A note on : my art-poems in A History of Unnecessary Developments

I had a friend who can take photos come into to see my new, brief, exhibition at Willesden Gallery, and try to turn chicken beaks into gold. The photos are excellent, and improve my works when seen in the flesh. In a sense, these works do consolidate a lot of my recent explorations in visual poetry - especially in the art poems field, which I’ve loosely theorised in a lot of my teaching. They were all made for the exhibition, on wallpaper paper, with indian ink and some acryllic paint. Tonnes more photos of the exhibition are at……. www.stevenjfowler.com/developments

Published : Beir Bua special feature - 8 art-poems from 8 books

A very energised online journal from Ireland, Beir Bua, edited by Michelle Moloney King, has generously featured my art-poetry as their special focus in their second issue. It collates one example, one art-poem, from eight of my books. It essentially draws upon what I’ve been working on, in exploring visual poetry and the handmade, and the poem brut movement, since the summer of 2017 and prior. It’s satisfying to see it represented in this way, and the issue has some really fine poets in there too, from Gregory Betts to Susan Connolly and many others new to me. Worth checking out https://beirbuajournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/issue-2-15.pdf

The works are taken from my books Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep), due next month, then Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020), Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018), The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (2020), I fear my best work behind me (Strange Press 2017), Sticker Poems (due out later in 2021 with Trickhouse Press), Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit (Hesterglock Press 2019) and finally Bastard Poems (due out later in 2021 with Steel Incisors)

Also featured in the issue are short reviews of my books Crayon Poems, Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire, kindly penned by the editor, who also reviews my friend and collaborator Christodoulos Makris, as well as introing the issue. https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/journal/issue-2/

A note on : Ed Hadfield's exhibition opening chat

I met Ed Hadfield years ago and we’ve stayed in contact, with Ed being one of the most interesting poets working with public art that I know. His work’s background is in an area very different from my own, and its through my awareness of Ed’s work that I’ve slowly built up proper knowledge of those I’d see as poets who are known as text artists like ruscha, weiner, holzer, baldessari et al.

Ed has a year long exhibition / installation at Cable Depot, run generously by Iavor Lubomirov https://cable-depot.com/About, and asked me to pop down to talk with him about it, for a chat on instagram live, because he couldn’t do a normal opening due to the pandemic.

I had a really magic time going down to woolwich dockyards on a friday night, with gale force winds battering in as i walked down the thames path and emerging into an industrial estate to discover this incredible intimate gallery, surrounded by mechanics and warehouses. The video here shows Ed and I’s chat, which is a bit wind affected, but captures a moment - its almost a performance in itself, trying to talk in the gusts as the light fades - and its worth listening to to glean Ed’s sincere and intelligent insight into his piece, which is admirably elegant. Ed’s website is here too https://edhadfield.co.uk/wall-mural/

A note on : Language Art course at Poetry School

Sylee Gore

Sylee Gore

Remote or online courses aren’t necessarily suited to that which motivates me to teach. I’ve approached pedagogy in a way that the dialogue of exchanging information when leading a program isn’t a pretence. I have collaborated with students, learn from them every lesson, and this is the main reason for me to share knowledge I’ve accrued but naturally, already know. I’m maybe too reliant on that face to face, improvised style of teaching. So it’s taken me a few years to improve at leading courses online. The current course I’m working on with the Poetry School and about 20 quite brilliant poet-artists around the world, including folk from Australia, America and elsewhere, is the best experience I’ve had so far without immediate conversations. It’s likely due to the people who signed up, who are unusually talented and generous, and a maturation on my part, most especially in not overloading the source material and prompts. I would upload 100 pages in the past for one exercise, somehow I thought I needed to give participants their money’s worth. It takes time to learn it’s not just about that perhaps. Here are some works by poets who are on the course, really impressive asemic, handwritten, concrete poems and this is the true value of an online course - it allows access to people globally and you somehow then get poet-artists who are remarkably advanced in their work, seeking knowledge and insights, rather than fundamental approaches. Some of the work coming in is better than anything I’ve done, some professional standard work, and yet the exchanges in the group are supportive, and humble. https://poetryschool.com/groups/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry

Claire Collison

Claire Collison

JE Moore

JE Moore

Published : Crayon Poems - Penteract Press

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Available penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler

2020 - £10.00 Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 60pp

Produced to a remarkable standard, a volume of 50 original art-poems, written entirely with crayons. The books is closed with a new essay, explaining why it exists. An excerpt = “There is a part of me that wants to be messy, dumb, clumsy, childish, ape-ish and impatient because I am quite naturally these things and these things are preferable to pretense. I never wish to be a child again, and will be granted this wish, but I’d rather be one than a fraught, bourgeois adult, and so robbing the techniques of infants seem a valuable, if petulant, path to safety. What better reason than childishness, amidst the recreations of mortality, animalisms, literacy and colourfulness, could there be for me to author and labour a book of poems made exclusively from the wax crayon?”

