New course : Live Poetry and Performance, begins October 3rd

Live Poetries and Performance : an online course

Begins October 3rd 2021, running for 6 weeks. £200. All info here https://www.poembrut.com/courses

Sound Poetry, dance-poetry, video-poetry, theatre-poetry. Reading, recitation, installation, improvisation. Live collaboration and performance literature - Every live poem is a new work and poetry began in sound. Comprehensively reflecting upon an artform borne of liveness, this course will explore readings, recitation, installations, dramaturgy, sound poetry, dance, music, collaboration and performance - delving into what is possible when the poet mindfully explores the body, the voice, time, space, presence and absence, technology and the immutable idea of the audience.

Not a course aimed at extraverts, this course will be a practical, as well as conceptual, journey through what is often erroneously second in the poet's arsenal. What is the meaning of a poem spoken and heard, over written and the read? What are the possibilities of recorded or installed poems? Why has the 21st century seen a grand resurgence in performance literature, which takes live art as inspiration? We will examine the art of public reading, improvisation, talking performances, scripts and scores, as well as orchestration and planning.

This course will emphasise method. Participants will be sent a succinct document of resources once a week – ideas, examples, concepts, history, accompanied by exercises or prompts. Then, on a private blog-forum, responses - including written poems, video and audio recordings, images, scores, notations and performance plans - can be posted, with comments and feedback from all involved. When the course finishes, an event will consolidate that which everyone has produced.

Backed up with case studies on a swathe of brilliant poet performers or those who wrote with liveness in mind - from Samuel Beckett to Peter Handke, Marina Abramovic to Elaine Mitchener, Bob Cobbing to bp nichol, Maja Jantar to Jonathan Burrows and many many others- this course with expand the knowledge of those familiar with live events and offer strategies to those looking to tread boards.

EUROPOE : an online course on European Poetry

EUROPOE - exploring 20th and 21st century European poetry www.poembrut.com/courses

An online course. Begins June 20th 2021, running for 7 weeks. £200. For booking, via paypal, please click here

The character of European literature remains a hotbed of innovation – a constant remaking of what we know poetry to be. This ambitious course seeks to introduce the English-language poet, or anyone captivated by a wide understanding of what poetry is, to the European tradition in all its richness.

Over the course of seven weeks, we will trace a line from the aftershocks of modernism, to the arrival of symbolism, futurism, surrealism, and more. We explore the constraints that emancipate in the OULIPO movement, the collaborative asemic poetry of the CoBrA group, the onset of conceptual poetry, the birth of Concrete Poetry, the emergence of Sound poetry, leading to the current movement of Performance Literature. We explore electronic poetry and digital literature, and vitally, we present what is happening now – with contemporary poets working in the 21st century.

We will also dip into the ‘grand’ post and pre-war literary poets across the continent, focusing in on their technique to inspire new works. From Mayakovsky to Akhmatova, Brodsky to Dragomoshchenko, Celan to Sachs, Brecht, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska to Różewicz, Ritsos to Elytis to Seferis, Popa to Jozsef, Salamun, Isou to Queneau, Cendrars, Pessoa. Müller, Ekelöf, Handke, Saariskoski. Alongside the dozens and dozens of contemporary poets, EUROPOE will situate the anglophone poet with roads into an often occluded European tradition that will hopefully last long into the future.

A note on: Writers Kingston poetry films back online

After an inexplicable struggle with youtube deletion, which has led me to archive every video i have on my youtubes for the stores of the National Poetry Library, I am happy to say the Writers Kingston Online poetry films - over 40 of them commissioned this year - are back in the land of the semi living online world. Worth checking a set of new ones now up, from Sylee Gore, Stephen Sunderland, Charlie Baylis et al. And this, from the legendary Bohman Brothers… https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos

More on the series https://www.writerskingston.com/online

New course : The Writing Eye

EXPLORING PHOTOPOETRY & FILMPOETRY

An online course. Begins May 2nd 2021, running for 7 weeks.
All information and booking here www.poembrut.com/courses

The potential of image and text is an endless field of creative exploration. Yet, despite the ubiquitous access we have to cameras, it remains underexplored and underappreciated as its own medium. This course traces the history of photopoetry and filmpoetry and draws it into the 21st century, rooted in making over theory, method over all else - it aims to provoke questions while exploring examples from a variety of fields - from conceptual art to surrealism, collage to concrete poetry, from modernism to collaborative practice.

