A note on : Poem Brut in the City

the first live www.poembrut.com event in a long time, over 18 months, and the launch of my new book, sticker poems https://www.stevenjfowler.com/#/stickers/

I took people on a merry dance. I’ve spent a lot of time in the city of london, i explore it often, im interested in its history and so when i wanted to do a poem brut event, outdoors as we emerge out of lockdown, i thought it suited as a locale. 11 poets were given 11 locations but no one but they knew where the readings would be or in what order. so there was a sense of surprise, i hope, amidst the hot weather, hidden corners and general friendly ambiance. we began at bank and ended up at the thames, two hours later, a good few dozen of us. all the videos of the excellent performances are online here www.poembrut.com/city

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A note on: Interview with Sylee Gore for Oxford Review of Books

Thanks entirely to Sylee Gore, a poet I admire greatly and have the pleasure to get to know over the last year, I was interviewed for Oxford Review of Books. https://www.the-orb.org

The chat was themed around nature, the city, animals, humans, environment and so that led me to talk of my residency with j&L Gibbons, my time in Kensal Green Cemetery and then read from my 2017 book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, with Shearsman press.

A note on : poem of the day at National Poetry Library

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https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/photographer

an unexpected thing, my poem The Photographer, taken from my 2014 book The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner, has been featured on the National Poetry Library’s website as their poem of the day for May 5th 2021.

it’s an audio recording of the poem, one I gave years ago I think, I don’t remember. it’s a very short clipped work kind of about my friend alexander kell, who took the photo featured on the site, while we were both working at the british museum

Published : Time of the Wolf in Poem Atlas' Refraction online exhibition

Very cool to be in this online exhibition which celebrates the Streetcake Magazine writing prize, of which I’m a patron and is hosted by Poem Atlas, which is doing great things with sculpture or 3d poetry. https://www.poematlas.com/refraction

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This poem-brut lo-fi concertina is a deliberately aberrant pop-up book page. It combines found material, abstract painting, stickers of three different origins, or packs, and is part of an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of collage and an experimental poetry of humour. It is taken from the book 'Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films' (Broken Sleep Books 2021)

Published: an article on Mummery for Versopolis

I was very happy to be asked to write a new article for the Versopolis Review, where I was co-editor a few years back. It is part of a brilliant e-book edited by Ana Schnabl called the European Reliquary - collected texts about European Customs. I wrote about Mummery. The article is part of an ongoing interest of mine in English idiosyncrasy which lies beneath what is official or branded art, and historically too. I’ve been interested in going beneath what is designated as art and poetry to the weird things English people have always done in one form or another, creatively, to find a thread into my own work, and its flippancy, strangeness and intensity. This exploration has taken me into tonnes of folk songs, old manuscripts, visual poetries, theology, religious texts and rituals, local festivals and even into things like Nonsense Verse, which I discussed on Mischa Foster Poole’s podcast in 2020. Perhaps things people take for granted, those who know them, but stuff I wasn’t aware of when younger, having no interest in anything creative. This article then, while I'm sure naive and inaccurate in parts, is a dip into some of that research and I was delighted to write it. // To receive a free copy, you simply go to this link and fill in your email https://www.versopolis.com/multimedia/ebook/1043/european-reliquary

A note on : Museum of Today launched - Space Bananas

http://themuseumoftoday.org/2020-44-space-bananas/

“The Museum of Today aims to give people an opportunity to become part of a collective project at this time of extreme isolation when many of our physical gathering spaces are inaccessible. The Museum of Today invited individuals or households to select an object from their home that has a particular resonance for them, now, and to tell its story.  After all the objects had been collected our ‘Curator of Now’ categorised and collated all the items and our team built the magnificent cabinet of wonders which houses all the items, stories and narratives submitted as part of the project.” 

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 : The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler

Years in the making, The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (me) is now available from Zimzalla. zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-scribbling-and-scrawling-2nd-edition/

From the publisher - The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler is an assembly of hand-drawn, instinctive visual poems from beyond the ragged edge of language. Arguably the most comprehensive book of asemic poetry ever published in the UK, this sizeable revamped new edition includes images of live asemic performances alongside over 100 visual poems divided, and introduced, in chapters. Asemic neurons butt up against poetic constellations, portraits and diagrams. The volume is bookended with new articles on the asemic endeavours of SJ Fowler from David MacLagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen and David Spittle, plus a written interview between Fowler and Zimzalla editor Tom Jenks. Click here for a sample.

