Published: Puebla Songs in Boto-Cor-De-Rosa Livros, Brazil

Sarah Rebecca Kersley, a British poet, quite remarkably, has started a bookshop and cafe in Bahia in Brazil with a focus on the contemporary and curation by Brazilian contemporary literature professor and critic Milena Britto, and adjoining the shop, has a beautiful online journal that publishes work in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and fortunately for me, the journal has now published one of my poems - Puebla Songs, part of a series I've written about violence and south america, written from a position of ignorance, but while I was travelling in the region.

Visit the poem here http://www.livrariabotocorderosa.com/index.php/2016/09/15/puebla-songs-sj-fowler/ and submit to the magazine too.

A note on: in the Conceptual Poetics exhibition at Saison Poetry Library

A series of videos from the Enemies project video library have been included in this extraordinary exhibition running at Southbank Centre in London, at the Saison Poetry Library. It includes my performance with Amanda de la Garza and a series of brilliant publishers, who make up the heart of the exhibition, with whom I've been working with for years. A must see, go visit it while you still can! (Photographs of the exhibition below generously provided by Pascal O'Loughlin)

http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/conceptual-poetics-1001501

eating a book for Enemigos: performing with the video Amanda de la Garza

A series of adaptations were required to complete this collaboration, one taking place on the first night of the London Bookfair, for an event I was hosting & curating, with Amanda de la Garza. In the end, the evening was genuinely beautiful, easy to put together, and the performance between a video Amanda & I was really resonant (to me, I wouldn't presume further than that.)

The British Council have been a great partner on this event, providing lots of support and the presence of the brilliant Carmen Buellosa, and I had some time at the bohemyth bookfair in the day before the evening, where I reconnected with lots of friends I met on my two visits to perform in Mexico. It was during that afternoon, strolling in the Olympia, that I received Amanda's video, and then, with crippling audio problems, at great speed, I rushed home and we hashed out a deliberately unsynched audio reading track which had pauses for me to read in, around her words, and then I came up with some actions, reflecting her own performance in the video, when the audience could see her extraordinary visage, looming large. I bit pages from the Enemigos anthology and crawled on the stage. The final result was gentle, unsettled and singular, I think. I was very pleased.

The evening gave life once again into what has been one of the most exciting Enemies projects, and to see Rocio Ceron, Holly Pester, Adriana Enciso, Fabian Peake, Nell Leyshon, all shine so cohesively, with such clear relationships emanating from the collaborations was satisfying. I can vaguely relax for the rest of the bookfair now, cold selling my cupcakes to the massive trade delegations who also feed on books.

You can see all the Enemigos videos here : www.theenemiesproject.com/enemigos

performing with Amanda de la Garza for Enemigos - April 14th at the rich mix

I was so sad to hear, in the end, Amanda didn't receive her funding to come to the UK to collaborate with me live. But we have fashioned a video art collaboration that we'll screen at the event instead. The last time we read together, video here, it was an unforgettable night. She has an extraordinary calm, dignified and powerful way which permeates her writing. We'll have to renew our work another day.



Oxford Brookes weekly poem feature - Gilles de Rais from Enemies

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/poetry-centre/weekly-poem/weekly-poem-for-20-october-2014/ Very nice to have two poems from my collaboration with David Erkembode Kelly pop up on the Oxford Brookes poetry weekly poetry feature.  
Weekly Poem for 20 October 2014

  • from Gilles de Rais

    shot in the ribs in revenge.
    my organs like this, two ribs, rhymes 
    and emily’s 
    racist baby workout 
    is a future collected book 
    like this a postcard sized box that is completely 
    empty as a hospital bed 
    can be empty soon 
    enough if you don’t watch you mouth & if so 
    I’ll be on quick as a flash 
    evidence for it in my past
    by SJ Fowler