We ask what makes up the essence of photography, film and poetry, and how might they interact to move beyond traditions in both fields, as something new, a true photopoetry or filmpoetry? We ask what is hybridity, truly, and simultaneity, and photoliteracy, and illustration? What is a poem in time, on film? How has the technology needed for the cinema and video evolved what a poem might be? What is the line between documentation and artwork?

Poet-photographer-filmmakers featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern figures to "outsider" artists, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Barbara Kruger, Francesca Woodman to August Strindberg, Peter Greenaway to Hamish Fulton, Blaise Cendrars to Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller to Yamamoto Kansuke, Paul Muldoon / Norman McBeath to Paul Eluard / Man Ray.

A note on : Writers Kingston Online - new poetry-films #21 to #39

#WRITERSKINGSTONONLINE

New poetry films and video-literature to start 2021 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos With the usual new year’s program of events unable to take place I’ve been happy to commission a brand new set of poetry films.

This is the third set to be released with the full list here
https://www.writerskingston.com/online

SEEN AS READ : Online Course

An online course beginning March 14th 2021. Seven weeks. £200.  All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses
What are the possibilities of poetry on the page, or screen, beyond, or expanding with, its semantic content? Far from being a domain of contemporary experimentation in marginal literatures, what we know as visual poetry reaches back into the very origins of poetry, far more than more formal, mainstream writing. This online course exposes the roots of the language arts, from cave paintings to undecipherable manuscripts, before touching upon the possibilities of the modern visual poetry by taking in great swathes of modern art engaged with text. We explore Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry, Minimalism, Poster Poetry and Originary Visual Poetry in a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else.

The Voynich Manuscript / Sophie Podolski / Judit Reigl / Annagret Soltau / Seiichi Niikuni

Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, taken from all over the globe - from canonical modern artists to "outsider" poets, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Henry Michaux, Bob Cobbing to Rosaire Appel, Sophie Calle to Sophie Podolski, Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly.

A note on : Writers Kingston Online - new poetry-films #11 to #20

#WRITERSKINGSTONONLINE

New poetry films and video-literature to start 2021 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos

With the www.writerskingston.com usual new year’s program of events unable to take place I’ve been happy to commission a brand new set of poetry films, hosted on the Writers Kingston youtube channel, themed and released as premiered events online. I’ve asked writers, poets and artists, connected to institute and the events that were planned in the flesh, to present new works of film poetry, video literature or digital reflection on the nature of the moment, around loose themes. I hope, in creating a new body of work, to create a kind of creative time capsule, that will have a legacy beyond that which is hopefully soon passing. Works from Rishi Dastidar, Simon Tyrrell, Luke Kennard, Sylee Gore, Jade Cuttle, Spike Mcclarity, Kayleigh Cassidy, James Byrne, James Knight and more.

Published : 3 new poems on films on Berfrois

Representing the multi methodological poetry of my new collection COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS (available for pre-order https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days) I’m happy to say 3 unpublished poems have been shared by Berfrois, thanks to editor Callie Michail

DOGTOOTH, MARGIN CALL, GUMMO https://www.berfrois.com/2021/02/margin-call-gummo-and-dogtooth-by-sj-fowler

A note on : Writers Kingston Online - new poetry-films #1 to #10

#WRITERSKINGSTONONLINE

New poetry films and video-literature to start 2021 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2LmXtC6HArB9k2QSLWQGJA/videos

With the www.writerskingston.com usual new year’s program of events unable to take place I’ve been happy to commission a brand new set of poetry films, hosted on the Writers Kingston youtube channel, themed and released as premiered events online. I’ve asked writers, poets and artists, connected to institute and the events that were planned in the flesh, to present new works of film poetry, video literature or digital reflection on the nature of the moment, around loose themes. I hope, in creating a new body of work, to create a kind of creative time capsule, that will have a legacy beyond that which is hopefully soon passing. Works from Laura Davis, Agnieszka Studzinka, Sara Upstone, Meg Jensen, Anna Johnson, Stephen Sunderland, Susie Campbell, Chris Kerr, Robert Sheppard and more.

