I will be doing a physical launch when possible in April, May, June, but for now Broken Sleep have set up a digital launch event series and happily I shall be reading from my book COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS : POEMS ON FILMS on March wednesday 31st at 7.30pm, with the link here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/copy-of-broken-sleep-books-march-launch-tickets-143689443995
Really happy to be one of 10 respondents in a new book of interviews conducted by David Spittle and published by Broken Sleep books, entitled Light Glyphs https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/david-spittle-light-glyphs
“Light Glyphs is a series of interviews with filmmakers on poetry, and poets on film. Featuring interviewees such as John Ashbery, Iain Sinclair, Lisa Samuels, and Guy Maddin, this intriguing set of interviews delves into the connections and shared interests of creatives behind the camera, and holding the pen. Light Glyphs seeks to explore 'ways of thinking, writing and seeing opened to new and changing possibilities [...] or in where the light escapes and how it obscures, in what is missing from the frame or smudging the lens.' I’ve been reading and following this series for years, David is a brilliant poet and am really pleased to be in such company. Our chat covered my film The Animal Drums amongst others thing.
This chat was in aid of a new piece of short fiction being published with Tar Press, so editor Henry Johns phoned me up and we spoke. We spoke about lemon smell, axes, courses, warhammer and the story itself. Tar press publishes fiction on twitter, trying to do something good in a bad place. https://www.tarpress.co.uk/
https://theinterpretershouse.org/reviews-1/2021/2/17/joseph-turrent-reviews-sj-fowler
A generous review of my 2020 choose your own adventure poetry fiction hybrid book I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) by Joseph Turrent. The book is available here https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/iwillshowyou
“Again, this leavening of darkness by the surgical insertion of an item from childhood. Humour in this text comes when you least expect it. You feel as if someone knows you truly, then they go and buy you a soda stream machine. You feel the sudden chill on the hand of a gaudy drink you didn’t realise you were holding. Is everything over now? Should you run like a deranged John Goodman down the burning corridors of your life? (I should say here that my wife bought me a soda stream last year as a gift. It was very welcome and I am very happy with it.)
Fowler foists uncertainty on us, and some of the most memorable passages of the book evoke the inescapable, unaccountable peril of an anxiety dream.
Here we find ourselves on a bus. In keeping with the conventions of anxiety dreams, we are exposed to others: we perceive the vehicle’s interior as a theatre, filled with observers.
When you shift your chair just a few centimetres from the middle of the stage, to better see the driver, it falls out beneath you. This in front of a full audience and with a series of glasses below. You are not embarrassed, as its quite spectacular.
You stand up and say ‘my arse is wet’, then some elderly person points out to you your leg had been cut and blood is streaked across your clothes. The glass cuts into your knee joint, you were lucky to not have slashed your wrist. A different older human being asks you, are you alright love? Yes you say, they’re taking effect but they’re not working proper.”
This was a lovely, off the cuff video interview / podcast / chat with the Irish poet and editor Michelle Moloney King for her Beir Bua journal, in its new youtube channel. We chatted about asemic poetry, high and low art, authenticity and loads of other stuff. Michelle is exactly the kind of person I’m lucky to be able to meet through poetry, someone who has found their own way into it and won’t give up their own way of things, and is original for that fact.
Do go follow beir bua too, it’s a great magazine https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/
An online course beginning March 14th 2021. 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 visual poetry by taking in great swathes of modern art engaged with text. We explore Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry, Minimalism, Poster Poetry and Originary Visual Poetry in a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else.
The Voynich Manuscript / Sophie Podolski / Judit Reigl / Annagret Soltau / Seiichi Niikuni
Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, taken from all over the globe - 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.
My #poembrut vispo book Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire published with Hesterglock press in 2018 has 4 unpublished asemic / art poems now online at Mercurius, an online journal. https://www.mercurius.one/home/aletta-ocean-alphabet-empire
AOAE is available https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/aletta
The publication includes the essay featured in the book, on poetry, eroticism and pornography.
“You can never discover for yourself what you’ve been given. Bodies and knowledge, both. The primary purpose of this book is to worry about the division between the experienced and the perceived, and what is lost between that ever expanding gap.
Bataille suggests that you try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are in, to one in which your whole self is completely doubled. He means this to be a disturbance. He reminds us, you would not survive this process since the doubles you have turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now, as while you’ve split into two new versions of yourself, you cannot be the same, twice over. A kind of procreation is what he is suggesting and the metaphor is about writing, I think. To mark the pages then release them is to indulge oneself, fundamentally, in a productive onanism. Cells dividing, with some of that division escaping you. No wonder it feels sad, a let down, to release things into the world.
