Published : Hotel, Phonica - why my work is pointless

I’m very lucky to be part of a new series published by Hotel magazine, edited by Dominic Jaeckle, about the Phonica event series, curated by Christodoulos Makris. I was asked to provide an article, reflection, response to a performance I did in Dublin for the series in early 2018. It just so happens that this performance was one of the most important for me, in developing my live work. At this link you can find my recollections along with video of the performance, paged artfully by Dominic https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Pointless-Work

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My performance at PHONICA on March 26th 2018 was a breakthrough. If there is ever a recounting of my ‘career’ in literary performance, one of the many terms I use that no one else really seems to use, then this would be a dramatic scene. Let’s be honest with ourselves. There will be no recounting. This evening in SMOCK ALLEY THEATRE, I wasn’t very well. It drew down my scant nerves, or better said, filters. Not towards antagonism, as had been the case in the past, but towards almost pure improvisation, as a mode towards a live, living poetry. The work I did on that night led me to think through liveness in a concrete way, it led to THIS—a nice juicy section on my website. I describe a TALKING performance thusly ... A SPECIFIC KIND OF PERFORMANCE WHICH EXPLORES TROPES OF PUBLIC SPEAKING, RECITATION, READING AND INTRODUCTION, WHICH USES DERIVATION, PROLIXITY, MENTAL ASSOCIATION AND SUBVERTED EXPECTATION TO MAKE OFTEN ENTIRELY IMPROVISED TALKING PERFORMANCES OR TALK-POEMS.

Published : Four poems on the films of Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway’s work is hugely important to me - his austerity, his excess, his style, his unapologetic intellectual concerns, his irreverence, his obsession with language (which is poetry at times) and his exploration of writing, calligraphy and asemia. I’ve written poems about his films for the last few years, in a kind of suite or sequence, ranging in methodologies.

In my latest collection - COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS - released in March with Broken Sleep books I have 6 poems dedicated to his works. 3 of them, plus a poem on a documentary made about him by his partner Saskia Boddeke, have been kindly published online by Partisan Hotel, edited by Dominic Jaeckle. They include a long literary poem about THE FALLS, then a hand-written documentary poem about DROWNING BY NUMBERS and an ASEMIC WATER POEM about PROSPERO’S BOOKS https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Fowler-for-Greenaway

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A note on : Subverse on Hotel, features Great Apes and more

Excerpts of three books of mine, from BEASTINGS, I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) & THE GREAT APES, have been remixed and mashed and edited by Diamanda Dramm for her new solo show, Subverse. Hotel magazine, edited by Dominic Jaeckle, have published the parts of the texts used alongside a video of Diamanda performing. https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Dramm This clip below is from my book The Great Apes, which is due from Pamenar press in 2021!

you know that life for a minute?
let’s pretend. we’re in the jungle.
the jungle, where ugly finds itself.
but you get used to it, because it is you, that smell
worried about things you can’t change

and while you were worried about your mother’s drinking
and what kind of poetry is going on, and AI
it was chimp who landed on your shoulders
and stuck his middle fingers into your ears
like a medieval helmet covered in oliver oil
and made two fists and ripped your ears off down
and as your hands came up to cup your lost ears
chimp grabbed your fingers in a flower bunch
like it was the brakes on your fancy city bicycle for the green future
and squished them together with strength you didn’t know
and then broke them back against themselves
and tried to pull them off
and partially succeeded
and put some of them in Chimp mouth
and chewed
and looked around and looked at you and waited and couldn’t tell
what species you were even ?

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: 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."

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.