EUROPOE : a new online course on European Poetry

An online course beginning January 23rd 2021, running for seven weeks. £200. 
All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses

The character of European literature remains a hotbed of innovation – a constant remaking of what we know poetry to be. This ambitious course seeks to introduce the English-language poet, or anyone captivated by a wide understanding of what poetry is, to the European tradition in all its richness.

Over the course of seven weeks, we will trace a line from the aftershocks of modernism, to the arrival symbolism, futurism, surrealism, and more. We explore the constraints that emancipate in the OULIPO movement, the collaborative asemic poetry of the CoBrA group, the onset of conceptual poetry, the birth of Concrete Poetry, the emergence of Sound poetry, leading to the current movement of Performance Literature. We explore electronic poetry and digital literature, and vitally, we present what is happening now – with contemporary poets working in the 21st century. 

We will also dip into the ‘grand’ post and pre-war literary poets across the continent, focusing in on their technique to inspire new works. From Mayakovsky to Akhmatova, Brodsky to Dragomoshchenko, Celan to Sachs, Brecht, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska to Różewicz, Ritsos to Elytis to Seferis, Popa to Jozsef, Salamun, Isou to Queneau, Cendrars, Pessoa. Ekelöf, Handke, Saariskoski.

Alongside the dozens and dozens of contemporary poets, EUROPOE will situate the anglophone poet with roads into an often occluded European tradition that will hopefully last long into the future... When the course finishes, an event and publication will consolidate that which everyone has produced. All info www.poembrut.com/courses

THE SWEDISH BEEST - a poetry film : EPF Digital #4

From a lonely London a figure calls out for the lost poets and three Swedes will answer, each in their own way, with poetic precision and desolate northern sensibilities. The Swedish Beest is less than a cry for help and more than a poetry film; it is a documentary of those who are not there, a gathering of readings out of time and place.

Supported by supported by The Embassy of Sweden, London. A film by Steven J Fowler. Starring Aase Berg, Jonas Gren and Ida Börjel. Music by Benedict Taylor. Photography by David Spittle. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swedenfilm

A film as part of the European Poetry Festival Digital program. With no physical events in 2020, EPF digital reveals what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest.

European Poetry Festival Digital begins - Three Swiss Poets

EPF Digital begins! After two cancellations, I’m happy that I bit the bullet and decided to lean into some proper online content. Masses to come, 9 interviews, 3 films, and more. This opening is just the beginning of stuff coming out over the next two weeks…

An eight part online festival, presenting long-form video interviews and entirely original poetry films. Unable, finally, to take place in the flesh this year, the festival will present poets from Switzerland, Austria, Latvia, Sweden, Hungary, Lithuania and more, leaning in to what can be created without proximity, generating new insights into poetic practice in continental Europe and creating ambitious film-poetry collaborations especially for this two week e-fest.  / The full program is available to view www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 and the 'events' will be released via this newsletter and online every few days November 23rd to December 10th. To begin, we are very happy to present three new long-form video-interviews with Swiss poets to kick off EPF Digital 2020. More on the work of Laura Accerboni, Rolf Hermann and Linn Molineaux is available at www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss with videos below and on YouTube. These interviews are supported by Pro Helvetia and are part of the Maintenant series at 3am magazine.