At some event, I’m watching a panel of speakers talking about something banal. The title is specious, it’s designed to intrigue but not offend. It’s a turgid literary festival, stuffy and fake, but the panellists keep talking about sex. They are almost battling each other over it. It is awkward, and insistent, but not, perhaps, for the reasons they’d imagine. They are desperate to appear comfortable with the notion of sex and in so doing are opening a gap between themselves and sex itself. Gone is anything remotely evocative of the experience, from within, within consciousness. I do not believe them too, it is a falsehood which is designed to make the audience comfortable while appearing to be discomforting. Aletta flits across my mind, as I’m actively daydreaming an escape, and it occurs to me there seems nothing more unerotic than poets talking about sex. “
New poetry films and video-literature to start 2021 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos
With the www.writerskingston.com usual new year’s program of events unable to take place I’ve been happy to commission a brand new set of poetry films, hosted on the Writers Kingston youtube channel, themed and released as premiered events online. I’ve asked writers, poets and artists, connected to institute and the events that were planned in the flesh, to present new works of film poetry, video literature or digital reflection on the nature of the moment, around loose themes. I hope, in creating a new body of work, to create a kind of creative time capsule, that will have a legacy beyond that which is hopefully soon passing. Works from Rishi Dastidar, Simon Tyrrell, Luke Kennard, Sylee Gore, Jade Cuttle, Spike Mcclarity, Kayleigh Cassidy, James Byrne, James Knight and more.
Representing the multi methodological poetry of my new collection COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS (available for pre-order https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days) I’m happy to say 3 unpublished poems have been shared by Berfrois, thanks to editor Callie Michail
DOGTOOTH, MARGIN CALL, GUMMO https://www.berfrois.com/2021/02/margin-call-gummo-and-dogtooth-by-sj-fowler
Magic my new book COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS : POEMS ON FILMS due next month with Broken Sleep Books is now available for pre-order. The link features 2 poems from the book (Paul Schrader’s Mishima and Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor, featured here +) https://brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days
'I love the conceit of the project; the meandering and collagic mindscape, induced by the various prose and textual formats, encourages a desire to keep on reading. Here lies an unfathomable interconnectivity, parts always competing for a place in some unfinished scene.' Andrew Kötting
I had a glut of film work and collaborations in the latter half of 2020, due to obvious reasons. Trying to avoid the ubiquity and pseudo deadness of zoom teams skype, though it has its uses for chats, film is the best way to make work that can be shared at a remove. One of the films was made with my long-term collaborator Thomas Duggan, an artist, architect, designer based in Cornwall. He took a 16mm old camera up to the highlands and cut the footage into a poetic montage, this just at the time I was teaching tonnes of poetry film stuff, and so having pushed the more experimental potentials of the medium, I decided in this case, an separated exchange was the best route, where I write and record poetry to go with the images. When I teach I often mention this form as the standard for poetry films but its that for a reason.
The film is called HERE YOU WERE NEVER A CHILD. It has a soundtrack by The Dirty Three, which is remarkable, and a connection through Thomas. Happily, already, the film has been accepted for screening and competition at the Montreal Independent Film Festival and the Venice Short Film Festival.
A very energised online journal from Ireland, Beir Bua, edited by Michelle Moloney King, has generously featured my art-poetry as their special focus in their second issue. It collates one example, one art-poem, from eight of my books. It essentially draws upon what I’ve been working on, in exploring visual poetry and the handmade, and the poem brut movement, since the summer of 2017 and prior. It’s satisfying to see it represented in this way, and the issue has some really fine poets in there too, from Gregory Betts to Susan Connolly and many others new to me. Worth checking out https://beirbuajournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/issue-2-15.pdf
The works are taken from my books Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep), due next month, then Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020), Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018), The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (2020), I fear my best work behind me (Strange Press 2017), Sticker Poems (due out later in 2021 with Trickhouse Press), Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit (Hesterglock Press 2019) and finally Bastard Poems (due out later in 2021 with Steel Incisors)
Also featured in the issue are short reviews of my books Crayon Poems, Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire, kindly penned by the editor, who also reviews my friend and collaborator Christodoulos Makris, as well as introing the issue. https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/journal/issue-2/
New poetry films and video-literature to start 2021 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos
With the www.writerskingston.com usual new year’s program of events unable to take place I’ve been happy to commission a brand new set of poetry films, hosted on the Writers Kingston youtube channel, themed and released as premiered events online. I’ve asked writers, poets and artists, connected to institute and the events that were planned in the flesh, to present new works of film poetry, video literature or digital reflection on the nature of the moment, around loose themes. I hope, in creating a new body of work, to create a kind of creative time capsule, that will have a legacy beyond that which is hopefully soon passing. Works from Laura Davis, Agnieszka Studzinka, Sara Upstone, Meg Jensen, Anna Johnson, Stephen Sunderland, Susie Campbell, Chris Kerr, Robert Sheppard and more.