Click here to buy for £11.99 in the UK.

I'm happy to announce the release of my latest visual poetry book, collecting the vast majority of my asemic writing in one beautifully produced volume. I had the best time working on this, developing the first edition, working with Tom Jenks. It means the world to me too that the volume is full of brilliant reflections on my scribbles by such luminaries in the asemic world - David Maclagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen, they all influenced me a lot, and the long critical piece by David Spittle is brilliant. I spent all summer tinkering, theorising around these abstract writings, really working hard on my intros to each section, and this book is the result, a true consolidation of my travails into asemia

Published : Excerpts from I Will Show You The Life... on Mercurius

Very cool to have four poems from my book I WILL SHOW THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) published on Mercurius, a journal brilliantly edited by Thomas Helm here free and out like nowt. Please have a peek www.mercurius.one/home/i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs

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These are four special texts, or rather excerpts (as the book is a poetic conceptual choose-your-own-adventure narrative with all text intermingled somewhat), as they include the book’s opening gambit, describing the human brain.

A note on : Tangible Territory journal with Švankmajer, Josipovici et al

My friend and collaborator Tereza Stehlikova has started a new journal online, entitled Tangible Territory “a platform that offers a space for various voices to meet and discuss themes relating to the role of the body, the importance of place and embodied experience, in giving meaning to our every day experience of life and art.” For the first issue, which rather extraordinarily includes Jan Švankmajer and Gabriel Josipovici amongst others, a genuine conglomeration of unique artists, I wrote a small piece on London and walking https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue1/s-j-fowler-experiences-of-necessity/

“My exploration of London is a sacrosanct subject I do not normally write about. This is because it is for the future, or because it is not a material to make things out of, but a thing I just do. I’m likely better to write about it when I have left London, if I do that upright.

What I do know is that I’d rather walk than write, which is why I have yet to complete longer works of fiction or non-fiction. I am literally out walking instead. I know how to walk from anywhere north of the river to anywhere else north of the river within the bounds of say, zone four, without the aid of a map. Mapless I wander, impressing friends and loved ones with my ability to end up where I had intended to.

But I also do not write about my London because I have often noticed, and recoiled, at those professional artists who turn everything they like into work, without fear of the thing being despoiled, or it being uninteresting to others. I shan’t write about it here. Simply to say, I walked a great deal during the lockdown of 2020. I keep a pedometer because I find in it a curious companion and across London I would average forty miles a week.”….

Published : Zones of Darkness, on science writing and my book 'I will show you...'

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I was sent this article by a friend, having not heard of its being written. It places my most recent book in its proper place - science writing on the brain, the hard problem of consciousness, experimentation as a purposeful means to get to insolvable problems of language - which is something that hasn’t happened too much, so it was gratifying to read. It mentions Francis Crick and Henri Michaux in the same article too, alongside analyses of Michael Pollen and Charles Murray, and then me. It’s an ambitious piece. More than this it contextualises the real issue of my book - the brain, the mind, what is happening to ours, our search in popular culture to engage / ignore this issue. Anyway, from Eric Jett, Zones of Darkness https://www.full-stop.net/2020/09/16/features/essays/jett/zones-of-darkness/

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Published : Asemic poems for Love in the time of covid

Big thanks to Vaughan Rapatahana in NZ for this publication. He’s part of a project that (from the site) “offers an unprecedented opportunity for voices all over the world to share, in quality fiction and non-fiction, poetry and dialogue, art and music and more, the collective experiences of the international community during COVID.” https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com

My asemic poems are very recent, taken from my upcoming book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler with Zimzalla Press. One is a crystal and one a landscape. https://loveinthetimeofcovidchronicle.com/2020/08/07/asemic-s-j-fowler/

Here is what I wrote for the site “i suppose, in a sense, a great deal of the experiences we have all gone through, if not the actual horrible sickness of covid itself, has been one of self-confrontation through lockdown’s pragmatic and practical limitations on our movements and space. in this sense then, i am interested in a poetry that acknowledges its inability to eloquently express inner dialogue, mood swings, clouded thought patterns, meaningless and often banal swings of feeling, and the expression of that. i think asemic, or semantically fraught poetry, gets to that. these poems are about synapses flashing and other things you can’t see but see anyway.”