From the publisher “Crayon Poems is the poetic equivalent of a cat gifting its owner a dead bird, only it’s done with greasy, gentle colours on the page. In an intrepid interrogation of what it is to write, SJ Fowler’s art poetry collection offers a take on childish play and death’s tenacity that is compelling in its abjection. A cheeky nod to the unknowable, it is a gift you don’t want but should be grateful for. Fowler’s colourful crayons, like the bird’s intestines, are bodily, fascinating and undeniable.”

These poems overflow the pool and belch broken pinwheels and algae blooms. They originate the faces and traces of those dreams that wake me. The ones I cannot describe to the adults around me. My lack of words or the words they have over me. Hold a crayon one day and convey. Here there is no illegible or illiterate.  Kim Campanello

SJ Fowler's Crayon Poems enter the realm of hauntology, a special place in which the sensible child finds expression in the day-dreaming adult. This line of Electronic Voice Phenomena is sketched into cardiogram in shaky and colourful wax. Who says the colours of Crayola are just for the under-tens? Chris McCabe

The fifth book in my Poem Brut series. www.stevenjfowler.com/artbooks The book was released with a special podcast by Penteract Press, between editor Anthony Etherin and I. https://penteractpress.com/p-p-p/2020/7/5/episode-10-sj-fowler-crayon-poems-launch

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A note on : An Invisible Poetry : exhibition at Poetry Society

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….so this is pretty great. For the month of July I’ll be presenting a mix of new works made specifically for the Poetry Society Cafe space, including window poems and sculptural pieces, alongside a selection from my five poem brut books. I will also be curating a group show alongside my solo show, as the exhibition space has two floors. Both shows, but especially the group show, will firmly be a part of what I’ve tried to do with Poem Brut as a project - that is to make available ideas and methods of poetry is a way that is liberating and not judgemental to those who perhaps don’t find mess and play so appealing as I.

The Poetry Society, especially Michael Sims, have been hugely generous and supportive, and accommodating, and it bodes well that this summer month can be spent in the space, which is open six days a week, nearly 12 hours a day.

AN INVISIBLE POETRY : JULY 1ST TO JULY 27TH
a new solo show of paint and sculpture poems at The Poetry Society Cafe in Covent Garden 
https://poetrysociety.org.uk/poetry-cafe/exhibitions/future-exhibition/

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The Poetry Society Cafe : July 1st to 27th / 22 Betterton St, London WC2H 9BX
Opening Hours 11am to 10pm everyday bar sunday. www.stevenjfowler.com/invisible

"A visual poem should be visible, yet it seems it’s often not so. In this solo exhibition of new painterly poems, SJ Fowler asks questions so manifest they are almost indiscernible. What is in the shape of a letter and what images do words recall? What is the meaning of colour in poetry, and where went the handwritten word? Where is mess, notation, scrawling and material? Why is composition strange to an art-form that is as visual as it is sonic? An Invisible Poetry presents new sculptural poems and original visual literature alongside a selection from Fowler's Poem Brut project and its accompanying series of publications from Hesterglock Press, Stranger Press, ZimZalla and Penteract Press. These are poems exploring handwriting, abstraction, illustration, pansemia, scribbling and scrawling." 

Special View Performance Event - July 8th 2019 : 7pm doors for 7.30pm start. Free entry. & // This is a split exhibition, as in the basement gallery of the Poetry Society I am curating a group show - The Poet's Brut www.poembrut.com/poetrysociety

The Poet’s Brut : A group show with Chris McCabe, Paul Hawkins, Astra Papachristodoulos, Karen Sandhu, Simon Tyrrell, Imogen Reid, Vilde Torset and Patrick Cosgrove www.poembrut.com/poetrysociety

Brand new works exhibited by seven of the UK's most exciting contemporary poets. Poem Brut project has generated over a dozen events since 2017, alongside multiple exhibitions, workshops, conferences, publications and over 1000 submissions to it’s 3am magazine series. It advocates for an artistic creative writing, a visual literature, a concrete poetry - poetry that embraces colour, the handwritten, the composed, the abstract, the scribbled, the noted, the illustrated. Poem Brut affirms the possibilities of the page, the pen, and the pencil (and the crayon) for the poet in a computer age, and celebrates these ideas in the live realm alongside the two dimensional. This group show evidences a new generation of poets working in old traditions often forgotten or nudged into the realm of modern art. http://www.poembrut.com/exhibitions

