A brilliant new book of minimalist poetry has been ejected into the world thanks to Dan Power’s Trickhouse press. I was lucky enough to blurb it, below, and the book can be snapped here https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-atomised-by-robin-boothroyd/2?cs=true
“Hey listen poetry is about language first and it's more artificial than speaking even. So if a poetry is reduced down to its atoms, small clusters of letters, single words and their slight variations, misspellings, mishearings, well that's important literary work. And hey listen Robin Boothroyd is not only able to do this, which is hard, because the smaller poems get the more every single tiny gesture is exposed, but he has done it with a humour which suggests a great emotional intelligence as well as a linguistic, poetical, intellectual one. Atomised is a concentrated gem of a book. It's Brain Eno and a whole whale. It's froth and sore eros. You'd be lucky to see it slowly!”
- SJ Fowler
Published : My essay, Adult Waste and Childish Wonder: On Writing Crayon Poems
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2020/09/sj-fowler-adult-waste-and-childish.html
I tend to write essays for my poem brut books for a myriad of reasons. Initially, it was a sort of justification, knowing the work might seem intense / brutish / opaque to literary eyes, I knew that if I described the process, the reasoning, there would be some valuable context. I knew too that if I avoided the deep theory I’m allergic to then the essays would be more than bewildering apologia and allow me knowledge that might bode well for myself and my future work. Increasingly, the essays are for me. They allow me to understand what I’m doing and why, and they give me a structure in which to research purposefully.
This essays features in the back of my Crayon Poems book from Penteract Press https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler and has been generously published by Periodicities, a journal Rob Mclennan edits with great energy. An excerpt….
“Here is a formulation I would not say I believe, but have often thought of, making these works. If the crayon is for the child, and children are the most living of human beings, the most life orientated of us, being new, being closer to birth and further from death, and the crayon is their artist tool, evoking bio-matter, edibility, refuse, mulch, excrete, bodily colours and vegetation, then are crayon pictures not somewhat symbols of mortality? Otto Rank, given to me by Ernest Becker, suggests the primary trauma of life is birth (not the Oedipal Complex, causing Freud to cast Rank aside for this break in psychoanalytic dogma). Being birthed then begins our uncomfortable relationship with creatureliness. Going for a shit reminds us we were born and we will die. We are repulsed by the reminder, the smell of it, and the gushing of blood, popping spots etc.., and with good reason. These things are often, unlike their imitation in crayons, disease bearing. This is why, I believe, I was drawn to crayons to write poems, and that these poems became illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. Things alive but not alive in the way the human mind thinks they are alive. Perfect for kids and a book which is a celebration of life.
If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts. In a sense, these ‘reminders’ that interest me so much, in my work and in all things, can be equated to wonder. They are the shock of realisation. Surprise. This may stretch beyond extreme emotions like love and near-death, into any kind of alive consciousness or moments of distinct knowing. These moments also evoke both our childhood, that process of constant discovery that masks the confusion of our adult lives, and our end, that we cannot imagine the world without us, in one moment. The shock of wonder, like the reminders of creatureliness, put us in time. They force us to realise, in that temporality, we are.”
Published : Anthology, Myth & Metamorphosis
Well happy to be in this brilliant anthology with a Rune concrete poem… Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 148x210mm, 56pp https://penteractpress.com/store/myth-amp-metamorphosis
“Myth & Metamorphosis” presents a collection of poems inspired by an array of ancient mythologies. The poetic styles on show are similarly varied, showcasing the breadth of contemporary formal poetry: constrained poetry, concrete poetry, erasure poetry, asemic poetry, found poetry, prose poetry, photo poetry, puzzle poetry, translated poetry, typewriter poetry, as well as original and traditional verse forms..
Featuring work by:
Merlina Acevedo, Sacha Archer, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Luke Bradford, Marian Christie, Franco Cortese, Clara Daneri, Lucy Dawkins, Anthony Etherin, Kyle Flemmer, SJ Fowler, Mary Frances, Greg Hill, MD Kerr, James Knight, Alex McKeown, Annie Morris, Ben North, Rachel Smith, Dani Spinosa, Alex Stevens, María Celina Val, and Martin Wakefield.