A note on : Beijing October Literary Festival online

I had such a lovely time being part of The Beijing October Literary Festival online recently. I had the pleasure to visit and read in Beijing in 2016 and made friends there who remain correspondees to this day and so this was, for me, a reconnection. The online festival has two themes - the city and tradition with modernity. I gave a talk on London, on its relationship to my writing, reflecting on how physical space, proximity, alters the reality of the writer, and how the modern city demands a modern literature, that looks forward, future facing, rather than looks to history for writing. History is for history. It seems to go down well, which was gratifying, but for me, the other speakers were exceptional and this was arguably the best online event I’ve done. It was especially cool to watch the Chinese poets and writers talk about Beijing and the modern Chinese megacity. It was a frank and playful conversation at times.

A note on: Seen as Read - arguably my favourite course

I always try to try all iterations of professional creative work once. Running adult courses face to face, with lots of different institutions, has been one of the most up and down endeavours for me. Some have created extraordinary new pathways for me, and loads of new friendships, genuinely. Others have been draining, pressured experiences, where participants use the format to unload after a hard day at work. I’m always up for doing them at new places, but when I had done online courses in the past, I found them rewarding but difficult - the removed nature tends to obfuscate the main reason I teach - to meet people, to communicate. Recently, with the lockdown bla blah I decided to go again, more seriously than before and set up a course called Seen as Read. I wrote entirely new material for it, blended that with previous explorations. I put my heart into it really, as it felt a new venture, a new moment. It has just ended and is perhaps the most exciting, rewarding, generous experience I have had teaching, including face to face work. The level of those involved, the insight, generosity, innovation - it really felt like a brief community. So many people signed up, which was inevitably very validating, and then so much support was offered for my approach, detailing a prehistoric to present history of visual poetries, then going into asemic writing, art poetry, poster art, text art, concrete poetry, collage and the like, this also was uplifting. The screenshot above shows the tiles of the blogforum set up as our interface. Each tile represents a post by a participant poet, each filled with their work and thoughts, responding to the themes of the week. Extraordinary. You can look at the work too, it’s now made publicly available with the permission of the poets https://seenasread.blogspot.com/ & https://visualpoetrycourse.blogspot.com/

The Writing Eye - Online course on Photo Poetry and Film Poetry

An online course. Begins November 8th 2020, running for 7 weeks. www.poembrut.com/courses

The potential of image and text is an endless field of creative exploration. Yet, despite the ubiquitous access we have to cameras, it remains underexplored and underappreciated as its own medium. This course traces the history of photopoetry and filmpoetry and draws it into the 21st century, rooted in making over theory, method over all else - it aims to provoke questions while exploring examples from a variety of fields - from conceptual art to surrealism, collage to concrete poetry, from modernism to collaborative practice.

We ask what makes up the essence of photography, film and poetry, and how might they interact to move beyond traditions in both fields, as something new, a true photopoetry or filmpoetry? We ask what is hybridity, truly, and simultaneity, and photoliteracy, and illustration? What is a poem in time, on film? How has the technology needed for the cinema and video evolved what a poem might be? What is the line between documentation and artwork?

Poet-photographer-filmmakers featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern figures to "outsider" artists, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Barbara Kruger, Francesca Woodman to August Strindberg, Peter Greenaway to Hamish Fulton, Blaise Cendrars to Martha Rosler, Susan Hiller to Yamamoto Kansuke, Paul Muldoon / Norman McBeath to Paul Eluard / Man Ray.

A note on : Seen as Read - online course on Visual Poetry

An online course beginning September 14th 2020, running for seven weeks. £200.  All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses

What are the possibilities of poetry on the page, or screen, beyond, or expanding with, its semantic content? Far from being a domain of contemporary experimentation in marginal literatures, what we know as visual poetry reaches back into the very origins of poetry, far more than more formal, mainstream writing. This online course exposes the roots of the language arts, from cave paintings to undecipherable manuscripts, before touching upon the possibilities of the modern manifestations of visual poetry - Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry and Photo Poetry. This is a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else. 

Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern artists to "outsider" poets, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Henry Michaux, Bob Cobbing to Rosaire Appel, Sophie Calle to Sophie Podolski, Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly.