https://www.versopolis.com/festival-of-hope/festival-of-hope/1049/poetry-films
“The Festival of Hope, a global initiative of Versopolis, was launched in a situation where the connection between literary creators and readers, as well the global exchange of ideas and content was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our main idea was to create a bridge between continents and cultures, while giving a clear signal to the widest global community that poetry has no boundaries, that it can bring hope even in times of crisis.”
Nice that the three poetry films we created for european poetry festival 2020 are now shared again as part of this Versopolis online festival
This first screening of Limbo, Lotje Sodderland’s new short film which I co-wrote, was supposed to take place this January 2021 in the Curzon cinema, either in Soho or Mayfair. Unfortunately, not possible, and so the London Short Film Festival premiered it online, in a program of excellent shorts. Nice that the film has been aired once, and hopefully many more festivals to come.
I’m often associated with collaboration when it comes to poetry, and more recently, art-poetry too. Art-poetry being something ive tried to explore in my own work, teaching and in www.poembrut.com Recently I’ve had the pleasure to get a copy of one of the most considerable poetry / art collaborative volumes released in recent years - Gabriele Tinti and Roger Ballen’s THE EARTH WILL COME TO LAUGH AND FEAST.
Gabriele is an old friend, we bonded over our shared love of boxing and did an event together at the National Poetry Library. His poetry in this beautifully produced book is extraordinary, but more than that, it is perfectly set with the grim, atmospheric photo-art of Balen, whose speaks to, and compliments Gabriele’s poems to great effect. There is a really complex interchange of mediums in the book, between the poetic, the discursive, the morbid, the photographic and the hand-made / hand-written. You can also see the great director Abel Ferrara reading one of Gabriele’s poems in this video
I’ve had the chance too to publish a small selection of the work on 3am magazine here https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/theearthwillcome/
And the volume can be picked up here https://powerhousebooks.com/books/the-earth-will-come-to-laugh-and-to-feast/
Peter Greenaway’s work is hugely important to me - his austerity, his excess, his style, his unapologetic intellectual concerns, his irreverence, his obsession with language (which is poetry at times) and his exploration of writing, calligraphy and asemia. I’ve written poems about his films for the last few years, in a kind of suite or sequence, ranging in methodologies.
In my latest collection - COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS - released in March with Broken Sleep books I have 6 poems dedicated to his works. 3 of them, plus a poem on a documentary made about him by his partner Saskia Boddeke, have been kindly published online by Partisan Hotel, edited by Dominic Jaeckle. They include a long literary poem about THE FALLS, then a hand-written documentary poem about DROWNING BY NUMBERS and an ASEMIC WATER POEM about PROSPERO’S BOOKS https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Fowler-for-Greenaway
Very cool to be in this online exhibition which celebrates the Streetcake Magazine writing prize, of which I’m a patron and is hosted by Poem Atlas, which is doing great things with sculpture or 3d poetry. https://www.poematlas.com/refraction
This poem-brut lo-fi concertina is a deliberately aberrant pop-up book page. It combines found material, abstract painting, stickers of three different origins, or packs, and is part of an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of collage and an experimental poetry of humour. It is taken from the book 'Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films' (Broken Sleep Books 2021)
Very generous of Ghareeb Iskander to take a new poem of mine for publication in the Belgium based journal Eurolitkrant. https://eurolitkrant.com/OneBook.aspx?Id=81
The journal has featured some great European poets recently - Peter Zavada, Ida Borjel, George Szirtes, Kornelia Deres - and I’m particularly happy to have this poem up as it’s taken from my new collection, which is due March 2021, in two months time. It is entitled COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS poems on films with Broken Sleep.
The film the poem is about is an intense one, but also from Belgium, so some synchonicity jiggling.
This short film, by Julie Kamon, is based on an extract from Andrew Gallix‘s novel-in-progress, Loren Ipsum. Readings by Susanna Crossman, S.J. Fowler, Stewart Home, Sam Mills, and C.D. Rose.
Very cool to be asked to read an excerpt of Andrew’s work, someone I admire and have worked with for a decade or so at 3am magazine. It’s from a new novel he’s working on, turned into an interesting literary-film with a cacophony of readers layered and intersecting.