    This excerpt from ‘Gilles de Rais’ is copyright © SJ Fowler, 2013. It is reprinted by permission of Penned in the Margins from Enemies  (Penned in the Margins, 2013).
    Notes from Penned in the Margins: ‘Gilles de Rais’ is a collaborative work with poems by SJ Fowler and artwork from David Kelly, and comes from the anthology, Enemies. This ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary collection is the result of collaborations between SJ Fowler and over thirty artists, photographers and writers. Diary entries mingle with a partially-redacted email exchange; texts slip and fragment, finding new contexts alongside prints, paintings, diagrams, Rorschach blots, YouTube clips and behind-the-scenes photographs at the museum. Find out more from the Penned in the Margins website, watch SJ Fowler read from the poem, and follow his work on his website and on Twitter.
    Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond. The company is currently touring two productions: Shlock!, a powerful feminist satire for the cut and paste generation, and The Shipwrecked House, a one-woman performance that blends poetry with theatre, in which Anglo-Breton poet Claire Trévien navigates a shifting maritime landscape. You can find out more about these productions on the Penned in the Margins website. 

Mexico : diario de la poesía #5 - Moctezuma's revenge & the Cervantino festival in Guanajuato

Into a muddy hole disappeared two or three days of my life in Mexico City. Travelling from Xalapa, I felt unsteady, but not concerned. The drive back into the megapolis was a chance to watch the country pass. Once installed into the Fiesta Americana - a massive, 25 floor corporate hotel sat right on the Reforma, the kitsch boulevard that centres Mexico City, once bullied into lifts with portly groups of men with greased back hair and far less gentle manners, once I'd eaten from the rich and seemingly endless buffet, the nausea and stomach ache turned into something else. 

 I've been very ill travelling before. It's always a lonelying experience. You are a long way away from those you love, as you are sensorially, from comfort. It is a mental game. In the end I had trouble walking, it not just being projectile but with cramps, migraines and so on, and before we were to leave for Guanajuato, they had to have a doctor visit me. I was faced with a difficult decision as to whether to attend or not, but with such ripe disdain for that hotel room, that plush open room that sat on the 17th floor and took in most of Mexico City, that I hated, I went. Much is owed in easing my own will to those around me, the writers Nell Leyshon (who kindly ((!)) took this photo of me as the doctor visited) and Bee Rowlatt, the British Council staff, the organisers of the Cervantino and those back home who relentlessly insisted on getting me better when I wanted to crawl into a corner.

 A five hour car journey then, still ill, but corked, listening to Veracruzian music sent me by new friends in Xalapa just gone. Into Guanajuato, an impossibly beautiful place. But I was blind to it, and hid again for another lost day, trying to get past the nausea. Student protests raged outside my room, hundreds, like thousands across Mexico, protesting the horrific torture and murder of a group of protesting students in Iguana. The brilliant Ioan Grillo wrote this article on the awfulness of what happened http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/opinion/mexicos-deadly-narco-politics.html?_r=0

 I woke up better yet, and being able to know the date, and the place. I walked around Guanajuato, also being to eat more than a bite for the first time in days. The city is unbelievable, every corner a scene in a film, every street a picture. Every colour on the buildings, rising up on hills and littered with parks and markets and small alleys, and tunnels. The city is build on tunnels that bore through the hillside, genuinely subterranean streets that hold bus stops and pedestrian walkways see cars pour through and pop out in brilliant sunshine. I talked with people again, bought things, felt like a person once more.
My nurses and friends and buoys, Nell Leyshon and Bee Rowlatt, and I, then attended our event, at the University, for the grand Cervantino festival. This is the 42nd year and the festival goes on for three weeks. That we were staying just a day seemed incongruous. We were self panelling on Shakespeare, and it turned out marvelous I thought. We all come from different backgrounds, different professions, different modes of thought. And it complimented. I stressed the need to interrogate the value of Shakespeare, pedagogically, to make sure the relationship was personal and not assumed, earned and not because the value of his works were so overbearingly lauded. I also talked about his role in the future, which was the theme, being the same as it was in the past, really, but that there were immense things to be taken from his prolific nature etc etc.. It went well and the students were positive. 
More time allowed me to visit Diego Rivera's house and the old market, before we bundled into a van for a brutal 6 hour crawl back south across Mexico into Mexico city once again. I was well and truly well then, for if I hadn't have been, I would've capitulated. Instead Nell and I shared the backseat and confused the Mexican car with conversation.