A note on : Language Art course at Poetry School

Sylee Gore

Remote or online courses aren’t necessarily suited to that which motivates me to teach. I’ve approached pedagogy in a way that the dialogue of exchanging information when leading a program isn’t a pretence. I have collaborated with students, learn from them every lesson, and this is the main reason for me to share knowledge I’ve accrued but naturally, already know. I’m maybe too reliant on that face to face, improvised style of teaching. So it’s taken me a few years to improve at leading courses online. The current course I’m working on with the Poetry School and about 20 quite brilliant poet-artists around the world, including folk from Australia, America and elsewhere, is the best experience I’ve had so far without immediate conversations. It’s likely due to the people who signed up, who are unusually talented and generous, and a maturation on my part, most especially in not overloading the source material and prompts. I would upload 100 pages in the past for one exercise, somehow I thought I needed to give participants their money’s worth. It takes time to learn it’s not just about that perhaps. Here are some works by poets who are on the course, really impressive asemic, handwritten, concrete poems and this is the true value of an online course - it allows access to people globally and you somehow then get poet-artists who are remarkably advanced in their work, seeking knowledge and insights, rather than fundamental approaches. Some of the work coming in is better than anything I’ve done, some professional standard work, and yet the exchanges in the group are supportive, and humble. https://poetryschool.com/groups/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry

Claire Collison

Lynne Cameron https://www.lynnecameron.com/

JE Moore

My new poetry collection - The Wrestlers - due out this summer

I'm happy to say my next poetry collection will be out with Kingston University Press this summer. The Wrestlers brings together poems written over the last five years but finds it origin in a commission I was lucky enough to do for Tate Britain online, thanks to Sarah Victoria Turner - a suite of poems responding to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's eponymous relief and the nine consequent copies.

In a sense these poems, when I wrote them in 2011 and 2012 were a pivotal moment in my writing, a rejection / acceptance of Poundian modernism. Moreover they were about wrestling itself, something that was the primary activity of my childhood and teenage life, as well as the relief, and written upon request, that felt / feel strangely autobiographical (though you wouldn't be able to tell that by reading them).

I've revised these and then added many other works where wrestling has become an action verb in the mechanics of the poems, often just in the title. In a sense wrestling becomes a concept of imposition that acts like a dialectic between ideas or opinions. 

Like my last book, The Guide to Being Bear Aware, I think The Wrestlers is pretty traditionally poetry, its literary, because like my last book, it has come into existence while, organically, I have found other mediums to be the place of my experiments, like in art books, theatre or performance. So my natural instincts have changed too, in poetry, something I'm glad about, to always be changing tastes. If it was those European poets of the post-war new lyric tradition looming over me for my last book, now I'd say it has been a revisitations to pre-war poets which have influenced me. Mallarme, Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, Wat, Cummings have become ghosts in my new book, a bit. Reading them again, seriously, for a second or third time has of course disturbed some bones in my own work.

The book will have a London launch on June 30th at Rich Mix with other readings to follow.

Poems in the collection have been previously published, in one form or another, by Gorse Magazine, Test Centre magazine, 3am magazine, The Wolf, Poems in Which, The Honest Ulsterman, The Bohemyth, Wazogate and the anthologies The Long White Thread: poems for John Berger (Smokestack Books), The Other Room 4, Millets (Zeno Press), Dear World and Everything In It (Bloodaxe Books), Hwaet: Ledbury Poetry Festival (Bloodaxe Books) and Shifting Ground (J&L Gibbons). It also features the suite Poems in which César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza wrestles Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (Pablo Neruda) which was commissioned by The Hay Festival : Arequipa, Peru in 2016 and a number of the poems in were created as part of The Green Infrastructure – a residency with landscape architects J&L Gibbons.

Published: Two new sound / video poems - Anubis & Amishkuapeu

London Review Bookshop - new & recommended poetry

http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/on-our-shelves/on-our-tables/new-and-recommended-poetry

New and Recommended Poetry

Our pick of poetry. Here are six of our current favourites, as chosen by our poet in residence, John Clegg.

The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

S. J. Fowler

From the publisher:

A groundbreaking, aberrant but ever ebullient love letter to those who deserve it, The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner refracts marriage, death, friendship, violence ...