A note on : Poem Brut books on Good Press

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.

“Ǥᗝᗝᗪ ᑭᖇᗴᔕᔕ is a volunteer run, informally organised shop and event space dedicated to the promotion, distribution and production of independently or self published printed matter, with a focus on visual arts and writing, occasionally music or artist objects. All of the publications you find in-store and on-line are either self published or produced by an independent small press, gallery, group or organisation.”

A note on: Dan Power reviews I Will Show You ... at SPAM magazine

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Very good of SPAM and Dan Power to offer this review of my book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/

A few excerpts from the review, which can be found in full https://www.spamzine.co.uk/post/review-i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs-by-sj-fowler

> Using the second person throughout, Fowler directly implicates you, the reader, in the story. He speaks as your mind speaks to you. Considering this book opens by addressing the unknowability of the mind, what’s surprising is how relatable so much of this is. Is there a universality to even the most intimate experiences that we might prefer to ignore? Are everyone’s anxieties and anguishes the same under late capitalism? Are we wired up to process life in symmetrical ways, or do the drugs standardize our experiences in-house, making ideas digestible and easily transferable, while at the same time neutralizing them?

> It’s also a choose-your-own-adventure! So Fowler gives us a sense of control, the option to use our unique and free decision-making skills to try and steer ourselves back into the light. Of course, this also means that every terrible thing that happens to you is your own fault, the result of poor decision making, of failing to understand the thing that lives inside your skull. But at least you’re free to choose.

> When Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of Deutschland’ is filtered through a mind on citalopram, lines from the seed poem blossom into new poems in the sequence. 'lean over an old / and ask / remember? / can you raise / the dead?' (p.29) is almost the ghost of a thought, coming in blips like a distant transmission. But even when the connection is shaky, the consciousness is definitely streaming. Fowler illuminates the structures of the brain not only through the structuring of the book, but through the deconstruction of the text. Ideas spark up and fizzle away, lines bleed into one another. Like the mind, language is an internalized and navigable structure. when one breaks down so does the other. definitions shift across words, syntax dissolves letters drawn to their nearest partners like magnets. disjointed ideas meet / neurons collide at random when their paths are eroded. incoherence, fractured and erratic decision making. brain structure determines bodily action determines brain structure. We are trapped in constant orbit of ourselves.

> The book is also very funny (I should have spent more time saying how funny it is), it’s wry and sharp in a way that allows you to chuckle with the protagonist at their terrible situation, and without undercutting any of the effect. It’s an infectious humour that’s both sincere and playful, frenzied in a way that lets it emerge seamlessly from the ever-changing currents. It does the essential job of keeping the reader afloat through turbulent waters. This book goes to places which are unstable, alarming, vacuumous, but never beyond seeing in a comic, self-deprecating, self-affirming light. Fowler grins into an abyss of his own making. He shouts into the book and the book echoes back, circles itself, ideas like pages are turned and turned over long after it’s concluded. You feel your brain sloshing about in your skull. It does a backflip.

A note on : Poetry of rearguard consciousness on The Learned Pig

The Learned Pig is a really considerable online journal and recently they’ve been publishing thematic issues. The latest is on Rhythm, edited by Rachel Goldblatt and I have a series of asemic poems in the issue. http://www.thelearnedpig.org/the-poetry-of-rearguard-consciousness/7780

I wrote “The scribble or scrawl is not a secondary product born of distraction, but a primary neurological output triggered when concentration moves downwards, expressing the minds fundamental rhythm of brain to hand movement. The poetry of rearguard consciousness, it is more often a product of writing than visual art. So why does poetry, the language art, not hold scribbling closer to its chest as a mediator of our internal writing rhythm?”

The work is taken from my upcoming book - The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler : Asemic Poems - to be published by ZimZalla. The work is a 2nd edition of a 2018 book but will be greatly expanded with over 100 works in a dozen asemic chapters plus lots of appendices like interviews and articles.

