“The Spit Bucket is a zine celebrating the wonderful responses made by artists to the sport of boxing.” It is run brilliantly by David and Lizzy Turner. I’ve a poem in the latest edition, 7. It is about the German boxer Jurgen Braehmer. You can read it for free here https://writersonboxing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/the-spit-bucket-issue-7.pdf with all previous editions here too https://writersonboxing.com/the-spit-bucket-a-boxing-fanzine/
Very happy Diamanda Dramm is performing her Chimp show live this month and through 2026. The songs are based on poems from two of my books and pick up our longstanding collaborative exchange. The trailer for her show is here https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NszyAxRHdso
credits for Chimp Live
music/violin/voice : Diamanda La Berge Dramm
concept : Diamanda LBD, Sonne Scheermakers
text : SJ Fowler
https://diamandadramm.com/chimp-live/ promo text “Dramm is an intriguing appearance on stage and a great musical talent. Compositionally, Chimp is a personal milestone in size: ten numbers that last a total of 40 minutes. A new challenge is to translate this material into a liveshow, that conserves her so characteristic combination of sublime and spontaneous. The songs are based on texts by British avant-garde poet Steven J Fowler, with whom Dramm has a longstanding collaboration. They are specifically drawn from I Will Show You the Life of the Mind (on Perscription Drugs) and The Great Apes. Dramm brings these two works together through a suggested image: the world of waiting rooms enfolds the world of the apes….”
https://sampsonlow.co/2025/10/16/a-zed-two-os-an-anthology-of-poems-on-the-animals-of-shaldon-zoo/
Published 2025. ISBN 978-1-915505-54-5. A6 Size
28 printed pages. Colour. BUY a zed & two o’s (£3.99 + £1.20 P&P)
My residency at the amazing Shaldon Zoo throws up another highlight!
Shaldon Wildlife Trust is a zoo like no other. Nestled on a hill, a stone’s throw from the sea, in a beautiful corner of South Devon. It is a residence to binturongs, loris’, armadillos and poets. In 2024 and 2025, SJ Fowler, as part of his residency in the zoo, organised a series of walking tour events, inviting poets from across the UK, to read to an audience of various animals. This pocket-sized anthology brings together the best of those new poems, each written for and read to an animal of Shaldon. The anthology also includes an introduction by Zoo director Zak Showell.
Featuring SJ Fowler, Colin Herd, Danica Ignacio, Will Rene, Matt Sokulsky, David Spittle, Vilde Bjerke Torset, Cameron Wade, Eleanor Wilders and Ellen Wiles.
The anthology was launched in London at the Small Publishers Fair in Conway Hall library on October 25th 2025, with readings below. Another launch will take place on November 8th at the Zoo itself
12 Limited edition postcard poems, colour and A6, just a fiver here, from Sampson Low Ltd https://sampsonlow.co/2025/10/16/fppp-1found-photo-poetry-postcards-sj-fowler/
“In theorising what is possible for the photo poem while teaching at the Photographer’s Gallery, I proposed four possible ways the two mediums can interact. With each other, separately. With text upon image, somehow. With text made of image or language evoked with image, in sequence or otherwise. And finally, a photo of language. How would this last method be more than just documentation? When the photo was necessary, when it was intrinsic?”
This limited edition set of twelve postcards, Obi wrapped as a bundle, presents photographs of language found in the world, and thus, photo poems. It is a sequence that demonstrates that language found on a high street, when divorced from context, can be more poetic than an ode. It suggests that the language people use and misuse when branding their business is often more creative than the best-selling novel. It is twelve simple photos that insist that conceptual poetry can be relatively funny, and oddly personal. BUY FPPP (£4.99 + £1.20 P&P)
The publication was launched at the Small Publishers Fair 2025, with the performance here
Once again the Small Publishers Fair was a great experience for me. For the fourth year I had a table where I shared over 30 of my publications from over 20 independent publishers. Once again I was close to many friends, stallholders, publishers and visitors alike. The fair feels like something out of a different time, friendly and collegiate and physical and intensely social. I was really lucky too to have some dear friends helping me run my table so I didn’t have to sell my own books too often. Eleanor Wilders, Simon Tyrrell, Lisa Blackwell, Patrick Cosgrove, Mikael Buck and others, to them a big thank you. We shifted a few hundred things, out now with other’s eyes rather than in boxes.
The fair readings were great too, and I launched two new publications as well as watching many writers and artists who have influenced me, including Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kotting, as in the videos below.
Ivor Kallin is brilliant. He recorded Benedict Taylor and I’s set at Improvox this past summer - a viola and talking poem performance - and included it in his Resonance FM show, as an excerpt, with him bleeping it with his brilliant commentary chat voice, and it becomes a wonderful trio.