Published : Anthology, Arrival at Elsewhere
https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere
“In this book-length poem, curated by Carl Griffin, poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere. Elsewhere has arrived…to everyone affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – in aid of NHS Charities Together
THE POETS - Indran Amirthanayagam, Penny Boxall, Martyn Crucefix, SJ Fowler, Linda France, John Glenday, Rebecca Goss, Philip Gross, Rachel Hadas, Matthew Haigh, Sarah Hymas, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lorraine Mariner, Chris McCabe, Richie McCaffery, Michael McKimm, Jessica Mookherjee, Abegail Morley, Katrina Naomi, Sean O’Brien, Alasdair Paterson, Jeremy Reed, Eléna Rivera, Chrys Salt, Maria Sledmere, Julian Stannard, Alina Stefanescu, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Hideko Sueoka, George Szirtes, Helen Tookey, Bogusia Wardein and many many more
PUBLISHER NOTE - When the idea for this book was pitched to us it was still fairly early in the global Covid-19 pandemic. We were all still probably in a state of shock. All locked down, uncertain what was happening – we certainly felt we had landed in a new place. All three of us, like many poets, were unsure how to creatively assess this new situation. That’s why we wanted to support this book. A collaboration of sorts, a creation of a road through all the work of poets who contributed to its making and a maker who has sensitively crafted this winding path of a poem from all our tongues. We are happy to support this work and its intention to support the NHS. Abegail Morley, Karen Dennison and Jessica Mookherjee
Published : Maadlejad, my collection The Wrestlers, published in Estonian
The longest book of mine to be translated and published, my book The Wrestlers www.stevenjfowler.com/thewrestlers has been published in Estonian by the publishers ALLIKAÄÄRNE.
All is due to Mathura, the Estonian poet, who did the translations. The book is available here https://www.rahvaraamat.ee/p/maadlejad/1399151/en?isbn=9789949746804
I like that they put my face on the back cover and the book is designed beautifully. What more can you ask for? Big in the Baltic.
Published : Animal Drums on Mercurius
My relationship with the Barcelona based journal Mercurius continues, this time hosting my film with josh alexander, THE ANIMAL DRUMS along with some new critical comments by the brilliant Jonathan Brooker https://www.mercurius.one/home/animaldrums
Jonathan Brooker on The Animal Drums - “…the episodic nature of it - reminding me a little, while having entirely its own character, of some of Chris Petit’s work with or without Iain Sinclair; that sense of a search without there being a clear objective & the requirement for the viewer to do the work of joining the dots. The route taken being as important as the destination. Of course it could just be the presence of Sinclair himself that brought it to mind! The underlying theme, of a changing & ever less accommodating London, defenceless against the manipulations of international capital, was one that has fascinated & saddened me over the years….
… I’m also interested in the way that the character appears to be SJ Fowler but isn’t - something I’ve always liked about the films of Jonathan Meades; that overt acknowledgement that the person you’re watching is only a version of the person as they actually exist. I guess it’s just a conscious application or heightening of Goffman, but using that disconnect between essence & performance & the idea of consciously blurring the line for dramatic or narrative effect greatly appeals.” More information here.
Published : new asemics in Authora
Great to have some new asemic poems in the Australian based online journal Authora.
The poems were featured in my early 2019 February exhibition at Avivson gallery, responding to Henri Michaux’s work in their collection.
https://www.authora.net/artworks/empty-spaces/steven-j-fowler
I’m in the art section, but the poetry section has some grand stuff, including Andrew Taylor https://www.authora.net/issueone
A note on : Words like paintings - Klangfarbentext in Deutschland Funk
The magic Klangfarbentext (www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/klangfarbentext )festival in Munich that I was part of and helped create earlier this year continues to get good coverage and have a lasting impact. It was, already at a six month remove, an important happening for us to recount what concrete poetry is in the 21st century. The paper deutschland funk has this slightly funny article up https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erstes-festival-fuer-visuelle-poesie-worte-wie-gemaelde.691.de.html?dram:article_id=471898 It contains audio toooo
“Participation was the focus of the first British-German festival for visual poetry, which was jointly organized by the British Council and the Lyrik-Kabinett. One of the moderators was Steven J. Fowler, who carried colorful letters with him in a fanny pack. He laboriously unpacked it on stage, then washed it in a bowl with gurgling mineral water to finally form the word “troublemaker”, troublemaker - an allusion to Brexit?
“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Steven Fowler and after having been mentioned so many times I am sure to be a disappointment to you. We are now experiencing twelve very short performances by the aforementioned poet teams who will be here for the next three days and create “sound colors text”. If I weren't one of them myself, I would be sorry for them because they now have to follow up on Eugen's incredible twenty-minute performance. We're all ruined now because you were so good. "
A note on : Seen as Read - online course on Visual Poetry
An online course beginning September 14th 2020, running for seven weeks. £200. All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses
What are the possibilities of poetry on the page, or screen, beyond, or expanding with, its semantic content? Far from being a domain of contemporary experimentation in marginal literatures, what we know as visual poetry reaches back into the very origins of poetry, far more than more formal, mainstream writing. This online course exposes the roots of the language arts, from cave paintings to undecipherable manuscripts, before touching upon the possibilities of the modern manifestations of visual poetry - Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry and Photo Poetry. This is a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else.
Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern artists to "outsider" poets, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Henry Michaux, Bob Cobbing to Rosaire Appel, Sophie Calle to Sophie Podolski, Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly.
A note on : 10 years of sound poetry - HIPOGLOTE podcast
This is something I’m really happy with - a podcast in the remarkable HIPOGLOTE series, thanks entirely to the amazing Tiago Swabl - which recounts my ten years in sound poetry this year, 2010 to 2020. A unique audio document, I was invited to provide performances and commentary explaining my path though the noise poems as part of their Carte Blanche series.
It traces my first steps as part of the post Bob Cobbing Writers Forum, my early improvised vocalisation work with Ben Morris and Dylan Nyoukis and at the British Museum, then my travels around Europe working with Zuzana Husarova and Maja Jantar amongst others, then my Soundings project with Wellcome Library, my participation in the Palais de Tokyo sound poetry retrospective and works with British artists I admire like Nathan Walker and the legendary Phil Minton. All this with brand new works made for the show, loads of solo works I’ve dug out of my archive and cover versions of Cobbing and bp nichol, also new for this ambitious hour.
It’s pleasing to not only have had the invitation, but to have Tiago’s editorial assistance (he did it all!) in making this document. It succinctly looks back on so much work I’ve found myself doing in a field which has always intimidated / excited me and it’s made me realise things, in making this summation, that had escaped me. More than anything, it’s made me realise I want to do more sound poetry. https://www.mixcloud.com/Hipoglote/183o-hipoglote_2020-08-17_-carte-blanche_-steven-j-fowler/
Published : 3 new Crayon Poems in Sober magazine
A grand burst of publications around my latest Poem Brut book - CRAYON POEMS with penteract press (buy it here https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler ) that features works not found in the book. Three more have been published by Sober magazine here https://www.sober-magazine.com/#/new-page-35/
I added this note “There is a part of me that wants to be messy, dumb, clumsy, childish, ape-ish and impatient because I am quite naturally these things and these things are preferable to pretense. I never wish to be a child again, and will be granted this wish, but I’d rather be one than a fraught, bourgeois adult, and so robbing the techniques of infants seem a valuable, if petulant, path to safety. What better reason than childishness, amidst the recreations of mortality, animalisms, literacy and colourfulness, could there be for me to author and labour a book of poems made exclusively from the wax crayon?”
A note on : Poet's Poem Podcast on Edward Lear
click the image or link below to listen
A really good experience appearing on Mischa Foster Poole’s great new podcast series - Poet’s Poem - where he asks the guest to choose a poem which is then explored over an hour. Well I chose a poem not because I have expertise in it, but because I wanted to explore its context, knowing how clever Mischa is, and how much more skill he has at certain kinds of analysis than I.
I explain in the talk how I have recently realised that nonsense poetry in Victorian England may be another link in a tradition I find myself in, that is so obviously known to be unknown to me. In a sense this chat was a chance for me to proof that idea, a bit. The poem resonates with my interests a lot too - a kind of muted surrealism, a pessimism and the use of animal imagery (in my case to ironise the anthropocence - with Lear, Mischa and I happily disagree on why he throws in Walrus after Crab…)
Moreover I think we had fun doing this, having a laugh, and going, not by design, 90 minutes, rather than 60. Please do give it a listen and support Mischa’s podcast in the future too. https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-n23ni-e669e1
this amazing term list from the cast that mischa made says it alll
A note on: Timelapse in the Northern Echo
One of the highlights of this and last year is my collaboration with the brilliant David Rickard for an installation in Kielder Forest. The Northern Echo recently wrote a story on the work to be found here https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/18640831.new-art-installation-kielder-water-forest-beauty-spot
Timelapse, created by sculptor David Rickard for the Kielder Art and Architecture programme, is a new feature on the Lakeside Way, on the south side of the Bull Crag peninsula. Visitors can sit among the locally harvested timber that the structure is comprised of and take in the area’s timeless beauty.
The artist said: “The sculpture derives from the underlying materials that define Kielder Water & Forest Park: timber and time. With trees typically growing in Kielder Forest for several decades before harvest, the forest itself reflects various timespans through the scale of the trees in different plantations. This passage of time is also marked within the timber of individual trees.”
Texts from poet SJ Fowler are embedded in the floor and ceiling of the sculpture, subtly referencing the way gravity slows time, as first defined by Albert Einstein in 1907….
A note on : The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling...coming soon
I’ve put my heart in this one. So much of my lockdown summer has been thinking through asemic writing / poetry, what I’m doing, what it is, who has come before me. I’ve found so much work that was new to me and shared some things too, for example doing this online lecture for Arnolfini UWE for example.
