Part of a brilliant online summer festival organised by UWE’s Centre for Fine Print Research and Arnolfini, I was asked to talk about Asemic Poetry for a bit https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/book-and-print-summer-festival-2020/
Never easy to do it from the top of your head but that’s how I prefer to teach, obviously leaping from idea to idea but hopefully being more immediate / engaged for that leaping. Asemic work is important to me and the feedback I’ve had suggests this has bled through.
Another grand launch, the third of four, at the world renowned gallery Arnolfini in Bristol. I read alongside friends and peers Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Matti Spence and John Hall, who is a great influence on my work, and Phil Owen, who is a curator as well as a writer, and was immensely hospitable to us. Shearsman Books and Tony Frazer, the editor, were on site too, being local, and it was a inviting, intellectually agile, open evening with some really fine readings. The weather in Bristol was beautiful, people sat along the dock before the Arnolfini and I had time during the day to really take it in, enjoy my book as an excuse to see friends, leave London and spend time busied with good things
In the lead up to my book launch at the remarkable Arnolfini in Bristol the acclaimed gallery has published a poem from The Guide to Being Bear Aware on it's website. Pap.
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/sj-fowler-poetry
It's a poem about being old.
http://www.vasw.org.uk/events/the-guide-to-being-bear-aware-a-poetry-collection-by-sj-fowler.php
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, BS1 4QA / 0117 917 2300 boxoffice@arnolfini.org.uk
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/the-guide-to-being-bear-aware-a-poetry-collection-by-sj-fowler
Thursday 06 April 2017 19:00 - 20:00 Opening Hours: 11:00 - 18:00 Booking recommended
The launch of SJ Fowler’s latest poetry collection The Guide to Being Bear Aware from Bristol-based Shearsman Books, featuring performances and readings from Fowler and guest readers John Hall, Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Phil Owen & more to be announced.
"The Guide to Being Bear Aware offers advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in... Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” Sarah Howe http://www.stevenjfowler.com/bearaware
I can't help but be grateful for the opportunity to put together an event like this one, that happened last Saturday at the Arnolfini in Bristol. To travel outside of London, to make a highly memorable day out of such a thing as poetry jaffing, in such an amazing institution like the Arnolfini who could've not been more supportive or gracious toward our collective enterprise, from commissioning to execution.
the latest in Bristol's Arnolfini was about Bristol Bristol Birstol. I've learned so much from the practise of mr Coyle it was a privilege again to work and read with him. An immensely warm, witty, erudite and lovely human being, as much as he is intimidating as an artist. We first did in 2011, then again in 2012, and now in 2013. We had a profound series of moments preperformance discussing what we are trying to do in general with our work and how it is changing, and undoubtedly we shall work again in the future, moving further into the world of improvised raw pain pain.
