A note on : Rose Lewis on Goblins

Very happy to see that Julia Rose Lewis has published a critical essay responding to my last collection, Goblins, from Broken Sleep Books, in the latest issue of Utriculi, entitled goblins, emails, deer oh my! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJXTHXZL A couple of excerpts below. Really uplifting to have a poet whom I admire so respond to my work in a way that mirrors that which I value in my own work. This book, Goblins, was the last in a trilogy of collections made up of long poems, expounding on human nature through singular subjects, and this one our relationship to the internet and nature, as a false dualism in the 21st century. It was perhaps a little misunderstood as a satire by some reviewers, which was a kind of success for me, but such responses as Rose Lewis’ are balancing and unexpected.

A note on : EPF Liverpool

A third year running, to visit one of my favourite cities and favourite poetry scenes, thanks to Liverpool Poetry Space and Open Eye gallery, a great Liverpool Camarade.

As before, the works were really ranging from literary to performance, but the hospitality and atmosphere was uniformly brilliant. Such a nice thing for a Sunday afternoon and the embedded performance here especially wowed me.

It’s been really good building a connection with a new generation of Liverpool poets, led by Chris McCabe, in the likes of Michael Sutton and Lenni Sanders. They are doing really interesting things, and to introduce them to poets from Czechia, Norway, Austria, it’s satisfying work.

Some great pictures, and all the videos, here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/liverpool26

A note on : EPF Manchester

https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/manchester26

For the first time in some years I was able to bring the European Poetry Festival camarade back to Manchester, and this time thanks to the Manchester Poetry Library and City of Literature.

The audience was remarkable, always a good sign when you have to scrabble for more chairs, and the performances excellent. A very assured, easy going, literary event. Good to meet some new poets from the area and travelling in from across Europe, and reunite with friends I have known for 15 years or more. Everything is documented at the link above with the videos well worth a watch

A note on : EPF Sweden 2026

A grand way to kick off the winter festival for the European Poetry Festival 2026, celebrating Swedish poetry at Hundred Years Gallery. Jorgen Gassilewski and Anna Hallberg came over to be joined by 14 other poets all presenting new works in pairs.

It was the kind of event that takes a lot of time and experience to do easily, but it felt very easy, as it was uniformly hospitable and funny and friendly while being really ranged in its styles and plays and poems and works. It balanced between the literary and well worked to the improvised and chaotic. All videos and some photos are up here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/sweden26

A note on : Decomposition anthology and launch October 28th

Happy to have a piece of fiction, taken from my novella Barabas, in this new anthology from Victor Rees and Damian Walsh. https://www.nsota.org/store

Messages are interpreted in piles of ashes and the grain of unearthed cassette tapes. Insects become librarians in palaces made of dead skin, then transform into invertebrate angels. Manic chains of correspondence connect ideas of physical decay to entropies of language and thought.

Decomposition is a gathering of work from voices both established and emerging. Contributors include Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kötting … Decomposition is the first book in the New School of the Anthropocene's in/kiostro imprint.

The launch free tickets for the evening of October 28th https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/decomposition-book-launch-tickets-2001888866489


A note on : Celebrating Bob Bright at Torriano Meeting House

A very special event at the Torriano Meeting House to celebration the work, and person, of Bob Bright. A launch of his selected poems combined with a wonderful community gathering, a dozen people read Bob’s poems to him or new poems written for him. On a hot saturday afternoon in north london it was a great pleasure to organise, for Bob is a very special human being, someone I have known for a decade and who has always been kind, honest, funny, decent, original and thus, beloved.

All the readings are up here https://www.theenemiesproject.com/bob and the book itself contains an essay I wrote talking about why his work is so special, in more technical terms. Please buy a copy to read it and Bob’s 50 years of superb writing https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Scatty-from-Cincinatti-by-Bob-T-Brightt/9781909362994

And at the end a very limited edition ‘festschrift’ volume was presented to Bob as a gift by his friends, brilliantly created and edited by Jules Sprake and Laura Davis. It’s a beautiful book, just made for this occasion, with lots of brilliant contributors.

A note on : Julia Rose Lewis' Traumatism

One of the most consistently original poets working in the contemporary UK / US scene, Julia Rose Lewis has a new book out called Traumatism. It’s with the publisher with whom I did my first ever pamphlet, still going strong Knives Forks and Spoons and Alec Newman. Julia’s book opens with an epigraph from a poem I wrote for one of my National Gallery commissions and I take this as a great sign, and honour, a first peeked thread of an extraordinary book, available here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Traumatism-Julia-Rose-Lewis/dp/1916590217 and well worth delving into.