Mexico : diario de la poesía #3 - Hay Xalapa continues

A day of remarkable discoveries, feeling more like a witness to worlds in worlds, now my participation in the festival itself is done. Still somewhat in space from the size and intensity of my reading the night before, still processing it, I joined some new friends to watch a wonderful panel on indigenous cultures in Canada and in Mexico. I had spoken in depth to the Canadian delegation through the week, the extraordinary work of Cheryl Suzack and Ingrid Bejerman, their activism and scholarship was worn very lightly, and hearing Juan Hernandez Ramirez of the Nahuatl too, was fascinating. This was a real meeting point between their concerns, and I spoke to them at length afterward, note taking throughout.

 Nell Leyshon and I then fulfilled our promise to our vehement hosts and were dropped off for one of the few times without a chaperone to visit the anthropological museum. It was breathtaking, and having worked in a museum for seven years that is a statement, for I have developed a deep suspicion about museum's and their function, my first book was about that really, and yet this place was more a park, an architectural project and a state of experience than a traditional museum. The ancient cultures of Mexico were not portrayed singularly, their entire culture, and its truly unfathomable artistic skill was expressed. I was left with an intense sense of their humour, and play, their families, their subtlety, and the embracing of mortality. It was too much after only minutes, I needed more time to try to understand the objects. Nell and I ate in the cafeteria there too, a simple one room cafe, where a lady cooked us homemade food in a tiny kitchen.

 We walked down from the museum, and thanks to Nell's intrepid nature and excellent Spanish, managed to visit the Panteon Xalapeno, the old cemetary of the city. Each grave was a complex in and of itself, a war of styles and colour, from the brilliantly tasteless to the architecturally avant garde. We were told families commission architects and construction workers to build these tombs and visit them so often they are like extensions of a home space. A privilege to witness, so removed as it was from a British cemetary.

 I needed a few hours to write, and to recover, and train, and managed to have a long and rolling conversation with the brilliant Forrest Gander, whose reputation for generosity is well deserved next to the high esteem he is held in as a poet, and in Mexico, as one of the very most important translators. He could not have been more decent and down to earth. I was soon out again after dinner to see Daniel Johnston in concert. I had watched the documentary about his life many years ago, and had listened to his music then, but his performance was so beautiful, so vulnerable and open, I wasn't expecting to be moved so much by it. It was almost wounding, and made me, for the first time physically, miss home and the people I love. His performance was very much like this one I found online.  After a brief trip to the hotel we all bundled off to a party thrown by the publisher Sexto Piso, who have a reputation for being very generous and very trendy. It was actually more of a celebration for the local people, the students really, who have volunteered the make the festival so amazing. It was good to see another side of the city again, not one I longed for, the hip nightlife, but fun none the less. I spoke to Forrest, the lovely Bee Rowlatt and Nell, and a lot of the young Mexicans, managing to get them to open up about their lives, and the effect the drug violence has had on their childhood. Their unrelenting warmth and friendliness seems to be in spite of the horror they have often witnessed, all of them had stories of hearing or witnessing terrible violence. Very humbled once again, and feeling very sober (the party had free tequila) I went home trying to quiet my mind.

