Published : 3 cinema poems on m58

Taken from my new book COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS : POEMS ON FILMS, available for pre-order https://brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days… 3 new poems up on Andrew Taylor's brilliant M58 - You The Living, The Abyss, Ordet https://m58.co.uk

I’m especially happy with the Abyss poem, made from collaged screen shots from the director’s cut of the film and You, the Living, using screenshots from the film itself, with the subtitle repurposed as poetry.

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Published : Man Bites Dog on Eurolitkrant

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Very generous of Ghareeb Iskander to take a new poem of mine for publication in the Belgium based journal Eurolitkrant. https://eurolitkrant.com/OneBook.aspx?Id=81

The journal has featured some great European poets recently - Peter Zavada, Ida Borjel, George Szirtes, Kornelia Deres - and I’m particularly happy to have this poem up as it’s taken from my new collection, which is due March 2021, in two months time. It is entitled COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS poems on films with Broken Sleep.

The film the poem is about is an intense one, but also from Belgium, so some synchonicity jiggling.

The Writing Eye - Online course on Photo Poetry and Film Poetry

An online course. Begins November 8th 2020, running for 7 weeks. www.poembrut.com/courses

The potential of image and text is an endless field of creative exploration. Yet, despite the ubiquitous access we have to cameras, it remains underexplored and underappreciated as its own medium. This course traces the history of photopoetry and filmpoetry and draws it into the 21st century, rooted in making over theory, method over all else - it aims to provoke questions while exploring examples from a variety of fields - from conceptual art to surrealism, collage to concrete poetry, from modernism to collaborative practice.

We ask what makes up the essence of photography, film and poetry, and how might they interact to move beyond traditions in both fields, as something new, a true photopoetry or filmpoetry? We ask what is hybridity, truly, and simultaneity, and photoliteracy, and illustration? What is a poem in time, on film? How has the technology needed for the cinema and video evolved what a poem might be? What is the line between documentation and artwork?

Poet-photographer-filmmakers featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern figures to "outsider" artists, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Barbara Kruger, Francesca Woodman to August Strindberg, Peter Greenaway to Hamish Fulton, Blaise Cendrars to Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller to Yamamoto Kansuke, Paul Muldoon / Norman McBeath to Paul Eluard / Man Ray.

A note on : Broken Sleep list for 2021

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I am happy to be one of the poets on the list for Broken Sleep in 2021, alongside some friends - Lucy Harvest Clarke, Luke Kennard, Emma Hammond, Jon Stone - and a lot of new names to me. Which is excellent.

The book I’ll be releasing in March 2021 is the second, far longer, instalment of my cinema poems. I’ve been working on them bit by bit for years. The first pamphlet I did with BS did really well and was a joy to put together, I STAND ALONE BY THE DEVILS, it was called.

This will be a full collection and more ambitious in terms of methodology too. Aliens is a film about more than one Alien, for example.

What Aaron Kent and his team have done with Broken Sleep is very impressive too, the press is growing exponentially. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/

Published : I Stand Alone by The Devils, and other poems on films

I Stand Alone by The Devils, and other poems on films
Broken Sleep Books : 33 pages : £5 www.stevenjfowler.com/istandalone
www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-i-stand-alone-by-the-devils-and-other-poems-on-films

A book, though lean, I have been working on for years. It’s been a pleasure to bring it into life with Aaron Kent, editor of Broken Sleep. From the publisher = "26 new poems celebrating 26 cult films of the 20th and 21st century, I Stand Alone by The Devils is a slim volume of cinematic poetic ekphrasis. At play is an aberrant intersemiotic translation between the mediums of popular or arthouse cinema and contemporary, modernist poetry. The poems aim to re-imagine moving image in language, often cutting in tone, taking on the dark, symbolic and sardonic on film. Each poem is a single film, interpreting, reflecting, embodying and transposing, exploring both films familiar to many, and digging out, often from 20th century European cinema, more unorthodox motion pictures. From Querelle and The Baby of Mâcon, to American Werewolf in London and Don’t Look Now. From Aguirre and Festen to The Fly and Breaking the Waves, these poems are a strange and playful musing on cinema’s impact on poetry and language and a useless thinking through of how films are actually consumed."

