Richard Marshall is a unique enthusiasm. One of the best performers I’ve seen, he is also the foremost interview of philosophers from around the world, in the UK. Also a great editor - we met working at 3am magazine - and a poet, novelist, educator and visual artist. He has tremendous energy, and balances his remarkable intelligence with chaoticness. He has recently written an intense article on myself and two friend-compatriots, Patrick Cosgrove and Vilde Bjerke Torset. Please read the full article at the link below to read more on the excellence of Cosgrove and Torset.
Because Richard is a master of the theoretical ebullient I experience his writing about my writing as his own magic fiction collaboration response. This is ideal. I therefore present excerpts from his piece below as my own kind of collaboration, or, in a real sense, these are the bits I partially understood.
https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/brief-note-on-fowler-cosgrove-and-torset
‘… attempt to tie down the dithering generalizations of Romanticism and turn them into equations worthy of deliberation.’ (Graham Robb).
“So here’s a short aside on three contemporary poets through the prism of Robb’s insight made when reflecting on Mallarmé’s statements about poetic language. The three poets are working to link the high flown to the ground using bits and pieces – words sure, but also stuff and performance and lacerations of constrained postulates. They might be humorously characterized as boisterous pre and ante textual presences. All are within the invisible high pressure atmosphere of Poem Brut, a London based but international poetry movement inaugurated by SJ Fowler…..
…. The bed of poetry your conventional expectation seeks is absent and intimations of mortality eclipse any sense of sunrise. The perfect rigid frame of those old habits are left staggering around as symbols of death and emptiness. It’s a new form of the sublime and is how art can focus on what’s cancelled. This is difficult and complicated art. The poets hover eccentrically around ordinarily solid figures of speech and behaviour. They perform an image of writing that probes whilst remaining spirals of periphrastic and obscure transparencies. They confront a hostile world by posing the book in the book, the poem in the poem, the object in the object, the form in the form, the life in the life and on and on like everything they do are versions of burial grounds where, nevertheless, something hopeful is about to happen.
… Their dramas all break down any provisional artistic optimism and so there’s a helplessness expressed directly in counter-images, lurking convictions that transcendent values are lost or that discourse about a discourse that can’t exist is just a nasty infectious malaise. The sheer naked engagement with this as the basal ground of poetry makes them consummate and necessary and urgent for these dark times.
Why don’t they offer anything more than just the possibility, that notion of ‘I can’t go on, I go on,’ so familiar and almost a cliché in Beckett? Well, they all place limits (in very different ways) on poetry. All they can do is present the starting point of the activity. They provide oblique literal and allegorical structures so attempts are suggested but not directly described, whilst what we are given seem like rehearsals of those terrible, obscure initial conditions. So there are mysteries but never directly expressed. We’re forced into a condition of enjoyable exasperation like we’ve been seduced, refused and offered no consolation and all we do is scream and agonise over what might have been alone. It’s a heady, unmissable show.
SJ Fowler - His material is placed in a symbolic relation to the subject of literature, maybe poetry even. It is not symbolism as such but more a kind of analogy to transcendent value. There’s little more than the hope that a synthesis will be achieved, or at least, approached. What happens is the satisfaction of perceiving a thin allegorical drama advanced as aura. What is depicted then? Not the thing itself so much as the effect. His figures and shapes and physical complications and exaggerations are strange ranges of recognition done outside the need to communicate. He has a single way that doubles words. Sometimes erases them. Most of the things are peculiar to him, but at times there are conventional things to drawn on. But there are always structures and so we can read, listen, see these as a weird anthropological and psycholinguistic twisting.
Well now, what gets reactivated are the mysterious aspects. These lie even in decorations of fancy prose. That makes sure we notice that language here is organic with its own internal logic as distinctive from meanings and sharing. This is play understood as that cognition that’s neither trapped nor freed but held in an unsustainable equilibrium. Everything is constant. He couldn’t care what you make of it in terms of exchange. If these are symbols there is no indication of a single reference. Images are abstract patterns he finds in the objective universe. Whew….
Concrete dimensions. This is a principle delight for Fowler. Increasingly so it seems. What he makes are those strange visual coincidences that suggest the vista of visual mementos. But often the visual and the aural find their similarities and he has contrasting devices using sounds drawn to the eye.
There is of course a sense of gigantic alarm: what is it when we confront these synthetic acts except us left clutching at straws? Coherence is there but ready to be replaced by this equation: as vivid as they are obscure. This is unsettling to the ‘reader’/’audience’ used to meaning and being served. Fowler asks us to do two things: recognize what’s been undermined and then relish it….
In Fowler’s most zany and fragmentary mode there’s a gesture towards memories of older rhymes and allusions towards mysteries of a lost past or rather a hidden present. In this sense he’s offering souvenirs. He harks back and harkens. There are earlier words that are not words. Poetry is a kind of sheep dip. There’s not a label of anything, but maybe just labels. He references things that go back to a previous dispensation, an earlier word. If it seems random then Fowler isn’t too worried about the integrity of an author per se. Maybe its inevitable and necessary……
Perhaps one way to think about Fowler is in terms of topography. There is space rather than time, so a sense of expansion over something stuck fast. The pieces work like the wriggling trapped animal. The swan in ice. The suffocating sheet. Why put it like that? To find a way of distancing him from the Romantic notions of flight and flying away and time. Romantics are young. Fowler is of course young but in these terms a heretic. He’s also melodramatic and an extreme case. We’re never in the best seat to watch and listen or read. In this everything he does is a parody of performance because he doesn’t care that we miss. But this isn’t the same as not caring about there being something worth while to miss. Anyone who has watched his performances and the way he herds his fellow Poem Brutists knows this is someone intensifying the connections between performance and audience with a knowledge that many others frankly don't understand.
He is skillful and combines his knowledge with the strict rules of tense humour, parodic abstraction and vertiginous slap-stick. He knows what the difficult task is of facing each one of his poems. He draws attention to this by doing what he does. It’s a kind foregrounding that reminds us of what is forgotten and erases what is always remembered. Sometimes what flies is uglier and messier than what was there before, but at least its now flying….”