A note on : Dennis Cooper includes I will show you... on his favourite stuff of 2020

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>>> https://denniscooperblog.com/mine-for-yours-my-favorite-fiction-poetry-non-fiction-film-art-and-internet-of-2020-so-far/

Dennis Cooper is someone I read when I first started reading novels at all. His George Miles Cycle (an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) where startling. I remember reading excerpts to a friend while he ate chips and startling him. He has been writing, editing, organising and supporting others for forty years plus. His recent rundown of novels, poetry collections, albums he's liked from 2020 so far included my book I will show you the life of the mind (On prescription drugs) from Dostoyevskay Wannabe, which is really gratifying. There’s some brilliant works on the list around my depressing book also https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/

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Published : I Stand Alone by The Devils, and other poems on films

I Stand Alone by The Devils, and other poems on films
Broken Sleep Books : 33 pages : £5 www.stevenjfowler.com/istandalone
www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-i-stand-alone-by-the-devils-and-other-poems-on-films

A book, though lean, I have been working on for years. It’s been a pleasure to bring it into life with Aaron Kent, editor of Broken Sleep. From the publisher = "26 new poems celebrating 26 cult films of the 20th and 21st century, I Stand Alone by The Devils is a slim volume of cinematic poetic ekphrasis. At play is an aberrant intersemiotic translation between the mediums of popular or arthouse cinema and contemporary, modernist poetry. The poems aim to re-imagine moving image in language, often cutting in tone, taking on the dark, symbolic and sardonic on film. Each poem is a single film, interpreting, reflecting, embodying and transposing, exploring both films familiar to many, and digging out, often from 20th century European cinema, more unorthodox motion pictures. From Querelle and The Baby of Mâcon, to American Werewolf in London and Don’t Look Now. From Aguirre and Festen to The Fly and Breaking the Waves, these poems are a strange and playful musing on cinema’s impact on poetry and language and a useless thinking through of how films are actually consumed."

A full list of films featured - Angel Heart, Querelle, Last Year at Marienbad, Ali : Fear Eats The Soul, The Fly, The Devils, Breaking the Waves, American Werewolf in London, Don’t Look Now, I Stand Alone, A short film about Love, En Coeur En Hiver, The Baby of Mâcon, Nightwatch (Nattevagten), Silence of the Lambs, Satan’s Brew, Aguirre, wrath of god, The Long Good Friday, Stalker, Salo, Festen, Three Colours Blue, Yojimbo, Possession, Beau Travail, M.

LAUNCH : August Thursday 29th 2019 at the Cinema Museum, London, alongside a screening of Peter Greenaway’s The Baby of Mâcon
http://www.cinemamuseum.org.uk/
7pm doors for 7.30pm entry. £8 (£5 concessions)
Readings, featuring Jonathan Catherall, Yvonne Litschel, Chris Kerr, David Spittle and more, alongside SJ Fowler, will mark this unique celebration of cinematic poetry, before a screening ofThe Baby of Mâcon, Peter Greenaway’s remarkable and challening 1993 film. More details to come soon.

Published: Versopolis Poetic Articles #2 - Animals as Humans, can only monkeys laugh?

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The second in my series of articles that are prose poems that are anti-opinion / anti-conclusion / anti-journalistic. It’s an interesting challenge, a long form poetic reflection, for an English person anyway. This one, following the theme of Drugs, is on the theme of Animals.

https://www.versopolis.com/times/essay/730/animals-as-humans

“Things obviously to be regretted in the future. The way humans educate their children. The way humans treat and consider their own planet, their own environments, their own place. The way humans treat and consider animals, as meaningless, stupid, brainless nothings. As food, to be made and unmade for a belly that might be full of whatever it likes. 

What the bloody hell is this massive weapon? It protects us, splits us homidiae from the pan pongo interface. Yet we cannot know each other’s self-consciousness, let alone that which lies in the grey brain of other creatures. A funny assumption begins a history. 

The octopus compared to the human. The chimpanzee compared to the human. The otter compared to the human. The bear compared to the human. 

The human glad in misadventures, harsher and more ravenous than anything you ever heard, anything in all other creatures born days.

Dogs. That perpetually dogs the footsteps of humans. Dogs as a verb. Dogs a best mate. Dogs as a fetching machine. Dogs who need defending. Dogs who defend homes. Dogs eaten in China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Nigeria. “

Published: Bubble comb up on Perverse

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

 

A note on: new articles commissioned for Versopolis

The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is an online literary journal, funded by the European Union, aiming to create an anglophone publication platform with a focus on continental Europe and world beyond. www.versopolis.com

A sample of the articles I've commissioned recently.