Interview with David Collard on Barabus

David Collard knows more about contemporary fiction than anyone I know, and so it was a real education to have a near hour long conversation with him, as part of his Glue Factory series, about my new novella Barabus, from Tenement Press. David has built such a generous and attentive following and audience over the years, and he really seemed to resonate with what I tried to do with the book, so an experience I was grateful for to talk with him.

Article on Herri on Federici's asemic writing

https://herri.org.za/13/steven-j-fowler-federico-federici/

One of my favourite online journals in the world, Aryan Kaganof’s Herri, out of South Africa. Really happy to be commissioned by them again to write about Federico Federici's Unmastered Bones series. Federico is one of the most important global figures in the asemic writing movement, and a master asemist as well as theorist.

“I have always thought improvisation seems a concept that suggests its origins, when evoked in specific time-orientated practises, as the ancestor of all things people do. Every plan began with an improvisation to make a plan, or something like that. Every repetition and rehearsal, every interpretation of something carved into stone, began with a person doing whatever it is to do a thing that we consider without premeditation ….”

New publication : Abstract Automatic Autobiographical Asemic Argot

https://stonecorpse.com/sj-fowler/ Abstract Automatic Autobiographical Asemic Argot from Stone Corpse Press is out, launched August 15th https://www.theenemiesproject.com/bob at Torriano Meeting House.

My second limited edition handmade pamphlet of asemic writing this year, and really remarkable how handmade this one has been thanks to Daniel J.Flosi over in the United States. He has put together, as the pictures below show, every single publication with stitches and press.

This publication opens with a short foreword which contextualises it a wee bit, an excerpt “These poems emerge from a time of both teaching and learning asemic writing. Since the publication of Selected Scribbling and Scrawling, my selected asemic poems (Zimzalla 2021) and my online lecture on asemic writing for the Arnolfini Gallery, I have often been invited to teach asemic writing, and in so doing, have worked with some remarkable practitioners in the field…/

And because someone leading should be doing what they are sharing, these poems exist, made in cities across Europe, in various schools and universities. They are thus somewhat collaborative and quite deliberately lo-fi, made of pens to hand, on paper I’ve salvaged or grabbed running out of the door. Made without recourse to trying to be impressive, or aesthetically grand. They are made of a sense of solidarity with those new to the asemic process, smashed out and rough.”

The launch performance I shared with friend Eleanor Wilders, who was also recently published by Stone Corpse press. We talked about our books while taking turns with some assisted doodling.

A note on : EPF recap on Compoetics and Asymptote

Chris Tananescu, Margento, has written a generous recap of the final event of the final event of this summer’s European Poetry Festival, where he performed, celebrating Romanian poetry for the first time at the fest. https://compoetics.com/european-poetry-festival-2026-romanian-poetry-night-by-margento/. 

and a shorter version on Asymptote's https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2026/07/31/weekly-dispatches-from-the-frontlines-of-world-literature-260/#more-39918 which perhaps fortunately doesn’t contain the very funny recap of my collaboration for the night…

National Gallery Lates : the final event of 2026, July 24th

A lovely charming night at the National Gallery with friends and compatriots, and new poems on paintings. The last event of this year, and the twelfth overall. The full readings are here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGH7DBdBSk0 with Colin Herd, Eve Davis, Duya Ribeiro, Sofia Barth and my readings below

New publication : Kawasaki Bush Doctor from Asatami Legesse

A new limited edition pamphlet of asemic poems commissioned and released by Asatami Legesse, an independent micro-publisher established by Italian visual poet and dada performer Dario Roberto Dioli and Zewditu Anteneh Retta. They have done some brilliant work in European asemia recently, with James Knight, Sylee Gore and others.

It’s a handmade minimalist work. It’s snapshots of a massive asemic piece, a kind of constellation work, made on a large wood board in my studio. The individual works in this publication are therefore meant to be impossible jigsaw puzzle pieces, they connect and are separate but seem almost the same. Repetition, and that which is lost in the whole, in the margin, is the idea. And the density of line too, the spirographical. If you’d like a copy, there are a few left, please email me https://www.stevenjfowler.com/contact

The publication was launched August 15th at Torriano Meeting House https://www.theenemiesproject.com/bob and is made in an edition, in the UK, of 30 copies.

Amazingly, for the launch, the publisher Dario Dioli came all the way from Italy to London! It was wonderful to hear more about his work, and his mission, and what asemic writing has meant to him. He is a heartfelt, charming, brilliant poet and publisher, and he was right at home on a lovely afternoon of performances.