A full list of films featured - Angel Heart, Querelle, Last Year at Marienbad, Ali : Fear Eats The Soul, The Fly, The Devils, Breaking the Waves, American Werewolf in London, Don’t Look Now, I Stand Alone, A short film about Love, En Coeur En Hiver, The Baby of Mâcon, Nightwatch (Nattevagten), Silence of the Lambs, Satan’s Brew, Aguirre, wrath of god, The Long Good Friday, Stalker, Salo, Festen, Three Colours Blue, Yojimbo, Possession, Beau Travail, M.

LAUNCH : August Thursday 29th 2019 at the Cinema Museum, London, alongside a screening of Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon
http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/
7pm doors for 7.30pm entry. £8 (£5 concessions)
Readings, featuring Jonathan Catherall, Yvonne Litschel, Chris Kerr, David Spittle and more, alongside SJ Fowler, will mark this unique celebration of cinematic poetry, before a screening ofThe Baby of Mâcon, Peter Greenaway’s remarkable and challening 1993 film. More details to come soon.

A note on: work in Test Centre magazine 7

Very pleased to be in the always brilliant Test Centre magazine. Generously the editors accepted work from three of my upcoming projects, a range of approaches, with poems from my next collection The Guide to Being Bear Aware, poems from a limited edition book with Pyramid editions about cinema and my debut art book, from Stranger press, entitled I fear my best work behind me - which is a series of brutalist illustrations. http://testcentre.org.uk/product/test-centre-seven/

The magazine is released in a limited edition of 250 copies and includes work from Allen Fisher, Holly Pester, MacGillivray, Pierre Guyotat, Daisy Lafarge, Joseph Persad, Rachael Allen, Sam Riviere, Francine Elena, Erik Stinson, Chrissy Williams, Wayne Holloway-Smith, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Iain Sinclair, Ralf Webb, Angus Sinclair, Paul Buck, Caleb Klaces, Stephen Watts, Laura Elliott, A. K. Blakemore, Nick Thurston, SJ Fowler and Ahren Warner.

Reading American poets at the Whitechapel gallery with Chris McCabe amidst American cinema

This was a really lovely evening, expertly curated by the generous and eloquent Gareth Evans, putting myself and Chris McCabe into a program of some amazing contemporary American experimental cinema, reading American poets. The Whitechapel is always a good place to read, but to have cinema sit up close with poetry, and to be reading work like O'Hara and Starr Hamilton made it feel completely new to me. A very generous feeling between the filmmakers and film curator Jamie Wyld and us too, this is the kind of thing I'm always happy to be doing. 

The Cinepoem Project - Nov 22nd at the Rich Mix

the Cinepoem project
Thursday November 22nd 2012 from 7.30
the Richmix arts centre, the main space
Bethnal Green road, E1 6LA 020 7613 7498Free entrance for all

Tom Raworth & Avi Dabach
Emanuella Amichai & SJ Fowler
Tim Atkins & Ran Slavin

A ground breaking collaborative exchange between three Israeli film-makers / video artists and three British poets, translating the medium of poetry into the practise of film to produce three original, poetic films, or cinepoems. http://www.richmix.org.uk/whats-on/event/cinepoem/

The aim of the project is to transform the auspices of a selected, single poem into short, conceptual films, that will be screened on November 22nd in London, at the Richmix Arts centre. The event will also feature poetry readings from Tom Raworth, Tim Atkins and SJ Fowler, and a panel discussion exploring the unique nature of poetic / filmic collaboration and the potentiality of poetry as a medium adaptable to film.


The project is designed to show that the potential for poetry to be realised in the narrative of film and film-making may lay the path for a wide future between these mediums, enriching them both in the process. This is the first instalment of the Enemies project, a year long exploration of poetry and collaboration, curated by SJ Fowler, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.

Programme of events:
A poetry reading by the poets: SJ Fowler, Tom Raworth, Tim Atkins.
- Ran Slavin will introduce a film based on Tim Atkins' poem: ODES I / 32+ODES II /3
- Avi Dabach will introduce a short film based on Tom Raworth’s poem "TAXOMONY"
- Emanuella Amichai will introduce a short film based on SJ Fowler's poem :"38 meditations on strong tea"
A panel discussion exploring the unique nature of poetic / filmic collaboration