New course : Live Poetry and Performance, begins October 3rd

Live Poetries and Performance : an online course

Begins October 3rd 2021, running for 6 weeks. £200. All info here https://www.poembrut.com/courses

Sound Poetry, dance-poetry, video-poetry, theatre-poetry. Reading, recitation, installation, improvisation. Live collaboration and performance literature - Every live poem is a new work and poetry began in sound. Comprehensively reflecting upon an artform borne of liveness, this course will explore readings, recitation, installations, dramaturgy, sound poetry, dance, music, collaboration and performance - delving into what is possible when the poet mindfully explores the body, the voice, time, space, presence and absence, technology and the immutable idea of the audience.

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Not a course aimed at extraverts, this course will be a practical, as well as conceptual, journey through what is often erroneously second in the poet's arsenal. What is the meaning of a poem spoken and heard, over written and the read? What are the possibilities of recorded or installed poems? Why has the 21st century seen a grand resurgence in performance literature, which takes live art as inspiration? We will examine the art of public reading, improvisation, talking performances, scripts and scores, as well as orchestration and planning.

This course will emphasise method. Participants will be sent a succinct document of resources once a week – ideas, examples, concepts, history, accompanied by exercises or prompts. Then, on a private blog-forum, responses - including written poems, video and audio recordings, images, scores, notations and performance plans - can be posted, with comments and feedback from all involved. When the course finishes, an event will consolidate that which everyone has produced.

Backed up with case studies on a swathe of brilliant poet performers or those who wrote with liveness in mind - from Samuel Beckett to Peter Handke, Marina Abramovic to Elaine Mitchener, Bob Cobbing to bp nichol, Maja Jantar to Jonathan Burrows and many many others- this course with expand the knowledge of those familiar with live events and offer strategies to those looking to tread boards.

Published : Sight and Sound summer issue feature

Extraordinary to open up the summer issue of Sight and Sound magazine and find this article on page 30. I was pleased to find out recently the international film magazine, run out of the BFI, would have a feature on my latest collection ‘Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films’ but the way it turned out, written by David Spittle, is exceptional. It’s obviously really positive that editor Kieron Corless asked someone familiar with my work to write the article, and David has been extremely generous. A couple of my poems from the book are also featured, a pair of what i call my ‘screenshot’ poems. I found my copy in a big Tesco, which was funny, so it’s available all over, but also online https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/magazine/summer-2021-issue

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Published : 2nd edition of 1000 proverbs and Knives Forks and Spoons books

In 2015 I published a full length conceptual collaborative book with my nemesis Tom Jenks. We sent each other warped poetry proverbs, one liners, for a few years, and Knives Forks and Spoons press, headed up by Alec Newman, put it out. It was a poetry society book recommendation and recently sold out of its print run. Took 5 years but none the less, it has been printed in a 2nd edition, with a fancy new cover, see images. I am delighted, as Tom and I continue our collaborations. It also made me reflect on how important Knives Forks and Spoons press has been to my own work and development. In the image below you can see the six books I have published with them. One of my three debut collections (I released three in the same summer) Red Museum, amongst four collaborative volumes and an early Fights pamphlet. I think if Alec hadn’t have supported my work around this time 2010, 2011, then perhaps I wouldn’t have become as overconfident with publishing as I have. But seriously, his faith in me did me a huge boost and I’m very proud to be associated with what the press has continued to do over the last decade. Visit them https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/

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A note on: launching Come and See the Songs of Strange Days...

Needs must and to launch a book in the times of the lockdown one must digital. The monthly broken sleep online readings, hosted by press editor aaron kent, was a fine place to share some of my poems on films in order to launch my new collection which can be snaffled up here https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days

I like to perform but i think what is entertaining in person can be smug down the camera hole lens. Not that smugness is often avoided with me goings on, but it seemed fairy lights did the right trick and people seemed to enjoy. Judge for yourself

Published : Time of the Wolf in Poem Atlas' Refraction online exhibition

Very cool to be in this online exhibition which celebrates the Streetcake Magazine writing prize, of which I’m a patron and is hosted by Poem Atlas, which is doing great things with sculpture or 3d poetry. https://www.poematlas.com/refraction