Performing with Amanda de la Garza / Holly Pester at Laboratorio Arte Alameda


What an incredible job Edgardo Dander did capturing this reading at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico city, just over a week ago. Amanda de la Garza looks so beautiful, and is so captivating, reading her transliterations of my poems. And Nomeda's video responses to the work are breathtaking. & finallu Playing the straight man, hamming it up theatre GCSE style, was well worth it to bring out the incredible Pester skills, so funny, I could barely keep a face straight.

Mexico city diario de poesia #7

The last entry, writing it from England. Sad raining psychologically repressed England. Went to a dead town by a desolate coastline, filled with slot machines, battered chip shops and grown idiots staring at me, the day after my return. A huge mistake. I should've gone away to Spain, or stayed in Mexico. The final day was spent feeling as though it was surreal to leave, that I couldve spent a month, a year, in Mexico city and written something good. Maybe a mirage, maybe it's always polished when you know you're off and every day is packed with new things and new people. Maybe though, there's a difference between the places. We ate our free massive hotel breakfast again, the last time Ill be having quesadillas in the morning, then I went out into the city to meet Ioan Grillo, the remarkable British journalist who moved to Mexico city 12 years ago. Originally from Lewes, I discovered his story and his amazing book Narco some time ago and contacted him out of the blue to see if he would meet me. He did, and I was privileged to spend a few hours speaking with him, plying him with questions about his experiences with cartels and his experiences of Mexico. Consummate journalist, he spent more time asking me questions. The beginning of a friendship I hope and undoubtedly a special experience to mark my last day in the city. www.ioangrillo.com
Holly and I then met up and walked down to Regina again to eat and sit and talk. The hours passed before we did a final circle of the Alameda and the Madero before catching our cab to the airport and flying 11 hours through the night. What can be said about the hospitality, warmth, generosity and energy of those who have gone far out of their way to host and befriend us in Mexico? One of the best trips of my life. Thanks to Ari, Ed, Rocio, Amanda, Itzel, Eliza, Adrian, Jack and many others. I hope to return, soon.

Mexico City diario de poesia #6

The day of our final performance, our main event, an hour or so split between Holly and I, a showcase really, in the Centro Cultural de Espana en Mexico, where we had eaten and hung out all week, in their main hall. The show had been loosely titled and advertised as something like night and death, and poetry. Not sure we could quite live up to that. Having not really formulated the content before the day of the performance, it was a day of construction and rehearsal. Absolutely a joy for me, to have the pleasant nerves to keep me sharp but to be working with someone as experienced, subtle and talented as Holly, after a good week of spending nearly all day together, we had immense reservoirs of material. Also we were genuinely trying to shape something new to both of us, that crossed the width of our practices in an original way. We created a programme that featured readings, performances, written collaboration, sound poetry and improvisation all stitched together with segways in antagonistic play between us - interruptions, interventions and quite physical stage play.

We soundchecked, looked after by the amazing staff of the cultural centre, and Ari, from Festival Expandibles, and really sat in the size of the hall, an amazing venue. Ari and I then took to the cathedral square, to get my face painted as a Calavera, to pay true homage to the fact that the performance was taking place on the day of the dead. The family doing the face painting, for 50 pesos, were cholos apparently, a gangster family. The girl who did my makeup couldn't have been more than 10 years old. 

 The show ended up going very well, and certainly left us on a high. There is something shared in the act of performance, and in the act of collaboration, that brings you intensely close to someone, and Holly and I having known each other for years, seen each others work for years, and spent a load of time together, but without ever having collaborated before, meant this crescendo was all the more powerful. Holly was on special form, it was all I could do to keep up with her! So much in that piece, too much to write about, hoping to get the video sometime soon. Suffice to say we covered translations, prisons, ravens, volcanoes, shanties, jaguars, and massive projected sexy pictures of me shampooing my hair amongst many other things.

