https://overgroundunderground.co.uk/blog/f/a-conversation-with-sj-fowler Excerpts below
The following is a conversation with SJ Fowler on his new pamphlet Recently Attracted Reality Influencers, recently released from Overground Underground Books. Purchase a copy HERE
MS: When I think of a meme the first thing that pops into my head is the image-text combo we see so regularly. However, many of the first most popular memes were videos i.e. ‘Star Wars Kid’, ‘Keyboard Cat’; no doubt these are poems too, but what does the obsession with corresponding, communicating text and image tell us about the (visual)poetic inclinations of the modern human animal?
SJF: I spent a long time during lockdown writing a course about photopoetry, and this emerged from teaching I did at the Photography Gallery in London, which I went into almost knowledgless and blagging about photos. What it left me with was a sense that for photopoetry specifically, the most interesting thing is hybridity, rather than illustration. To answer your question, I think we forget how new photo illustration is, and the illustrative instinct is probably significant to do with language development in humans I don’t know and something to do with attention spans decreasing I don’t know I don’t know.
But anyway, hybridity I realised, this is interesting photopoetry, not some tennis match rendition of image and text. This could literally mean superimposition, or compositional play, or conceptual documentation. But what it also opened up was what the meme was, as a poem. It is illustrative, of course, but it’s also often a lot weirder than that. There’s something uncanny often going on.
But I looked at this purely through method, as I do with most things, because I found in the last decade, now quite stringently, after studying philosophy, that analysis really doesn’t help me and I don’t like it. You can tell, sensibility wise, work made after mind grinding leaps to insight that are random and specious.
So I wanted to not really make meme poems, but to scratch them up, cut them, mix them with what would’ve have been newspaper clipping in the past, and essentially make collages, just like my book Bastard Poems, but digital. So I think your question I can answer by saying for myself, my inclination was to just source another set of chaotic, language-based aberrant things and make them into my thing because it was fun and funny I think.
MS: Richard Dawkins, the coiner of the term ‘meme’ pre its co-option by the internet hive mind, once tweeted:
Kafka’s Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature. Why? If it’s SF it’s bad SF. If, like Animal Farm, it’s an allegory, an allegory of what? Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist. I don’t get it. Where are the Emperor’s clothes.
I ask the same questions to you: If Recently Attracted Reality Influencers is an allegory, what is it an allegory of? and Where are the Emperor’s clothes?!
SJF: Amazing! What a tweet. He really went for the jugular with that one. All the Kafka fans must have gone batshit. Holy moly. I think for the Emperor to have clothes the thing itself has to be lauded and popular and significant? Hmmm. Well it is an allegory for the human capacity for deadpanning existence. For how insidiously stupid internet news or ads are, how they seem to seep into the actual means of scrolling down through shite when you’re on the toilet. Of how funny awful and stupid things are when presented in certain contexts. How much trash there is that people like. How the most talented people mostly don’t consider themselves poets or artists?
MS: Recently Attracted Reality Influencers continues your series of comical, collagic books following Bastard Poems (Steel Incisors) and Sticker Poems (Trickhouse Press); what is it that compels you to so vigorously explore this unserious mode of your practice? Is there a seriousness underpinning your unseriousness?
SJF: Thanks for knowing they exist. Yes this has been such a lovely patch of things, with my cassette Bab’s London Adventures in there too. My weird poetry series. It’s come from thinking during the lockdown when I passed ten years of making stuff and realising I did actually have a very strong sense of what I wanted to do and what makes that stuff unique and how I could go on to do more of that, and feel contented in doing that. That this was important, to have a strong sense of why. I am making poems because it pleases me and because I’d likely be doing something worse if not. No other reason is primary. I have not changed a single thing to suit anyone else recently. I have never really thought about this until recently, I just did my thing as though there was no choice. But now I am aware of my instinct more, and I follow it. These works make me laugh, and make others whose opinion I trust, laugh too. There are satirical, definitely works of satire. But also very personal, hidden in oblique forms. I could say how strange that so few poetry books are funny, or colourful, or deeply weird, when other artforms hold that stuff well, but who cares? There is probably loads of poetry like that, that I haven’t read, or because people don’t want to know about it. But you’ve published it Michael, and that’s enough for me, thank you.