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.

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.

la dominate: a collaboration with Ariadne Radi Cor on Cordite

the last of the five collaborations published as part of my feature for Cordite magazine, this work with Ariadne Radi Cor came about from our time together in Venice as part of the Crossing Voices project. She is an incredible artist and filmmaker - a live writer, a calligrapher, a poet. Her speed and tone are very complimentary to my own in their difference and singularity. Im so glad our creative relationship has continued on into this year, and this work, to be published in its full form for an anthology about Crossing Voices is a true collaboration, with a suite of my poems written for the task having been rendered beautiful by Ari's talents. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/collaboration/la-dominate/

Anglaise Actuelle - a new series of Vanguard poets in French for Recours au Poeme

Announcing a new series for the remarkable French journal, Recours au Poeme, launched for the 100th issue of the magazine, anglaise actuelle will feature a series of British experimental poets translated into French by Marilyne Bertoncini. The first instalment of AA is the great Allen Fisher. Lots more to come

Un regard sur la poésie anglaise actuelle (1). Allen Fisher, présenté et traduit par Steven J. Fowler et Marilyne Bertoncini

Confiée au jeune poète et animateur de la revue 3AM magazine, Steven J. Fowler, en collaboration avec Marilyne Bertoncini, cette chronique vise à faire découvrir des poètes anglais actuels aux lecteurs français de Recours au Poème. - See more at: http://www.recoursaupoeme.fr/chroniques/un-regard-sur-la-po%C3%A9sie-anglaise-actuelle-1/sj-fowler#sthash.Dmc2nwB2.dpuf

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.