Published: an interview with HIPOGLOTE

This was really fun, i had a blast chatting with portuguese sound poetry achivers / activists / investigators tiago swabl and nuno nevers who have been part of the Hipoglote interview series for 87 issues, up to mine. Everytime I get asked to mark my contribution to sound poetry is feels special, as I do feel a sense of great respect for those who created and lead the practise, it's always something on the frontline, and to be a little part of it, and to be recognised as such in europe, means something special

Nuno and Tiago have created a great route in to discussing sonic and sound poetry, with some brilliant conversations in the past. we got on like a house on fire, really a privilege to be part of the project for me, we chatted about loads of stuff, and they seemed to enjoy my notion that sound poetry is what we do the moment we are born and in the last moments before we die

listen in here https://www.mixcloud.com/Hipoglote/87o-hipoglote_2018-06-18_interview_-steven-j-fowler/

EPF2018 #5: European Poetry Festival celebrates Sound & Performance at Iklectic Artlab

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An extraordinary venue and a grand night of innovative live poetry, from the sonic to the electronic to the vocal to the conceptual. Eduard and the team (including Tony the Cat) at IKLECTIK are doing an amazing job and were so hospitable, we really felt like we were in someone’s beautiful living room. The place was nicely full, a good 70 people sat in to watch a real range of works. It was the first time I got to put on poets I’ve admired for years like Rike Scheffler from Berlin, Sergej Timofejev from Riga, and it was great to have back on in London poets like Robert Prosser from Vienna and Kinga Toth from Budapest. Range was the key element here, again, and the works complimented each other. It was a little nubache for me to run all the tech from my laptop while also filming but worth it, this movement of poets across Europe worrying about liveness and sound and time needed to be acknowledged in its own space and place.

See videos of every performance on the night and pictures too at www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/performance

A note on: Worm Wood exhibition : August 3rd to September 3rd

Worm Wood : an exhibition at Kensal Green Cemetery The Dissenter's Gallery
by Tereza Stehlíková and SJ Fowler - August 3rd to September 3rd

391 Ladbroke Grove. London W10 5AA. Entrance via Cemetery door on Ladbroke Grove or Main Gate during opening hours. Viewings by appointment.

An exhibition of found objects, artefacts., paintings, photographs and a new collaborative film from Czech moving-image artist Tereza Stehlikova and writer SJ Fowler which explores the historic, hidden and idiosyncratic in Kensal Green Cemetery, and its connection to disppeared and ever disappearing London. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood
 
Special View : Poetry Reading - August Wed 16th : Doors 7pm : Free Entry
www.theenemiesproject.com/dissenterschapel
Held in the beautiful Dissenter's Chapel, nearly twenty London-based poets will read mostly new works responding to Kensal Green Cemetery with Eley Williams, Fabian Peake, Joe Turrent, Michael Zand, Ariadne Radi Cor, Clover Peake, Adriana Diaz-Enciso, Ahsan Akbar, Alex MacDonald, Lavinia Singer, Richard Scott, Jonathan Mann, Giovanna Coppola, an audio installation performance by Pascal O'Loughlin & more.
 
Special View : Performance Night - August Thurs 24th : Doors 7pm : Free Entry
The exhibition's official special view before closing with screenings, interactive tours and performances, featuring new works in response to the place and themes on display from Gareth Evans, Thomas Duggan, Alexander Kell, Tereza Stehlikova, SJ Fowler and more to be announced. 
 
The exhibition is one of many facets of Worm Wood, a collaboration between the artists begun in 2015 and planned as ongoing with the area’s development. Worm Wood has included a summer long residency at Kensal Green Cemetery Dissenter's Chapel, multiple events, a film and publications.

Published: Three new poem bruts in Hotel Magazine

A really brilliant magazine is Hotel, and they've once again generously published some of my new art poems or poem bruts which will form the major output of my work over the next year or so, with a series of events at Rich Mix and four new limited edition books. These three works are taken from the book New Prim. 

http://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler-Poem-Brut-ii

Published: new artpoems in the latest Gorse issue 8

I've said before that I think Gorse to be one of the finest literary journals in the world. I read their impeccably produced issues cover to cover and feel the journal to be edited as beautifully as it made. To have some of my art brut poems, from my upcoming I fear my best work behind me book with Stranger Press in the latest issue is wonderful, not only to share that work, aberrant as it would be to most publications, but also because I knew how beautifully they would present the works. They look amazing on its pages, I couldnt be happier.

You can pick up issue 8 here http://gorse.ie/book/no-8/

A note on : Rauschenberg at Tate Modern, reflections on a fine course

Across five monday evenings in the new year of 2017 I had the chance to lead a course at Tate Modern, after hours, in the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition itself. With a remarkable group of people, ten hours were passed amongst the extraordinary range of artworks that made up this retrospective. All told I spent almost exactly twenty four hours in that space, most often alone or in a small group. I was able to really engage, in a way that is almost impossible in normal circumstance, with the lessons Rauschenberg's lifetime of art practise and general decency had to offer me. And I did feel it was a personal connection, feeling an immense kinship with his prolific and curious mode. 