The audience wasn't huge, but this seems to be in the inverse of the immense Mexican hospitality. If you phone someone on 20 minutes notice they will meet you for coffee and take you around the city or their home, but if you set a date and time, they probably won't make it. None the less many of the people in the city we met and admired did make it, which was amazing. We all went for food afterwards in the cultural centre restaurant where we had been spongeing all week with meal tickets, and then we wandered down to the beautiful Regina street where we closed out our last night in Mexico city in an appropriately buoyant, satisfied, slightly exhausted mood. The day of the dead was over too.

Mexico City diario de poesia #5

Days are running out. I actually walked into the restaurant used to people speaking Spanish, or used to me not understanding what anyone's saying. A quieter day, but perhaps the most profound of what has been an immensely human, social trip. Some time to actually explore the city, to realise how enormous it truly is. I walked from the historical centre, down the entire length of the Reforma down to the Chapultepec park, which is a huge complex of forests, avenues, museums and most importantly a zoo. In the last month or so alone I've been to Edinburgh, Bratislava and now Mexico city zoo. An institution which reveals the character of the people of the city. It was day of the dead, the family day, so it was packed with kiddles, but the whole feeling was very respectful towards the creatures. I saw brown, black, ice and Panda bears! and Axlotls. A charmed two hours.
I then walked a ring around Chapultepec, found the avenue of poets, which features busts and memorials to Mexico's famous poets and was adorned with skeleton paraphernalia for the weekend. I cut out of the park and spent a few hours walking south, exploring la Roma and the Condessa. I walked all the way back to the hotel from there, coming back via the Madero pedestrian road and seeing the teeming thousands of families and fancy dressed revellers. The atmosphere was very warm and some of the costumes are truly amazing, and funny. Parents seem to be practising a mild form of child abuse by dressing their young, many babies wrapped in bandages as mummies.
In the evening Amanda de la Garza was amazingly generous to pick us both from the hotel and drive us an hour outside the city to a small town in the mountains to visit a famous cemetary and witness an authentic day of the dead celebration. It was a humbling and moving experience. Winding through the steep cobbled roads of the town we followed an almost hidden path to the cemetary, a place we would have never found in a thousands years without Amanda. The walk to the gates were lined with brightly lit food stalls and joke shops. Hundreds of people were dressed for the occasion, but inside the cemetary, lit by hundreds of candles, with live musicians playing, with families sat around the graves of their loved ones, eating, talking, joking, it felt we had entered something entirely new and yet wholly welcoming. The atmosphere was like the music, upbeat in rhythm, profoundly sad in content. Many sat alone on graves, other families sat around dioramas and flowers and food on the graves. To witness an old couple look on to the grave of their child, covered in toys, left us silent. It's an experience I will remember forever.
On our return we ventured into the carnage of the Madero to see the thousands and thousands who poured into the city centre to celebrate. Some of the costumes were violently gory, others funny, but it was so packed you could barely move. I felt completely relaxed, there was no violence in the air though people had been drinking all day and we let the mass tide of humans carry us on.

Mexico City diario de poesia #4

I was immensely lucky with kind people who attended my seminar. The whole thing was a joy, because they were very warm and interested and English speaking! That being said the Cultural Centre actually laid out a translator with a microphone booth and earphones. Only one person took the translation. He was used to doing political translations, so he said he loved a bit of avant garde poetry for three hours! I just did a little tour of my methods - written work with disjunction, found text, mishearings, write throughs, performance, conceptual work, visual work etc... we did three workshops. One where we wrote through Coral Bracho and Octavio Paz with stolen lines to form new poems, another where we rendered a Paz poem visually, as a spiral, and a third making new poems in the Renga form, stealing lines and going multilingual. I showed some of my more out there performances on video too, they loved my boxing when ill and sound gorillaing. Met some great people, they were too too nice to me. 

The day of the dead stuff here continues to amaze. The dioramas they build are so inventive, and have such a sense of humour too. The sense of immediacy of purpose that facilitates this humour and community is remarkable. Again, we have no equivalent. I also bumped into the guy from the hotel who had been separated from his wife in America. He got residency! He can go back and see his baba. I wished him well.