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This poem-brut lo-fi concertina is a deliberately aberrant pop-up book page. It combines found material, abstract painting, stickers of three different origins, or packs, and is part of an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of collage and an experimental poetry of humour. It is taken from the book 'Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films' (Broken Sleep Books 2021)

Published : The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler

Years in the making, The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (me) is now available from Zimzalla. zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-scribbling-and-scrawling-2nd-edition/

From the publisher - The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler is an assembly of hand-drawn, instinctive visual poems from beyond the ragged edge of language. Arguably the most comprehensive book of asemic poetry ever published in the UK, this sizeable revamped new edition includes images of live asemic performances alongside over 100 visual poems divided, and introduced, in chapters. Asemic neurons butt up against poetic constellations, portraits and diagrams. The volume is bookended with new articles on the asemic endeavours of SJ Fowler from David MacLagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen and David Spittle, plus a written interview between Fowler and Zimzalla editor Tom Jenks. Click here for a sample.

Click here to buy for £11.99 in the UK.

I'm happy to announce the release of my latest visual poetry book, collecting the vast majority of my asemic writing in one beautifully produced volume. I had the best time working on this, developing the first edition, working with Tom Jenks. It means the world to me too that the volume is full of brilliant reflections on my scribbles by such luminaries in the asemic world - David Maclagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen, they all influenced me a lot, and the long critical piece by David Spittle is brilliant. I spent all summer tinkering, theorising around these abstract writings, really working hard on my intros to each section, and this book is the result, a true consolidation of my travails into asemia

A note on : a poem for All Particles and Waves

All Particles and Waves is David Spittle’s debut collection. To celebrate it, he generously asked friends to respond to the book with new works. I wrote a poem and it is online https://www.dspittle.com/post/sj-fowler

from David “…I wanted to gather artists I have met during this time to respond to All Particles and Waves. All the artwork compiled mainly consists of individual responses to the book or works kindly contributed towards a curation of the book’s extended ‘climate’. This 'gallery' gathers together poetry, essay, photography, film, and collage. I am immensely grateful to all who took part. It is the friendship, underground / tangential inspiration, and enduring correspondence with such artists that I most value in poetry.”

A note on: Museum of Futures: Scribbling & Scrawling exhibition ends

Another magic engagement with Surbiton's Museum of Futures, a unique community gallery that I've been able to work with through Writers' Centre Kingston and Kingston University. Students, local artists and writers, and those able to travel to the gallery nearby contributed to a brilliant month long exhibition of writing art, aligned with my poem brut project, on the theme of scribbling and scrawling. The work was uniformly good and once more, by taking on the labour of an open submission process, I had the chance to meet a load of talented new people, from Nicole Polonsky to Denise McCullough, there was some real discoveries for me. Moreover my students had the chance to see their work walled for the first time, and help me, significantly, in the curation of the show and it's events.

www.writerscentrekingston.com/futures lots more about the exhibition on the site, as well as the launch event here www.writerscentrekingston.com/making

Published: a new essay on The Learned Pig

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As part of my new series of art book publications for Poem Brut I've written a series of essays. Each one acts as a kind of contextualised full stop to the books and their otherwise un-explained content, but they aren't explanations, just ruminations. The brilliant online journal The Learned Pig have kindly published the essay On Time and Mess, which closed out I fear my best work behind me, with selections of the work from that book

https://www.thelearnedpig.org/on-time-and-mess/5477

Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple.

– Robert Rauschenberg

Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character

"Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to put it mildly, upon the regulation and control of grammar and correct spelling, in the final preparations for the publication of my book, ‘I fear my best work behind me,’ an exploration of the rudimentary character of poetry – that is letters and words – there was only one correction to make for my editor. Only one deliberate error, with all the obsequiousness that this phrase entails, for him to find and for me to defend. The title. I fear my best work is behind me. Remove the is. Then perhaps, to those dozen or so reading the title, and those few within the dozen who are concentrated by interest, the absence of the is will take on its proper significance. The primary significance I would posit that poetry has, outside of letters and words, is purposeful semantic omission.

