Really worth a punt https://hesterglock.net/Vik-Shirley Vik Shirley’s new book from the always brilliant Hesterglock press is powerful poetry and an important work in the 21st century take up of photo poetry and it’s possibilities.
I was happy to offer a quote onto the back of the book, proud even, and had the pleasure to publish some of these works on 3am magazine a few years ago https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/poem-brut-74-disrupted-blue-on-sepia/
My #poembrut vispo book Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire published with Hesterglock press in 2018 has 4 unpublished asemic / art poems now online at Mercurius, an online journal. https://www.mercurius.one/home/aletta-ocean-alphabet-empire
AOAE is available https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/aletta
The publication includes the essay featured in the book, on poetry, eroticism and pornography.
“You can never discover for yourself what you’ve been given. Bodies and knowledge, both. The primary purpose of this book is to worry about the division between the experienced and the perceived, and what is lost between that ever expanding gap.
Bataille suggests that you try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are in, to one in which your whole self is completely doubled. He means this to be a disturbance. He reminds us, you would not survive this process since the doubles you have turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now, as while you’ve split into two new versions of yourself, you cannot be the same, twice over. A kind of procreation is what he is suggesting and the metaphor is about writing, I think. To mark the pages then release them is to indulge oneself, fundamentally, in a productive onanism. Cells dividing, with some of that division escaping you. No wonder it feels sad, a let down, to release things into the world.
At some event, I’m watching a panel of speakers talking about something banal. The title is specious, it’s designed to intrigue but not offend. It’s a turgid literary festival, stuffy and fake, but the panellists keep talking about sex. They are almost battling each other over it. It is awkward, and insistent, but not, perhaps, for the reasons they’d imagine. They are desperate to appear comfortable with the notion of sex and in so doing are opening a gap between themselves and sex itself. Gone is anything remotely evocative of the experience, from within, within consciousness. I do not believe them too, it is a falsehood which is designed to make the audience comfortable while appearing to be discomforting. Aletta flits across my mind, as I’m actively daydreaming an escape, and it occurs to me there seems nothing more unerotic than poets talking about sex. “
The Glaswegian bookshop Good Press has two of my poem brut books in stock to buy, with profits to the brilliant Hesterglock press and the good cause of Good Press itself. They have laid the books out beautifully, with lovely images from within.
Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit www.goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/unfinished-memmoirs-of-a-hypocrit-by-sj-fowler
Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire http://goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/aletta-oceans-alphabet-empire-by-sj-fowler
I have often said I am lucky to have got into poetry, by accident, around 2010. I came into British poetry just at a moment when dozens of genuinely open, intelligent, energetic independent presses arrived. More than that, it seems to me, I came around when hundreds of poets from the UK are out working at material that is contemporary because it is innovative. Poetry that is responding to the world as it changes. As it changes seismically, fundamentally, in language.
Lockdown brains us. If we are the fortunate unaffected, physically, as I am (I am mega-fortunate in all ways, I believe). It has inevitably turned many of us in. We reflect and find understandable negative and positive in what we are doing. I have been candid in telling many people I think I am wasting my life writing poetry, because that very well might be true, but not in a catastrophic way. I do not dislike myself for doing it, I am just suspicious of what I am doing, as I try to be suspicious about everything, in order to be more aligned / balanced / decent, and more contented.
I have then had many chats with peers, friends, who feel unappreciated. This is an existential reality. But it is often, in the context of British Innovative Poetry (The BIP) true. I can make a long list of people whose work should be lauded. What is lauding? I wrote something here I then deleted. All I’ll say is, the poets overlooked because they are complex, I read them, I see them, I fucking appreciate them. I appreciate the presses who keep working, keep digging in, keeping sharing. It is proper impressive. I know. People just keep doing the work. It’s brilliant.
I work abroad a lot and bring to these European citizens this UK poetry they have never heard of. They think the UK scene is 5 poets. I share with them the people I admire and I see, dozens of them, through their eyes, I am right.. And I reflect on this and realise further how lucky I am to know the work of these poets, to get the books, to follow their ideas and experiments. And there is no longer the concentric “scenes” where poets are represented by their tribe as well as their work, I don’t think, and brilliant. Who wants that? Petty patty. The internet has scuppered it. We are often alone working and connected briefly. But this is why I put on events, curate, to make those connections, but not make solid any movements, group or crew. Because that is naff.