 Holly and I made our way to the Labatorio Arte Alameda next to Alameda park where the Enemigos performance would be. A famous avant garde venue apparently, it was a remarkable space inside of a giant yellow church, a big black cube. While we waited for Mexican time to catch up with Greenwich Mean Time we went to a cafe where a man had a hat on with rabbit ears and then his fellow waiter picked up an accordian and played it with such beauty.. i was terribly heartsick for my romanian, he played romany tunes! I finally met Amanda de la Garza, who I'd written with for the Enemigos anthology, we had transliterated each other's poetry. She was remarkably friendly and charming and talented, she is a curator at the contemporary art gallery in the city and has a clearly powerful poetic presence, as well as incredible freckles, el tigre. Also there was a frog on the coffee machine in the cafe and some sort of creature next to it, see below

The Enemigos evening, the reading, were grand. Amanda, Rocio, Holly and I popped up throughout the night, to a nice intimate crowd. Amanda did a great piece with a typewriter, her poem 'dictated' as she read, and she read her transliterations after I'd read three poems from the anthology, Atacama, the one about James Harvey and the one about Newquay. We had a VJ all night collaborating too, showing videos behind us as we read, he was amazing www.vimeo.com/nomadaspace Rocio showed some of her new work, which was very beautiful and then to close, Holly and I did an improvisational piece, on an hours notice! We came up with it fast. She sat in the dark and said mean things to me while i sat in the light and said nice things to her. They dont get our humour really so it ended up being like a drama exercise! i acted so heartbroken that i made one of the sweet Mexicans weeep! haha, maybe I should be a fucking actor. It was fun though, being restrained and not being able to verbally abuse Holly as I wanted to. This picture to the left is of the audience while Amanda read one of the transliterations.
we went out for a big meal afterwards in this massive hall with hundreds of people eating and playing dominos. they were so nice to me, the extended Enemigos Mexican family, a whole host of them, like i was an old friend. Ari the panda and her pando, Sara, who moved to Mex from Berlin to study, Rocio, Amanda, loads of people. They all got my jokes and were kind enough to laugh. They ripped the piss out of me a lot too for the picture I allegedly sent for the performance poster where I look like I am in a shampoo advert, and for the fact that Eduardo, the VJ, and I, both were wearing the same clothes with the same hair. But he was a dude, so I was happy to have a twin in Mexico city. / Nearly everyone we've met in mexico is really really kind hearted and gentle, much more than england. they find it very easy to make time for you and want to speak to you. 

Mexico City diario de poesia #2

A frightening amount of the buildings here lean. Seriously lean. The city is built on Tenochtitlan, the city of lakes. It makes towers and churches cut angles. They really love the Minions from despicable me in the city too, they are everywhere. After pancakes, we began the day with Holly's seminar in the CCEMX http://ccemx.org/2013/10/07/poesia-sonora/. A bit of a cautious experiment, as we didn't know who to expect, how many, what their knowledge was of avant garde poetry and indeed whether they spoke English. Turned out, they didn't speak English. Holly did an amazing job considering the seminar was to last four hours. I put my fat palm to my face a bit. She was calm and clear and covered her practise in gentle depth. Miscommunication - technology - error - song - body - code. She played some Mondegreens, some BBC radio (which immediately started talking about Jimmy Saville) from which she's usurped for poems and we finished up with a interactive exercise in symbol led sound poetry. All considered, she was doing a poem, talking to a room of people who for the most part couldnt understand her. But there is creative potential in not understanding, and the final feeling was perhaps more warm and intimate and genuine than it couldve been. Her skill, my seminar is thursday. Haha. Though I did find one of the best childrens books Ive ever seen.
We then were accompanied again by the lovely Ari, el pandarhia, and walked a fair swathe of the city, from the historical centre down the Alameda central and onto the reforma (a massive avenue de avenue), through the Zona Rosa (which is full of gay people and prostitutes apparently but seemed to me like a quaint, upmarket shopping district) and then into the Condesa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condesa very much famed for its trendy ways. We visited the American legion and their English language bookshop http://underthevolcanobooks.com/, which had loads of amazing writers and then doubled a mochacino in a trendy cafe. I left Holly as she was meeting a mate of a mate and walked back to the hotel in the dusk / darkness on the massive glowing streets of the city, music in my ears.
I ate alone in a restaurant, getting by on a day's worth of Spanish and going back to the hotel I bumped into the concierge who had helped on our arrival. Clocking off, we started talking, him with his thick American accent and I bought him coffee while he told me how he was deported from the US even though he was born and raised there, leaving behind his (caucasian - he kept saying this, I didnt ask) wife, while she was pregnant. He has spent a year in Mexico city, never having been there before, working as a busboy essentially, and a month ago his wife gave birth. He hasnt seen his kid. He is going to Juarez tomorrow for a physical (?) to finalise his papers to return, hopefully. I wished him luck. He asked about me, thought Holly was my wife, though said it was weird we stayed in different rooms and insisted he was going to buy some of my books. I told him not to waste his money.