14 minutes of it in a 90 minute show, which is all top tip
https://www.theenemiesproject.com/jupme
This was a blast, and such a wonderful thing to introduce friends, do so much improvisation, work with a legend in Terry Day and see my friends at Hundred Years. It was electric
“Celebrating the visit of the remarkable musician MIYA, from Tokyo, a remarkable and unique collaborative project following her pioneering curation in Japan. Three poets and three musicians collaborated in pairs across one evening in a round robin fashion, swapping places to create short new live works.”
Writers Kingston started in 2017. This is the 9th year. This was a very special event to kick things off in what is a year of flux for the centre. Friends from Japan, America and all across the UK mingled with my students and local writers. I was proud of so many of my former students, now graduated, whose work keeps growing, and is maintained, and they showed it to friends who hadn’t witnessed the community we’ve built at Kingston. It was gratifying, and an example below from Lily Ferret. All the performances and photos are here https://www.writerskingston.com/#/brut25/
https://artofjazz.blogspot.com/2025/10/poem-brut-writers-kingston-event-92.html and at this link you can see some extraordinary portraits done by my friend Alban Low, live drawing the night
The dream has been a book that isn’t a genre. In the same way I have found artist’s in different fields have made the best kinds of poetry by accident, often, it is sometimes the limitations of our perception around what certain books are, or have been, which forces us to find the wrong structure for our content. Bård Torgersen is someone I have admired for a long time, his work has been a palpable influence on mine, because he is able to know a lot without that knowledge stopping him from going beyond it. His new book Oey Oe:: everything speaks is one of the best examples of that. It is a truly strange and marvelous volume; original and immediate and weird and inspiring. It is a narrative and a photobook, but more than this, an asemic writing book, really highly produced, for such a series of visual incidents in poetry that it’s hard to think of a literary book like it.
Just out, it can be bought here for just over 20 quid: https://torpedobok.no/Oey-Oe-everything-speaks
And here is the documentation of the book being launched: https://www.pachinko.no/bard-torgersen
I attended the https://www.hostscena.no/ festival in Alesund, Norway to work on some future projects that I hope will grow out of the European Poetry Festival. It was an extraordinary experience because the work was quite consistently daring and radical in a way I would not have expected, given the scope of the festival and it’s location. All credit has to go to Siri Forberg and her team, who are really taking risks and never doing the easy thing. Watching full contact boxing in a town hall while a falsetto singer serenaded the audience is just of many things I shan’t forget. Moreover I got to spend time with many of the Norwegian poets I have come to count as friends over the last decade, such as Bard Torgersen, Jon Stale Ritland, Endre Ruset, Bjorn Vatne and others.
I’m really happy to have a table at the upcoming Small Publishers Fair, this October 24th Friday and 25th Saturday at Conway Hall in Holborn, London. https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/
A poem from FPPP, being launched at the fair - a found photo poem
I have been attending the fair for over a decade, and in recent years, it has become a really important part of my year. Recently excavating old essays I’ve written I came across something I wrote on commission for the fair in 2015 and it struck me how much I had taken from the enterprise over the years, building to the recent presence I’ve been able to have there. After last year’s fair I was asked by Derek Beaulieu to contribute some thoughts on the fair for his Minute review. Below is the piece I wrote which sums up my feelings on the SPF.
I should also say the fair always provokes me into new publications, or draws energy towards making and collaborating. This year two new things are coming, with Sampson Low, a small anthology of poems from my time as poet in residence at Shaldon Zoo (entitled A Zed and Two O’s) and a limited edition postcard pack of found photo poems (entitled FPPP) which I think breaks important ground for me in conceptual photo poetry. Please come by and visit me and my friends running my stall.
