Very nice for my employer Babs the cat to get a proper feature on Vik Shirley’s surreal absurd series on Mercurius. It not only features a new intro from me, below, but also two new poems made from the Babs live improv performances - proper talk poems. Then there is also a series of responses to Babs by poets I admire and Babs threatened.

“I first met Babs when I first met Babs in London. I was spending a lot of time in Bethnal Green because of my events at Rich Mix and my workshop at St Johns. I went into a shop on the Bethnal Green Road, surrounded by people pretending to be poets, and met her basically. I thought I had seen it all, but here was this purple cat. And she had a heart of gold. She really did. She showed me the film Villain, with a young Ian McShane. And she was there for me, to loan me money, give me advice about how people really are. And she was proud of being a Londoner, and of being English. And that wasn’t something I was used to. I looked the other way at her constant casual violence towards dogs, whom I love. But it is what it is as they say. She knew Bob Hoskins back in the day. Before London changed. And she was a connection to the past for me, and she isn’t even old, you know what I mean? And it really helped me, to have her to rely on when I was asked to read poems and I thought wow, that is going to be so boring, for me and everyone else. And wow I know some of these people don’t like me because I’m not necessarily all nice and soft like them even if I am quite nice most of the time, and that’s just like Babs. And she told me, if people don’t really know how to react, then they probably stuck ain’t they? In your lucy locket, all sewn up sweet like. And that’s something I’ve tried to do, that Babs has helped me with, going around people who aren’t as sharp as they think they are. But who is at the end of the day? Babs.” SJ Fowler, April 2023

Words on Babs by other poets

Chris Kerr - Here are 145 words. I hope this is ok. I love Babs

pspspsps there is Babs stuck in the tape spooled between cassette and Smurfette. Babs runs away with the tape stuck to her fur, not in on the joke sometimes. Get your horror camcorder out for the Babs who do the funniest things round and round the foley artist leg. A lucy locket does look like a cats face and other nice things. Babs was once a little cat, a catette, not a big cat scary roar in hollow red plastic house on Fenchurch st. Babs is not your fur baby, tickling the belly of language. watch suddenly it’s the previous decades. having nostalgia for marketing language. Cat sit on the looper pedal and like things. Oohh sweet. When tape fast forward it’s high pitched observational. What if jim Davidson was Virgo? What if a purple snooker ball potted history? then Sound poetry that make u laugh scream

Susie Campbell - 7 things I’ve learnt about Babs from trying to film a performance.
1. Babs is unpredictable and can’t stand still.
2. Babs loves a gossip.
3. Babs can’t leave stuff alone. Nothing is safe from Babs. Anything might be nicked, rattled, broken open, or transformed into a tractor.
4. Don’t lend Babs your watch.
5. I think Babs might be dangerous.
6. Babs just wants to be your friend.
7. Babs might be Godot as a purple cat.

David Spittle - Babs is the cheery volatility of what shouldn’t be said but is all the better for being said. The improvised chronicles from an amiably rabid eccentric where ‘eccentricity’ is not a cultivated affectation or pompous curiosity but a rough-shod and noble condition that derives from a wheeler-dealing lineage of truly unhinged troubadours. Between vaudeville Dadaism and seaside surrealism, Babs is an affectionately torn postcard from a purple cat; signed with the blurting sincerity of a local grievance, mixed up and tumbled into the giggling debris of a traveller’s discovery; it is the friendly nattering of prophecy and pratfalls. The strange joy of Babs articulates a liberating claustrophobia, to be dizzyingly free whilst also plagued by the scuffed heel of daily existence.

Entirely serious and very silly, Babs is not to be trusted. For this slapstick seer, wide-eyed vulnerability is grafted messily onto the reckless frustrations of contemporary cat-life. The creation of Babs, though it seems more akin to a kind of spiritual ventriloquism, is as much a parody of banal English fury as it is a crazed plea: a nonsensical rallying cry for living and live-ness in all its absurd wonder.

Julia Rose Lewis
Be careful!
Bab’s tractor is absolutely a shark attractor.
Babs is an ambiguous figure, forever confusing the foreground and background for the love of the audience.
A cat is not interested in a line of people looking at him.
Babs is a cat’s cat.
Cat is only an abbreviation for a cassette tape.
Babs will unroll that yarn they told you about evolution in his human and yet impossible to hear correctly voice.
Babs is the fifth life-form to follow the Animal Drums film.
Fowler is alive “to often explore an uncomfortable ambiguity” in the words of David Spittle.
Babs is a cat caught on cassette tape, like a cats eye, look and grudge can fly flinging into time and distant libraries.
It is the feline function to go toward the most timid and bring them into the fold.
Babs is always looking into the beyond chrysoberyl eye to rice crispy to very brilliant to tough enough for polished concrete.
No cat ought to tolerate a closed door or being ignored by human beings on the other side of reading death.