How often have I shared a friend’s book with someone outside of the BIP to see them say surprised “this is amazing, why isn’t this in shops?” yes yes yes, because you don’t buy it mate. But it exists, it’s good. This cannot be denied. I see it. I see it. Do my eyes not count? Yes they do. I have made sure they do.
All this is leading to me saying simply, it’s a golden time for interesting, innovative British poetry. We are lucky. Many don’t know it but if they looked, they’d see. Here are some books out recently or coming out soon which prove what I’m saying. All you need do is get them and find out. iF YOU BOUGHT EVERY ONE OF THESE, IT’S 100 SQUID, AND IF YOU READ THEM, THE IDEAS, THE THOUGHTS THAT WOULD FLOW. WOULDN’T THAT MAKE LIVING BETTER? TO BE GROWING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARTH REFLECTED BACK AT YOU BUT CLEVER LIKE? IT DOES FOR ME. TRY IT NOW! JUST ONE HUNDRED SPONDULICS
HARBOUR EQUINOX by AARON KENT from SAMPSON LOW
Chrissy Williams has recently started a brilliant and innovative new journal / e-mag endeavour entitled Perverse. It's a really engaged, open, direct, clever, complex way of sharing and reading poems, typical of Chrissy's work. I'm very happy to be in the latest issue, 1c, with some grand poets, and to feature a visual work which will be part of my last Poem Brut book, Memoirs of a Hypocrite, due out in November with Hesterglock press. Click the link or sign up below to comb my bubble.
"Perverse 1C - Nelson / Moore / Gross / Fowler / O’Loughlin
Welcome to issue 1C of Perverse! There's a slightly different type of perversity at work in some of these poems than we've seen in the others. I hope you enjoy them. As before, these poems are best read sideways on a phone, or else as usual on a computer screen. You can also save them as a single PDF here if you like. (You'll find the previous micro issues here.)
Contributor Note on ‘The Bubble Comb’:
“'The Bubble Comb' is part of a book of art poetry, Memoirs of a Hypocrite (Hesterglock Press), which is part of a series of publications entitled www.poembrut.com It is about the potential poetic possibilities of handwriting, material, colour and composition meeting the semantic meaning of the written word.”
Please forward this email on to anyone who might like it - they can use the link below to sign up for future issues and updates:
http://tinyletter.com/perverse
Website (with an archive of previous issues):
http://perversepoetry.tumblr.com
I'm happy to announce the release of my new art book, from Hesterglock Press, released in limited-edition hardback first-print of just 40 copies, 20 of which have sold so far. The book is available to purchase here - Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire from my bigcartel page.
"A book that asks, abstractly, are letters shaped like bodies? Can words evoke faces, captured in a screen? Who, or what, is assimilating, who or what? Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is a collection of art poems, hand wrought in black, grey, silver and white, fashioned with indian ink, paint and pen, worked with techniques that edge around writing, vying with abstraction, constantly harrying semantic meaning and legibility.
Five years in the making, conceptually this is a book about sex, poetry and pornography and the disconnect between the former and the latter. These pages explore technology in its absence and aim to evidence the power of materiality and the body, and our hands, that are still required for touch."
"Searching AOAE online (Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire) shows a YouTube clip of Japanese cats mating. What's a word in any case if not a monster? A monster that eats words. The toner explodes on the office carpet spilling out a perfectly formed oeuvre. Serifs skywrite like migrating gannets. The rorschach accidentally tells you what to think. The printed facsimile becomes original when the world goes JavaScript. The dollar sign is a duck walking backwards into a lake. The ATM dispenses glyphs. How do we know people have faces when they take the day off work? The tank rolls over the charcoal leaving a map of Iraq or a new version of Cathay. We're back in the world of Artaud's final journal where, thank fuck (and at last) we're not being told what to think. Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is an almighty triumph, a well-earned relief. Picasso said it took a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Or, for that matter, like the mad." Chris McCabe