Andrew Kotting and I at the 2022 fair
From the Minute Review "I chose to be a poet to nullify possible ambitions that might’ve otherwise occurred to me. Since being a poet, I have long wished to strip out all ambition that might lie outside of a few general experiences. The first is an excited playfulness at writing and making blab blab blab. The second, most importantly, is to seek nothing more than deeply felt human connection through collaborating, teaching, event organising, performing, attending festivals, originating projects, publishing and the like. From these things many of my best friends have come, and some I would consider familial, and I am proud that around me is a large group of people I care for and admire. This kind of connection requires a considered environment. It requires a light-handed courteous generosity that some would mistakenly call curatorial but is more akin to familial (I use the word again deliberately). This is all complex and I don’t care about the specifics, but all to say it is present, massively so, in spades at the Small Publishers Fair, thanks to Helen Mitchell and Caspar Evans, and Julie Mitchell and Colin Sackett, and on and on down the vast majority of exhibitors, poets, printers, publishers, writers, artists, book makers and visitors who attend, in my opinion for me for me. It is something I felt so profoundly in 2022 when the fair held a retrospective of my publications, that people were encouraging, optimistic, kind, and beforehand, and absolutely in the years since. There is a collaborative, generative, communal spirit, that is all the more powerful for not being conceptualised or theorised or literally planned but is the byproduct of its organisers character and vision, its venue, and its rootedness in people making things in different ways that compliment, whose hands are inky and full of heavy objects. It’s unpretentious, convivial, active. It is an energised human enterprise around often singular practices. This must, at some level, come from the specifics of what happens there, from Andrew Kotting’s immersive 3-D exhibition, from the intimacy of the green room, the grandeur of the library, from the careful swell of the books being stacked, the views from the balconies, hiding for lunch. 2024 was as ever before, inspiring, and for me personally, special, as I met friends visiting from around the world, such as my publisher sal nunchakov, up from Portugal, whom id never met before, at the same time four of my students helped me with my table, charming anyone within arms reach and recontextualising, powerfully, what a life writing poetry might mean to them. I saw through their eyes what a welcoming intensity comes from the Small Publishers Fair and once again the experience often a concentrated reminder that my own personal ambition has settled on wanting no more than wanting the company of the good people who somewhat share a hobby of mine in an environment we might not consider remarkable, but is so, often."
Thanks to Christina Mitrentse and the team for including my selected uncollected visual poems book - Crocodile Tear Waterfalls from Penteract press, in this upcoming exhibition https://helleniccentre.org/event/bookmorphs-artists-books-from-greece-the-uk/
BOOKMORPHS: Artists’ Books from Greece & the UK : Tuesday 14 Oct 2025 – Friday 28 Nov 2025
The interactive exhibition BOOKMORPHS: Artists’ Books from Greece & the UK brings together a diverse selection of artists’ books, book works, book-art objects, limited and multiple editions, ephemera, and journals by 44 visual artists, curators, publishers, and theorists from both Greece and the UK. It marks the first comprehensive presentation in London of contemporary artists’ books by Greek and British visual artists in dialogue. Showcasing a wide range of techniques and media – painting, printmaking, drawing, writing, poetry, digital printing, cutting, bookbinding, sculpture, sound, and photography – the exhibition highlights the rich materiality and experimental nature of the book as an artistic form… and there’s an opening on October 14th, with booking required at the link
Rochak Agarwal runs Urban Ganges and recently wrote to me asking if he could feature one of my poems - The Robin Hood Estate from my collection The Guide to Being Bear Aware - on a reed diffuser. I said yes, of course.
You can buy it here https://www.urbanganges.com/product-page/the-robin-hood-estate-by-s-j-fowler-poetry-reed-diffuser
This is from the Urban Ganges website “OUR STORY Some stories are written in ink. Ours is written in scent. Urban Ganges began as a quiet idea in the heart of Rochak Agarwal…. But over time, Rochak found something just as poetic as the written word: fragrance. What started as a love for the lyrical soon transformed into a vision—to create a brand where scent tells a story, where each reed diffuser is a verse, and every note is a feeling you didn’t know how to say. Thus, Urban Ganges was born.”
The death of Eugen Gomringer, at 100 years of age, closes off what we might term the classic Concrete poetry century. He was long held to be the founding father of the movement as a movement, rather than a method (which has been ubiquitous throughout human history, human’s painting and depicting and shaping with writing) and he, for innovative literature, is one of the most influential and considerable poets of the 20th and 21st century. I was fortunate to cross paths with him on a few occasions, most especially when we shared the stage at the Lyrik Kabinett in Munich. There’s a nice article about that, and my response to him in work, here Even at 95 I found him to be warm, sharp witted, direct, like his writings, and his poems. Subtle in his focus. Every year I have been teaching, failing none, I have taught his thinking around Concrete poetry and it’s place in 20th century poetry. His influence has been enormous and his legacy assured.
Attached is the video I filmed of him, that night in Munich, with his talk for the Klang Farben Text festival. He lived an extraordinary and full life, genuinely broke ground in literature and language arts, and inspired many others into a field he formulated. He was always writing, always in his own, original way. To that we should all aspire, leaving behind us the silent spaces that can be found in the centre of his most famous poem.