For my launch I ‘read’ some of the asemic poems in sound poetry while Matt Sokulsky joined me on piano

European Poetry Festival : summer 2026

A labour of love. 9 events in just under 3 weeks, nearly 1000 people in attendance, hundreds of poets I have had the pleasure to pair, most often when they don’t each other, watching connections and friendships emerge from collaborating, performing, and pushing what is possible for live poetry / literature / text. I’ve resisted writing about the size and complexity and resonance of the process, curating this festival, because I want it to be entirely about presence and immediacy and hospitality as a means of enabling and enjoying more eccentric, playful, jubilant, weird and expansive live work. Thus the less I reflect on it in complex terms (I reflect on it a lot pragmatically and practically) the more it seems to be about the people involved and the things that happen in the rooms. It is about that, people meeting, sharing thing, being decent, and having an interest together in literature. This year was really great as it was mostly stress-free and it felt like some of these ideas had reached into all corners of participation. People seemed to know they can play, right through the events, from start to end. Lots of incredible performances. Lots of stuff I watched and was very jealous I wasn’t in it myself, or hadn’t come up with the idea.

This is the experience I hope will go on for many more years, the festival at this size, with lots of new people alongside those who have participated in the past, brilliant partners and venues, real atmosphere on London summer nights and nine evenings where it was better to be doing this than pretty much anything else. / Every event and every performance at each event is available at the link, it is well worth having a look through the grand photos and watching some of the videos I reckon! https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2026

Celebrating Bob Bright - August 15th at Torriano

https://www.theenemiesproject.com/bob Celebrating Bob T Bright : an event at Torriano Meeting House - August Saturday 15th 2026 : 2pm doors, Free

99 Torriano Avenue. Kentish Town. London. NW5 2RX torriano.org/whats-on/poetry/celebrating-bob-t-bright

Marking the launch of Bob T. Bright's selected poems - Scatty from Cincinatti from Kingston University Press - which draws together over fifty years of writing, this event will see readings of his works by over a dozen poets in a celebration of Bright and his singular output. A true original, a beloved character and a mainstay of the British experimental poetry scene, Bright's work is remarkable for its playful originality and it's methodological breadth, taking in many conceptions of what a poem is and always delivered with inimitable charm.

The book will be available to buy for the first time on the day, and performers include Laura Davis, Martin Wakefield, Beverley Frydman, Lucy Furlong, Matt Sokulsky, Jules Sprake, Lisa Blackwell, Susie Campbell, Patrick Cosgrove, Stephen Sunderland, Mikael Buck, Julia Rose Lewis, SJ Fowler and more.

EPF 2026 - Romania, Katarína Krupičková and dance poetry

One of my favourite collaborations from 2025, I had the chance to work again with Katarína Krupičková for the final event of the EPF 2026, and the first ever Romanian poetry celebration. Katarina is a dancer and performer who uses text and talking in her work, and she has been a key person for me to continue my interest in what might be termed dance poetry, or certainly the active use of movement in live improvised talking poems. I think we were trying to create a contradiction between how static the speech might seem compared to the physical duress of the movements. And I think we wanted there also to be a sense of the movement teetering on the edge of control. And it was so hot in the venue, there is an element of endurance as a metaphor, something like amusing suffering, purging, with a repression in it too. But also we didn’t plan anything and just improvised it at all really also, so maybe it got away from us a bit and freaked people a small bit. Worthwhile, for me to learn from someone who is doing exciting things with integrity.

EPF 2026 - Latvia, Krisjanis Zelgis and human sculptures

Seven years Krisjanis and I have worked together, and last year publishing a book of our collaborations https://sampsonlow.co/2025/06/17/levels-of-care-krisjanis-zelgis-sj-fowler/ This year, for our seventh work together, we decided to return to what we’ve termed ‘human sculpture’ reading, adapting some of our strange lifting intensities sitting around the spoken text to the specific environment of the National Poetry Library. Seemed to go well.

EPF 2026 - Poland, Magda Drozd improv

A new collaborator, an extraordinary debut in doing so, the wonderful Magda Drozd, at the first Polish poetry celebration at the European Poetry Festival. Magda I know through my friend and collaborator Miya, and her energy is unique and encouraging and attentive and entrancing. She allowed me such space but it felt so sympathetic. The audience really seemed to love it, it was gratifying. The context is that I was often utilising lines from poems performed that night, before we performed, and that a family attended with a small child who had to leave as they were talking during the reading. So at the beginning I went upstairs to ask them to return so the child could talk as I talked. I hope Magda and I do many of these.

EPF 2026 - Flanders, Nick Roth improv

Nick Roth and I have collaborated six times since 2022, when we debuted in Ireland. Everytime, twice in Ireland, twice in London and once in Kingston, we have entirely improvised. No preparation, no discussion. Just stand up and I talk and Nick plays. What Nick does remarkably well is follow the voice as an instrument by playing his instrument as a voice. He is intensely alert, very witty, and comes on the front foot. It’s such a joy to work with him, and this one was maybe our best? Hard to say, but people seemed pumped. We got a huge reaction in the room and throughout the night afterward, which was a special night, the EPF Flanders celebration at Flanders House just off Oxford Circus.