I do not imagine my best work is behind me, literally, but in those whom I’ve discovered – and that is the right word to use (for they have to be unearthed, do poets, in England) – who have given me permission to make such works as those that often litter my pages, they are behind me, and are the best work, for they were and are not making what can be mine. What they have made was original, or based on poets they have buried with themselves, as I shall not do........"

 

A note on: Hosting Landscape Learn : Growth and Decay

A dynamic public facing project from J&L Gibbons, Landscape Learn is an exciting venture that Ive been able to be involved with through my residency and tie into my time at Kensal Green Cemetery, with Tereza Stehlikova, with this event. A one day mix of cemetery tour via geology and lost rivers, to talks on the bones of the city, the urban mind, neuroscience, landscape architecture and finishing with a screening of a film I have small part in, made by Tereza. Tickets were sold to a group of nearly fifty and the day felt really communal and engaged, I met so many really interesting people, all of whom shared a complex and intensive interest in their city and its changing environment - often changing for the worst, as the discussion of the nearby Old Oak Common development seemed never too far from the discussions. It's inspiring for me to work with people such as Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, this is the kind of day that feeds into my work, takes it into new places, where it needs to be, always growing.

A note on: Rest and Its Discontents exhibition at the Mile End Arts Pavilion

A beautiful job has been done, the exhibition runs until October 31st and is really well worth a visit. Some wonderful and works and installations by some brilliant artists and thinkers. http://hubbubresearch.org/event/rest-discontents/

DATE & TIME 30 September – 30 October 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
VENUE: The Mile End Art Pavilion  Mile End Park, Clinton Road  London, E3 4QY United Kingdom

A note on: Rest and its discontents exhibition at Mile End Art Pavilion

Rest & its discontents, a new exhibition from Hubbub exploring the dynamics of rest, stress, sound, noise, work and mind-wandering. Rest & its discontents explores the dynamics of rest, stress, relaxation, sound, noise, work and mindwandering in an evolving laboratory of moving image, performance, drawing, poetry, data, sound, music and debate.

Rest & its discontents features a video installation of my Soundings project with Wellcome Library. A specially made highlight video, edited by Ed Prosser, shows my works with Maja Jantar, Emma Bennett, Tamarin Norwood and Sharon Gal.

DATE & TIME 30 September – 30 October : 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
VENUE: The Mile End Art Pavilion, Mile End Park, Clinton Road, London, E3 4QY United Kingdom

 

A note on: South West Poetry Tour - Bath, Bruton

The final two legs of the tour, in Bath and Bruton. All the blog and documentation www.stevenjfowler.com/southwest 

In the end the evening was frantic, the largest number of poets and an excellent attendance, with some tech demands in between hosting and all the usual responsibility of organising an event. Camilla and I's work seemed to respond to this, and was contextualised, and perhaps amplified, with a more literary feeling for the majority of the collaborations being shared. It allowed us to play, to use the space, to make our performance a dance of sorts, but also a playfight of another sort - a physical poem alongside our text - not entirely, and deliberately, careful, not entirely graceful, but full of something close, intimacy perhaps. A really resonant experience for me, working with Camilla, extending our curatorial collaboration with such proximity and tactility, and begin a conversation with her work, one I've definitely benefited from being exposed to....

Bruton - August 7th Our final stop, the week passing, predictably, with alarming speed. We were able to stay close to the extraordinary gallery and gardens of Hauser and Wirth, everything that so many on the tour had told me it would be, enjoying local hospitality in some style. It allowed the poets who had seen through every leg of the tour to really spend some memorable time together, not only travelling in mini car flotillas, often through the dense English countryside and its receptionless roads, in the middle of the night, but around dinner tables and long after that, talking. A privilege to get to know some brilliant, warm-hearted, talented and wise human beings through the excuse of reading poetry, part of the experience that will stay with me longest I think.

The reading itself was pretty remarkable, over 150 people climbing the gentle incline of the garden in the Hauser & Wirth complex, up from the gallery itself into what seemed a giant ant pod, or upturned paper-mache tugboat. I thought it an installation on first approach, only to discover it was hollow and airy, allowing us to pack an enormous audience in the space for our 18 poets and our final event. Some brilliant work on display here, and I had the chance to read with Annabel Banks. We built our poem on abstracted meta-references, to the tour and its happenings, and then wrote it out to the other four who had been on the road, to engage multiple voices, to surround the audience, in a kind of mini-play. 