I've generated an unwieldy volume of notes on his work that I intend to turn into an article or sorts, or a reminder for myself in smoother print, but for now, just fresh from the course's conclusion, I can only reflect on the generous human experience it provided. I must helped with quite some grace by curators Luisa Ulyett and Joseph Kendra, and I will admit at times the unique format of the after-hours adult-ed type format did provide challenges, I believe myself to be too conscious of every individual detail at times, trying to do all things at once, making sure everyone involved is satisfied in all ways, when this not possible and counterintuitive.  However the experience was resonant because of those generous enough to participate, really warm, intelligent, discerning people I had the chance to spend an extended time with, a ten hour conversation. Read more - http://www.stevenjfowler.com/tatemoderncourse

A note on: Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire, a book of marks

Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire : a book I am working a lot on at the moment, in the studio, with inks and experiments, for publication later in 2017 with Blart Books. AOAE will be one of the triology of poembrut books I release this year, and centred on the pansemic tradition, mark marking, material, sexuality, amoeba's and ... I'm writing essays for each of these three books too, to go in the back, not to explain but to discuss and am revisiting much Michaux and Bataille for AOAE.

A note on: Lightwave, performing with Lithuanian poets in London

If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them.
 -Andrei Tarkovsky

A memorable night at Free Word centre, bathed in a dirty UV light I had associated with searching for bodily fluids in hotel rooms transformed a literary house meeting hall into a space for real performance literature. I was performing alongside Lithuanian poets Zygimantas Kudirka and Gabriele Labanauskaite and thanks to Zygi's suggestion we themed the evening around the Lightwave, all presenting new live works thanks to an invitation by the Lithuanian Cultural Centre tying into the London Book Fair.

I've known Gabriele for years now, she has always been a peer whose work I find motivating, one of dozens of folk beyond the UK doing the work I think we should be doing on the island, blending heavy skill in theatre, poetry and sound. She has an immense presence too, calm, clear thinking, warm. And Zygimantas was a revelation, having never seen him perform before, he was unique, capitivating, authentic, very funny. He made my improvised speaking performance, which involved rope lights nosed around my neck, flames held under my palm and rambling engagements with the theme of light, seem conventional.

The Free Word was kitted out differently too and there was a sensitive, engaged feeling in the audience. It all emerged from the intent, mindful curation of the Lithuanian Cultural Institute, Rūta Nanartavičiūtė and her colleagues were a joy to work with, with an unusual sense of play and a taste for the contemporary and strange. The intense feeling of post performance energy, of soft relief, was permeated this time with a sense of hoping hospitality had been shown to the visiting poets, and it felt as thought they had shared an evening with myself and others that would be long in the memory.

A note on: the last soundings, performing with the great Phil Minton

An amazing privilege it was to perform an improvised vocal work with Phil Minton last October at Kings Place in London. The video of that work is now public, beautifully shot by Ed Prosser.

For over fifty years Phil Minton has been performing, singing, vocalising around the world. He absolutely has shaped, even defined, free vocalisation and improvised sound poetry since WWII. To get to work with him for the first time, with no prior preparation, no conversation about what we'd do before the performance even, was such an honour, and beautiful / terrifying in equal measure. So important for me to feel I'm crossing over with the greats of previous generations

Published: 3 poem-bruts on Partisan Hotel

Very happy the brilliant Partisan Hotel magazine have published a set of three of my poem-brut artpoems, all taken from my upcoming Stranger Press book 'I fear my best work behind me' due out in the summer. http://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler

From the magazine bio "These works are taken from his trilogy of books in the poem-brut tradition, exploring ready writing materials, the composition of handwriting and mark making and the role of illustration and legibility in determining poetic meaning. The three books are to be published in 2017 and are entitled I fear my best work behind me (Stranger Press), New prim (Hesterglock Press) and Aletta Ocean Empire (Blart Books). A sequence of Fowler’s poems will appear in Hotel #2."

A note on: Visual Art South West - New collection launch in Bristol

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

 

A note on: Museum of Futures Visual Poetry exhibition

Very happy to be curating this exhibition in Surbiton next month. It brings together colleagues at Kingston University from multiple departments, students, alumnus and local professional poets and artists. 

Opening night, with a camarade reading, is February Thursday 23rd. All info here www.theenemiesproject.com/futures

I'm also still taking submission for the exhibition until February 5th www.theenemiesproject.com/opencallfutures