A thank you to everyone who has made my 2016 a remarkable series of encounters, adventures and collaborations. Whatever the wider context of the adversarial world, I have been immensely fortunate to engage in the many things below. Happy new year.

Performances at festivals beyond my home island, including (these links include travelogues and videos)
- Hay Festival: Arequipa, Peru
- Times Lit Fest: Bombay, India
- Dhaka Lit Fest and teaching Chittagong for British Council, Bangladesh
- 10tal’s Stockholm International Poetry Festival, Sweden
- Airwaves Festival: Reykjavik, Iceland
- Bjornson Festival: Molde, Norway
- Poetry International Vlieland, Holland
- Krokodil Festival: Belgrade, Serbia
- TextWorld at Forumstadt Park: Graz, Austria
- Milosz Festival: Krakow, Poland
- Tbilisi International Literature Festival, Georgia
- CCTSS Festival: Beijing, China
- Iskele Poetry Festival, Cyprus
- El Tercer Lugar, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Ovinir and the Library of Water: Iceland

Commissions, projects and residencies

States of Mind at Wellcome Collection: curating and speaking at three events in July for the major exhibition on consciousness. The events were remarkable explorations of neuroscience and art involving Barry Smith, Srivas Chennu, Daniel Margulies & many others. www.stevenjfowler.com/statesofmind

BBC Radio 3's The Verb: The Worm in its Core commissioned as a new text in response to Hearing the Voice - a project which explores, and demystifies, auditory verbal hallucinations. www.stevenjfowler.com/theverb

The Soundings project: working with Wellcome Library via Hubbub group, new sound and conceptual collaborative performances with Phil Minton, Sharon Gal, Tamarin Norwood and Patrick Coyle, all documented by Ed Prosser. www.stevenjfowler.com/soundings

Jerwood Open Forest: collaborating with David Rickard for his ‘Returnings’, a proposed sculptural installation in Kielder Forest. Work with David was exhibited at Jerwood Space in Southwark as part of the project. www.stevenjfowler.com/returnings

Hubbub –The first ever Hub residency at Wellcome Collection, amongst many collaborations I co-curated a project entitled Respites for people claiming benefits and appeared on the Anatomy of Rest BBC Radio program with Claudia Hammond. www.stevenjfowler.com/hubbub

J&L Gibbons residency: a third year in residence with the groundbreaking landscape architects, included the Shifting Ground publication www.stevenjfowler.com/gibbonsresidency

The Singing Bridge: new texts for Claudia Molitor's audio installation on Waterloo Bridge as part of Totally Thames festival. www.stevenjfowler.com/singingbridge

Manners Maketh Man for Forum Stadtpark: new video poem installation commission exhibited in Graz. www.stevenjfowler.com/graz

Lunalia: An entire lunar cycle, one month, in sound collaboration with the brilliant Maja Jantar, responding to the moon through aberrant auditory artworks www.stevenjfowler.com/lunalia/

StAnza Festival, Scotland: New book destruction performances and workshop with Camarade for wonderful poetry festival in St Andrews. www.stevenjfowler.com/stanza

Publications:

House of Mouse: a new collaborative poetry collection with Prudence Chamberlain published by Knives Forks & Spoons press. The project also included a series of performances and magazine publications. www.stevenjfowler.com/houseofmouse

Tractography: a new limited edition pamphlet with poems about neuroscience from Pyramid Editions. Launched at the Proud Archivist in London.

40 Feet: a new collaborative publication with David Berridge published by Knives Forks & Spoons press. Launched at Essex Book Festival. www.stevenjfowler.com/40feet

& poems and artworks were published this year in magazines including Poetry Magazine, Gorse, Test Centre, Poetry Wales, Oxford Poetry, Poems in Which, Revolve:R, Queens Mob Teahouse, Berfrois, The Clearing, Karawa (Germany), Wazo (Spain), Boto Cor De Rosa (Brazil), Enchanting Verses (India) as well as anthologies including Long White Thread for John Berger (Smokestack) and Hwaet: 20 years of Ledbury Festival (Bloodaxe).Exhibitions:

The Night-Time Economy with Kate Mercer: Extended exhibitions of photography and poetry in both Newport's Riverfront Theatre & Arts Centre and London's Rich Mix exploring the often fractious energy and environment of Newport, Wales' nightclubs and pubs. Supported by Arts Council Wales. www.stevenjfowler.com/nighttimeeconomy

Rest and its discontents at Mile End Art Pavilion: an exhibition to close the Hubbub residency at Wellcome Collection, featured a video work with excerpts from Soundings project.