The IPLA collective (Matt Sokulsky, Danica Ignacio, Cameron Wade, Eleanor Wilders) have done a brilliant job running their debut exhibition in Notting Hill, a group show of conceptual and visual poetry and art. I’m happy to have had a little part in their work as a group and really pleased to see how much joy they’ve taken from running events over their show run. Six events in all, with dozens of poets, growing their community and announcing a new reading series for London and the UK. They’ve curated the events with warmth and charm, hosted some amazing performances, and I’ve been a part of two of the nights, with my latter performance here
Really worth having a look on their youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/@languageartists
and on their instagram https://www.instagram.com/inparentheses_ and their site https://inparentheses.cargo.site/
I’m happy to be part of this very ambitious anthology with poems by Babs the purple cat. https://www.mercurius.one/books/the-surreal-absurd-an-anthology-of-contemporary-surrealist-and-absurdist-poetry
It contains works by friends Ian McMillan, Tom Jenks, Aase Berg, Julia Rose Lewis, Dan Power, Luke Kennard, David Spittle, Stephen Sunderland, Mark Waldron, Ailbhe Darcy and many others
”Mercurius's ground-breaking Surreal‑Absurd anthology invites you into a realm where the everyday fractures into the uncanny, and the absurd gleams with mind-bending clarity. From fabulist prose‑poems to dream-logic nonsense, each piece is a tiny revolt—a refusal to accept realism's boundaries…. Born from a flash of invention and years of volunteer devotion, the Surreal–Absurd unites a once-scattered constellation of 80+ voices into a single, vibrant movement. Edited and curated by Thomas Helm, Marcus Silcock, Vik Shirley, and Ben Niespodziany—each a surreal-absurd poet in their own right—this edition celebrates a golden age of surrealism: alive, open‑ended, and insistently popular. Read the introduction to the anthology here”
Buy from one of these online stores UK
The first chapter of my upcoming novella Barabus has been translated into Czech by Sylva Ficova for the Revue Prostor. https://revueprostor.cz/english Revue Prostor, founded in 1982 in Czech Republic, is a collective of journalists, academics, and writers.
Three weeks in Bouda Gallery for my exhibition Poet Peasant came to an end with a saturday afternoon poetry film event curated by David Spittle. It was indicative of my time in Notting Hill with my weird poetry show, www.stevenjfowler.com/poetpeasant thanks to Czech centre London - relaxed and charming. Thanks to all the friends and well wishers who came out over this time and the four events, to hang out and perform and make the summer a memorable one. The video below has some of my closing remarks and highlights from the screening
I’m really happy that following my exhibition at Bouda Gallery, four poets will be following me with their own exhibition, as a way of announcing their new collective, which will likely be a feature of the British modern contemporary innovative literary and art scene for the foreseeable future. All four of them are talents, Danica Ignacio, Eleanor Wilders, Matt Sokulsky and Cameron Wade.
Their exhibition will be open for many days during August, Weds to Saturday from August 9th, 12 to 5pm, with more details here https://london.czechcentres.cz/en/program/the-sun-can-be-an-ipla-collective-exhibition “The Sun Can Be: an IPLA collective exhibition, showcases the works of four young British-based poets operating in the fields of visual poetry, experimental textual poetry, text art, and the asemic. The works of the exhibition range from multimedia poetry, self-portraiture, and 3D poetry to typewriter art, lino print, and a prose-puzzle poem series exhibiting material, form and method as conveyors of shifting, alternate realities. From a triptych of calligrams that echo the Surrealism of Guillaume Apollinaire to a series of text art pieces, to conceptual poetry that reinterprets perspective. The Sun Can Be expands on these themes through unconventional and diversified aesthetics that redefine traditional poetry, and serves as a translation of the artistic intentions of the IPLA poets.”
There are six events all told, all visible here https://inparentheses.cargo.site/ all free and at 7pm. I’ll be performing on the 16th and 23rd of August, seen below.
EVENT 3 - SATURDAY 16TH AUGUST 2025
The third event in our series features an array of bespoke new readings and performances from the IPLA collective, and poets such as:SJ Fowler and Vanessa Onwuemezi, Irena Skopljak Barić, Victror Rees, Regina Avendano, and more to be announced!
EVENT 5 - SATURDAY 23RD AUGUST 2025
The penultimate fifth event in our series features an array of bespoke new readings and performances from the IPLA collective, Richard Marshall, SJ Fowler, Golnoosh Nour, Matt Martin, and more to be announced!
Patrick Cosgrove is one of the most influential poets of his generation in the British 21st century contemporary innovative landscape. He’s certainly been a big influence on me. For the launch of his long awaited selected poems, Cosgrovia, I was happy to help host it’s launch at my poet peasant exhibition and to write an essay for the book itself. Below are images from the event, and Patrick performing, and me reading excerpts of the essay I wrote.
Purchase a copy of Cosgrovia https://www.steelincisors.com/product/cosgrovia-by-patrick-cosgrove/L53344RP3OUCQSLIC5XZKQ2Y
An interview with Patrick by James Knight https://www.steelincisors.com/s/stories/cosgrovia