Gilles de Rais / Estates of Westeros exhibition at the Rich Mix Art Centre Gallery Cafe!

an Enemies exhibition
Gilles de Rais / The Estates of Westeros
David Kelly / Ben Morris / SJ Fowler
Tuesday October 22nd - Sunday 26th
in the Rich Mix Arts Centre Café Gallery http://www.richmix.org.uk/venues/spaces/cafe-gallery/
 
The Enemies project presents poetry & avant-garde illustration exhibited in the unique ‘bearpit’ café gallery of the Rich Mix Arts Centre. Two exchanges between poet & artist aim to break ground in the collaborative relationship between text, image and form, as published portable exhibitions, or books in boxes, are wallhung and ceiling strung. / Gilles de Rais – an interchangeable narrative reflection on the life and legend of Gilles de Rais – this fusion of avant garde poetry and modernist line drawing aims to satirise and subvert the manner in which the monstrous myth surrounding such de Rais is echoed in our own time by Jimmy Saville. This is the disjunctive folklore of idiot's resounding through the ages, from 15th century France to 21st century Britain. / The Estates of Westeros is where avant garde poetry meets avant garde illustration. Whether perception or reality, housing estates are environments of occlusion, claustrophobia and damage, and poetry about them has a responsibility to reflect this complexity and intensity in its tone and form. The Estates of Westeros is a meditation on this living space through the universe of George RR Martin's Game of Thrones, and where Gilles de Rais explores the absurdity of mythmaking in that which once was real, the Estates ... explores the grinding realism at the heart of the fantastical. / Both books can be purchased for £9 direct from Like This Press: http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/sjfowlerandbenmorris
http://www.likethispress.co.uk/publications/sjfowleranddavidkelly
 
A special viewing of the exhibition will take place on October Wednesday 23rd at 8pm. The event is free to attend and features:- Eirikur Orn Norddahl, one of the most amazing poetical performers in Europe, award winning novelist / sound poet. Here’s what he did last time he visited London http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P4beEsNIcQ (Preview)  He will be reading from his new publication. / Ondrej Buddeus, a pivotal part of the post-millenial new generation of Czech poets, a brilliant young poet joining us from Prague, http://bodyliterature.com/2013/06/25/ondrej-buddeus-2/ / There will also be the launch of my collaboration with the photographer Matteo X. Patocchi. http://www.matteopatocchi.com/ ‘Twins born Triplets’ is a unique poetry object, a fusion of experimental portrait photography and typographically innovative poetry (about Russia, Putin, Khlebnikov, Pussy Riot – an excerpt read here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-b8KL8StMU ) printed as a newspaper in a limited edition.
 
Please join us for the crescendo week of the Enemies project year one on