This is a 2nd edition of a book published in 2018 with Tom Jenk’s longstanding and brilliant Zimzalla avant objects press. It’s become twice the size, multiple chapters of asemic poetry with introductions, over 100 works, plus appendices including essays by David Spittle, David MacLagan (who is an incredible figure in promoting outsider art ideas and scribbling - the pioneer, critically, of the field) and others, and a long interview.
This will be the 3rd in the poem brut series, but now the 5th.
It’s a great time to be sharing this book, which should be out late September, early October, and in the meantime, I’m encourage any purchases of the Zimzalla backcatalogue, which is extraordinary https://zimzalla.co.uk/
Published : Asemic poems for Love in the time of covid
Big thanks to Vaughan Rapatahana in NZ for this publication. He’s part of a project that (from the site) “offers an unprecedented opportunity for voices all over the world to share, in quality fiction and non-fiction, poetry and dialogue, art and music and more, the collective experiences of the international community during COVID.” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com
My asemic poems are very recent, taken from my upcoming book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler with Zimzalla Press. One is a crystal and one a landscape. https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/08/07/asemic-s-j-fowler/
Here is what I wrote for the site “i suppose, in a sense, a great deal of the experiences we have all gone through, if not the actual horrible sickness of covid itself, has been one of self-confrontation through lockdown’s pragmatic and practical limitations on our movements and space. in this sense then, i am interested in a poetry that acknowledges its inability to eloquently express inner dialogue, mood swings, clouded thought patterns, meaningless and often banal swings of feeling, and the expression of that. i think asemic, or semantically fraught poetry, gets to that. these poems are about synapses flashing and other things you can’t see but see anyway.”
A note on : Klangfarbentext in the Süddeutsche Zeitung
We snuck in the amazing Klangfarbentext in Munich just before lockdown hit. A dozen of us in Munich, at the incomparable Lyrik Kabinett, hashing out 21st century concrete poetry. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/klangfarbentext
Nice to see the project was covered in the massive german paper Süddeutsche Zeitung with a small article back in March https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/literatur-zeichen-von-gestern-gedeutet-fuer-heute-1.4830995
Steven J. Fowler told of the 1000 ideas for his performance and the fear of choosing exactly the wrong one. He took the festival title "Sound Colors Text" literally, dipped capital letters in colored water and put them together in a variety of ways to sometimes more, sometimes less meaningful words.
A note on : Broken Sleep list for 2021
I am happy to be one of the poets on the list for Broken Sleep in 2021, alongside some friends - Lucy Harvest Clarke, Luke Kennard, Emma Hammond, Jon Stone - and a lot of new names to me. Which is excellent.
The book I’ll be releasing in March 2021 is the second, far longer, instalment of my cinema poems. I’ve been working on them bit by bit for years. The first pamphlet I did with BS did really well and was a joy to put together, I STAND ALONE BY THE DEVILS, it was called.
This will be a full collection and more ambitious in terms of methodology too. Aliens is a film about more than one Alien, for example.
What Aaron Kent and his team have done with Broken Sleep is very impressive too, the press is growing exponentially. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/
A note on : a poem for All Particles and Waves
All Particles and Waves is David Spittle’s debut collection. To celebrate it, he generously asked friends to respond to the book with new works. I wrote a poem and it is online https://www.dspittle.com/post/sj-fowler
from David “…I wanted to gather artists I have met during this time to respond to All Particles and Waves. All the artwork compiled mainly consists of individual responses to the book or works kindly contributed towards a curation of the book’s extended ‘climate’. This 'gallery' gathers together poetry, essay, photography, film, and collage. I am immensely grateful to all who took part. It is the friendship, underground / tangential inspiration, and enduring correspondence with such artists that I most value in poetry.”
A note on : Poem Brut books on Good Press
The Glaswegian bookshop Good Press has two of my poem brut books in stock to buy, with profits to the brilliant Hesterglock press and the good cause of Good Press itself. They have laid the books out beautifully, with lovely images from within.
“Ǥᗝᗝᗪ ᑭᖇᗴᔕᔕ is a volunteer run, informally organised shop and event space dedicated to the promotion, distribution and production of independently or self published printed matter, with a focus on visual arts and writing, occasionally music or artist objects. All of the publications you find in-store and on-line are either self published or produced by an independent small press, gallery, group or organisation.”
Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit www.goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/unfinished-memmoirs-of-a-hypocrit-by-sj-fowler
Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire http://goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/aletta-oceans-alphabet-empire-by-sj-fowler
A note on : Mercuries performance series on Mercurius magazine
Thomas Helm has done a grand job with his new online journal Mercurius, bringing together artists from across the world. I have a series on the site which brings focus to some of my performance and film work, entitled Mercuries https://www.mercurius.one/mercuries Recent editions focus on performances about books, blades and time.