of a generation of poets.”
A fascinating night just off Trafalgar sq at the Korean Cultural Centre in London. I was asked to lead a discussion of Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death. They have a unique system, where people apply for these nights, and they do a lottery where 15 people get picked randomly, and they get sent the book for free. So everyone feels like the recipient of fortune, and reads attentively, and turns up. And they don’t choose the book. I didn’t quite understand this going in, as it completely shaped the two hours I spent with these 15 human beings. / The book itself is remarkable, and I think I overegged the punch on my response to it, talking about the impossibility of conceiving death in language instead of asking whether people like poems for example? But maybe that’s good. I don’t know. Hope to do this again though, I learned more talking to people who don’t like poetry or don’t think about it rather, than I normally do talking to those who pretend to know etc.
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-st-ives/exhibition/thomas-duggan-alchemy-art
My friend and collaborator Thomas Duggan has an exhibition / robotics installation at Tate St Ives which features two of our collaborations, both featured in my new book NEMESES
They are two poems, one printed in Silk and the other in Gold.
19 October – 3 November 2019 at 10.00–16.30
Thomas Duggan is an inventor who has a love of nature, design, materials, architecture, science, advanced generative design, technology, craft and robotic fabrication.
In this exclusive exhibition, Thomas Duggan presents new work alongside existing examples of his lifelong enquiry into process and invention.
I had the chance to moderate an event, and then perform a bit, celebrating one of my heros, Laszlo Moholy Nagy. His work and theory has underpinned a lot of my teaching, and then thinking, especially in being multi-medium with creative practise, and with photography and poetry. I had chanced across the Isokon gallery too, just on one of my huge london walkings, where he lived in London in 1935 to 1937. So to be asked to work alongside Valeria Carullo, who has written a book on that, was synchronicity on a few levels. I offered some opening remarks, Valeria spoke comprehensively, then I messed with a self-filming set up and read an adapted poem for Laszlo in London. I was trying to be playful while also referring to LMN’s obvious concerns and self-awareness. I was a little off I think, but it was a very worthwhile thing and I’m lucky to have been asked.
There was also this lovely write up of the event by Alison Miller http://ceel.org.uk/culture/review-hungarian-lit-night-moholy-nagy-in-britain-by-valeria-carullo-an-immersive-book-launch-at-the-hungarian-cultural-centre/
“In the two years László Moholy-Nagy lived in London (1935-1937), his creative energy and innovation were boundless. He charmed the British who warmed to his friendly, ebullient and witty character – ‘that lovely madman’. Poet Steven Fowler in opening the event said, ‘Everyone wants you to be one thing, go in a straight line, so if you’re a poet, a writer, a film-maker, a visual artist, a composition artist, an architectural designer and architect, normally people will not want to get to know you, but somehow Moholy-Nagy managed to navigate a path through.’”
http://gorse.ie/the-static-the-live/
NEMESES: SELECTED COLLABORATIONS OF SJ FOWLER, VOLUME 2, publishes with HVTN Press on 26 October. We’re pleased to feature SJ Fowler’s collaboration with Rike Scheffler in gorse 11, our forthcoming Borders issue. Here is SJ Fowler on collaborations.
a note on how the collaborations have been revealed
The relationship between the static and the live is akin to the relationship between the heard word and the read word. It’s similar even to that which is experienced and that which is remembered. Obvious as this may be, a hierarchy in the language arts of poetry, fiction and text in general, favours the written over spoken. Marks upon the paper are the dominant article because of their possible permanence, and their fixed place in time. The sounds or experiences are secondary. I’m understating the issue, historically and philosophically, to make my first explanatory apology……………………………
Alterity, an anthologic publication on consciousness is now existent, with a poem of mine, alongside Imogen Reid, Astra Papachristodoulou, Derek Beaulieu and Anthony Etherin.
Alterity Five features the work of fourteen poets, writers and artists commissioned to respond - via reassembly, erasure, blackout and anagram - to The Cambridge Declaration On Consciousness.
My poem will be featured in my new book ‘I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs)’ by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2020. http://www.alteritystudies.org/alterity-journal
It’s a beautiful thing
The Reading List is a feature of Poetry’s Editors’ Blog. This month, contributors to the October 2019 issue share some recommendations. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/10/reading-list-october-2019
S.J. Fowler
I don’t read many poems. I have to do that for work a lot so it’s a busman’s holiday now. However, I do want to just list those whose work I know (and inevitably know in person, and like) whom I think are really underappreciated in England, because there are so many of them who aren’t well-known since their work is challenging but without a bio hook. But then I’ve got to choose from hundreds. Really—hundreds. Instead, to tell the truth, these books are good food for my own machine of poems:
The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O’Connor
John Barleycorn, Jack London
Days Without End, Sebastian Barry
The Master of Mankind (Horus Heresy series), Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Journey to the End of Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Land of Ulro, Czeslaw Milosz
The Great Fall, Peter Handke
From King of Karachi to Lockdown in the Costa Del Crime: Meet the International Smuggler Who Dominated Europe’s Worst Prison, Chet Sandhu
Lanny, Max Porter
Well happy Joe Turrent and I’s collaboration is now up on the brilliant Hotel Magazine. It contains my obituary, in alternative reality https://partisanhotel.co.uk/SJ-Fowler-Joe-Turrent
PENIS-EATING LOUSE
The penis-eating louse enters male humans, typically aged 18-39, through the anus. It severs the blood vessels in the prostate gland, causing the erectile tissue to fall off. It then attaches itself to the remaining stub of the penis and extracts blood through the claws on its front [clarification needed] causing the penis to atrophy from lack of blood. The parasite then replaces the penis by attaching its own body to the pubic bone. It appears that the parasite does not cause much other damage to the host, but it has been reported by Lanzing and O’Connor (2074) that infested men with two or more of the parasites are usually underweight. Once the parasite replaces the penis, some feed on the host's blood and many others feed on human mucus.
This is the only known case of a parasite assumed to be functionally replacing a host organ. When a host male dies, the louse will detach itself from the pubic bone after some time, leave the male’s crotch, and can then be seen clinging to its head or body externally. It is not fully known what then happens to the parasite in the wild.