Conceptual Poetics exhibition at Saison Poetry Library: Performance works included in this group exhibition

Curatorial:

English PEN Modern Literature Festival: a privilege to curate a new festival where 30 English writers celebrated 30 writers at risk, currently supported by English PEN, and to celebrate Khadija Ismayilova with a new work www.stevenjfowler.com/englishpen

The first ever European Poetry Night: part of the European Literature Festival with over 20 poets from across the continent, included a new performance with Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttirwww.theenemiesproject.com/epn

The University Camarade: from my ongoing lectureship at Kingston University a new event to create collaboration between creative writing students across the UK.www.theenemiesproject.com/unicamarade

South West Poetry Tour: co- curated a five date tour across Cornwall, Devon and Somerset with Camilla Nelson. Over 70 poets involved, new collaborations with Matti Spence, Annabel Banks, JR Carpenter and John Hall. http://www.theenemiesproject.com/southwest

Kakania: Two remarkable events in Berlin and one in London, including a symposium, Kakania celebrated Habsburg Vienna in experimental style with dozens of new commissions. Supported by Österreichisches Kulturforum Berlin and Austrian Cultural Forum London. www.kakania.co.uk/ www.theenemiesproject.com/kakaniaberlin

A World without Worlds: curated with Lotje Sodderland, this event series exploring neuroaesthetics, neuroscience, the brain and language closed at Apiary Studios www.theenemiesproject.com/aworldwithoutwords

With the Enemies Project I also curated or co-curated collaborative events for the Rich Mix Anniversary celebrations, UNESCO Edinburgh City of Literature, The Essex Book Festival, Apiary Studios, the Poetry School Camarade and Ovinir: Icelandic Enemies, Mtrebi: Georgian Enemies and Enemigos: Argentinian Enemies.

Performance:

Celebrating Cesar Vallejo at Hay Arequipa: a new experimental performance in Peru, evoking the great poet. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlL4sH28gjo

Celebrating Aleksandr Wat at Milosz Festival: a newly commissioned collaboration with Weronika Lewandowska and Tom Jenks, loosely based on Wat's Moj Wiek or My Century www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWR-FPmTahI

Celebrating Jerome Rothenberg at Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck: A new performance celebrating the great American poet to mark his visit to London.www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD-rn0E-9JQ&t=15s

Praxis at Parasol Unit: a new conceptual performance with Maja Jantar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCW9cJ-Itfo&t=537s

Other new live work included for the The The the reading series, Lexicon at Marsden Woo Gallery and at the Library of Water. Iceland.

Articles:

On Poetry and Performance for Norwich Writer’s Centre International Literature Showcase
On the CROWD Literature Bus Tour for Literaturhaus Europa
On being in Europe as the UK was leaving for In Other Words
A feature at Poetry Spotlight
An article on collaboration for Jacket 2

If you're down this far, you are a good egg. I’m grateful to have worked with so many generous folk in 2016. There is more to come in 2017. Hope your year starts brightly, Steven

I was properly excited to attend this unique conference of literary organisers and activists, hosted and led by the extraordinary Lettretage - Tom Bresemann, Katharina Deloglu, Moritz Molsch & co, in Berlin, precisely because, absurdly, it seemed wholly focused on the extremely niche thing that I have found myself doing in poetry - that is organisation, curation, innovation, but also something more fundamental than this - the two extensive days of discussion in a room in Kreuzberg were about action. and the possibilities of doing that across Europe, with ambition and energy, while maintaining consideration and ephemeral sensitivity to what literature might be, rather than what it should be.

Lettretage itself is cutting a path for things like the Enemies project. It is doing what I've often inadvertently found myself trying to do. This conference was the best possible example of this, having been around near a decade, Lettretage is now innovating ways to grow and centralise a network of similarly minded people and organisations. They have secured fantastic funding support from creative europe and many others to create a tour of Europe, through their CROWD project and to develop things like an app which will allow visitors to new cities to get 'local' information on readings and performances. Always their emphasis is on the ground up outfits, the artists and curators who are building up from communities and live, contemporary cultures of poetry, literature and performance arts. Rather than shutting up shop after their successes, they are aggressively searching out those who share their mission and their general attitude of openness and innovation.

I have waffled about so many theoretical notions that gel perfectly with their approach, it was genuinely gratifying and made me feel wholly at home visiting them. So I trotted out these ideas again in Berlin - people before poetry, process over product, respect in the world, disrespect in the text... The guerrilla nature of Enemies was brought into sharp focus here, how reactive I am, and how grounded Lettretage and the many other organisers here are in their worlds and communities. I realised London is different place to organise, in a sense wonderful and anonymous and incremental because of its sprawl. The participants here are more rooted, they take responsibility with deeper ties, and all the while they maintain these positions of giving space to mostly avant garde, or contemporary, work and supporting artists while reaching actual people with that work.

I came across so many artists and organisers I had never met before and felt a genuine kinship with so many of them. I got to know the brilliant Daniela Seel and admire her incredible editorship of Kookbooks, I met the committee from Forumstadtpark in Graz, with the immensely charming Max Hofler leading their poetry program, Andrea Inglese too, who runs Nazione Indiana. Valgerður Þórodds from Reykjavik who has revitalised the poetry scene in Iceland with her ground up, community led, handmade press medgonguljod. Sasha Filyuta, Lily Michaelides & many more - it was such an intense two days, 10 hours of talking and listening back to back, it's not yet really sunk in how the environment was such a gift to someone like me, because really its purpose to was affirm the notion of mindful, self-orientated activity that stakes out the ground of our generations literary spaces. This has always been in my mind curating Enemies, but as an emphemeral notion. Lettretage solidified this idea, gave it back to me in a way.

I'm sure this will be the beginning of many relationships that Lettretage provided me, friendships I would venture to say, and I hope my work intersects with theirs often, for they are lighting a path I want to follow. www.lettretage.de