One of the best asemic journals in the world, out of Berlin, beautifully rendered, edited so well by Federico Federici, Antonio Diavoli, Nika Turbina all visible online here https://leserpent.wordpress.com/2020/06/22/die-leere-mitte-issue-6/
Three new asemic poems from me
dog’s eye
dog’s portal
dog’s shadow monster
This is a link to the issue directly also https://ia601500.us.archive.org/34/items/dlm6_20200621/Issue%206.pdf
Cool to be in there alongside John Bennett too, a legend.
Julia Rose Lewis has given me a gift I have never received before. Her new book, High Erratic Ecology from Knives Forks and Spoons press, is a new kind of poetry thing, and does me great honour by including a poem of mine, I think, and at times, documents Julia and I’s connection, correspondence, poetic exchanges over the last years.
Julia is one of the best poets working in the UK and America that I’ve been reading since I’ve been reading. She helped as many peers and friends as I have tried to do. Her and I have often lapsed into writing email poems to each other, without design. In this new book she has created something which is a singular collection, a collaborative book, an epistolary email prose poem abstract novel and a diaristic, ekphrastic reflection. It’s all of these things and none. And a lot of my concerns, and some performances, as a poet, find their way in and around the very distinct voice Julia has. It makes me actually feel some of my stuff has been worthwhile. Makes me feel my poetic friendships are sincere. I’m proud to be connected into this book. Wonderful it was to read. My words about Julia’s work is on the back of the book too, and at the book link
(Here is my poem in the book also…)
My third time moderating the Korean Culture Centre UK’s Literature Nights. It’s a gig that makes me appreciate where my wide ranging interests, methods, activities sometimes takes me. To be asked to deep read such brilliant books, come up with questions for mostly non-specialist participants, people who are just interested in Korean culture, and then talk about these books, for a few hours, is really such a pleasure. This time, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, as excellent at Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death and Han Kang’s The White Book. Choi’s book is powerful, deeply affecting, but also methodologically remarkable, blending commentary and poetry with found materials, photographs, documents, collage and more. It’s a rare book where method and meaning are in synch. / This session was really mellow, generous, unpretentious but really attentive. It was a boiling hot day and all of us, all 18 of our faces in squares on zoom, wilted and shared thoughts on the work. / Also if you are in London, really worth checking out https://kccuk.org.uk/en/
Filming again, Tereza Stehlikova and I’s film about disappearing / terraformed West London, and its mysteries, continues to grow, this time in the glowing boil of a heatwave. We were joined with others for this day, which is a rarity. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood
I’ve been in residence with J&L Gibbons for six years now, that is to say I have built a wonderful friendship with landscape architects Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, and their team, over many years. We meet occasionally and they lay out all their remarkable work for me, bringing me into their processes, their conceptual thinking, their pragmatic practise - their constant efforts to think laterally and liminally with the design and shape of the places we live. They are inspiring people - outgoing, passionate, tireless, considered and considerate. Rarely do I meet people operating at such a high level of effect on the world around us who are never lost within a private professional culture or other personal motivation by the very demands of that work. (Worth checking out their new website too https://jlg-london.com/Practice)
Introducing Tereza and Jo and Neil a few years ago led to some grand moments, most especially in Kensal Green Cemetery and The Garden Museum, so it was natural we would get together to film. We met at Willesden Junction, traced Scrubs Lane down past towering new high rise flats, named Notting Hill Genesis - the beginning of all things. The new development Oold Ooak continues to grow, ebbing over the west lands, clearing space, jutting up into skylines. No Trellick Towers in stone, just rows of glassy plastic flats coming together, built by workers who poured through the lockdown still labouring at risk. Thousands of new homes coming, the HS2 burrowing underneath. Haunts now becoming glossy magazines alive, stuffed full of more people where there is now nearly no one. But us. We joined Wormwood Scrubs at its most northwestern tip, the scrubland as persuasive, quiet, welcoming and atmospheric as ever, before coming back to the grand union canal to finish. It’s a route I must’ve walked 300 times or more. Never with my friends, capturing snippets of conversation, knowing one day the brief connections will be part of the greater whole Tereza and I have been building
The second edition of the Mercuries series which focuses on a single performance work of mine. I do these performances with so much intensity, they drain, and then, by their very nature, they fly by, to the next one, until one day no more will come. Being in lockdown, redoing my website, I’ve had a moment to see how many I’ve done, to try and fix them as not so ephemeral in my mind. This series on the Barcelona based journal Mercurius helps with that https://www.mercurius.one/home/mercuries-2-one-hour-in-vilnius
This one is on the highlights of a one hour performance I gave in Vilnius, on the invitation of the brilliant Ausra Kaziliunaite
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/
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/
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.
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 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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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…
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