A high point to bow out upon, drawing poets and audience from the surrounding area, Bristol and beyond, and to be in such a special place. We ate together then finished our last proper day of the project saying farewell at train stations or around a dinner table, talking very late into the night. A really resonant, generous, memorable week in the south west, a time that will be hard to forget, made up by people I am better off for having worked with and lived beside.

A note on: launching 40 feet, a new book, written with David Berridge

As part of an event at the Essex Book Festival, a Camarade I had the pleasure of putting together, I got to read with my friend and collaborator, David Berridge. We launched our book 40 feet, which has been published by Knives Forks and Spoons press. http://knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/ 

40 Feet is a poem in dialogue. 40 poems as 40 moments, 40 fragments, 40 conversation starters / enders. It is a poem deliberately broken, misheard, overheard and overlapping. It is a record of meeting, writing, witnessing; mulching and reflecting London in 2013, where both of us lived and frequently met. 40 Feet is the events of that time and the character of that place, fixed in the subjective, the miniature, the specific - through an open-ended poetics of expression and conversation. 

We wrote the book over a year ago and revisiting it in Essex was a beautiful thing, to feel the book as a record of a friendship in poetry but also a marker of a time in my life.

And you can read more about David's work here http://verysmallkitchen.com/ 

Published: 2 limited editions released in March: Tractography (Pyramid Editions) & 40 Feet (Knives Forks & Spoons press)

Very pleased to see two new publications emerge in March. 

Tractography is the first of a new series of poems, called Neurocantos, and is launched in a boutique limited edition by Pyramid Editions, edited by Owen Vince. The poem is partially built from the words of a paper by the neuroscientist Daniel Margulies. http://pyramideditions.co.uk/

40 Feet, written with David Berridge is to be launched at the Essex Book Festival Camarade, on March 20th 2016, 40 Feet is published by Knives Forks and Spoons press. http://knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/ 

40 Feet is a poem in dialogue. 40 poems as 40 moments, 40 fragments, 40 conversation starters / enders. It is a poem deliberately broken, misheard, overheard and overlapping. It is a record of meeting, writing, witnessing; mulching and reflecting London in 2013, where both poets lived and frequently met. 40 Feet is the events of that time and the character of that place, fixed in the subjective, the miniature, the specific - through an open-ended poetics of expression and conversation. 

An excerpt featured in Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler (2013) and is now published in it's entirety by Knives, Forks & Spoons press. And you can read more about David's work herehttp://verysmallkitchen.com/ 

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A note on: speaking at Humboldt University, school of Mind & Brain, Berlin

An amazing opportunity to speak at Humboldt University Berlin, in the lofty environs of the Mind & Brain school, for an event called, which celebrated the art competition. The event brought together artist Mriganka Madhukaillya, curator Elena Agudio, Daniel Margulies, neuroscientist and head of the Max Planck institute and myself (!) and we each delivered talks that somehow related to art and science interdisciplinary practise and the efficacy of such collaborations. It is the only thing I have developed any expertise on really, the nature of collaboration and through the Enemies project, the Hub residency, the Salzburg Global Seminar and A World Without Words, the neuroaesthetics field, though still often opaque to me, is increasingly of interest. My talk went well, seemed generally uncontroversial, despite my relatively critical stance and in fact seemed to stoke a really positive energy with the scientists who attended. Brilliant for me to be beside such lofty peers and learn from them. 

2nd edition of my 1st collection: Red Museum

http://knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/redmuseum.html As is the poet's prerogative, this, my first book, was somewhat declaimed by me over the last few years. Coming into this year, it's gotten a little attention and reconsulting it, it suddenly seems to have its own 'value'. Not sure what that is exactly, that it is so big and dense to be a reading challenge, that it maintains its intensity of language...Anyhow, very happy Knives forks and spoons press have gotten to the point where the first print run has gone, and a new one needed doing, with really beautiful production values. It looks better than ever, a lovely thing to receive in the post.