A note on : European Poetry Festival begins in 10 days, with Swiss then Norwegian poets!

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL : SWITZERLAND
November Saturday 20th at Rich Mix, London
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss

7pm doors / Free Entrance : EPF 2021 begins with an event centered around visiting contemporary Swiss poets presenting brand new performance collaborations with British-based counterparts, made for the night, at one of East London’s most iconic poetry venues. With Baptiste Gaillard & Vik Shirley / Rolf Hermann and Joe Dunthorne / Clea Chopard & SJ Fowler / Ghazal Mosadeq and Simona Nastac / Mikael Buck and Michael O’Mahony / Vanessa Onwuemezi and Martin Wakefield / Ana Seferovic and Konstantinos Papacharalampos & more. Supported by Pro Helvetia.

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL : NORWAY
November tuesday 23rd at Open Ealing, London
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/norway

7pm doors / Free Entrance : EPF 2021 continues with a celebration of contemporary Norwegian poetry, in collaboration. New performance poems made in tandem for this event will be presented across styles and languages. With Endre Ruset & Harry Man / Bjørn Vatne & Richard Marshall / Jon Ståle Ritland & JT Welsch / Maren Nygård & Susie Campbell / Silje Ree & Maria Celina Val / Tamar Yoseloff & Alison Gill / Chris Kerr & Virna Teixeira. Supported by The Norwegian Embassy UK and NORLA. The event will also serve as a launch for Utøya Thereafter : Poems in Memory of the 2011 Norway Attacks by Harry Man and Endre Ruset available from Hercules Editions

A note on : Poem Brut at Open Ealing

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A remarkably fun night at Open Ealing, and a second exceptional poem brut event in the month of august, 2021/ https://www.poembrut.com/thepast

Lots of friends and folk I’ve not met before, many of whom had done my online courses, and all of us, coming out of lockdown realities, were joyed to be communal, and take the chance to perform to a warm, and surprisingly full, audience. Chris Kerr, Beverley Frydman, Vicki Kaye, Mikael Buck, Lynette Willoughby, Bob Bright, Richard Marshall, Kayleigh Cassidy, Simon Tyrrell, Paul Hawkins and Susie Campbell. Everyone brought their A game.

This was the London launch of my Bastard Poems book, my selected collage https://www.steelincisors.com/product/bastard-poems/2?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false as well as a sneek preview of a new anthology Ive edited called Seen as Read, with many visual poets within… coming in october.

A note on: Duos & The Poem Brut - two new open calls on 3am magazine

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/submissions/

Poetry
Note: Poetry submissions are open only for the Duos and Poem Brut series. No other submissions will be read.

  • Duos: collaborative poems written / made by two poets. There is no criteria for the poems or process. Please send a single bio and single photo for both authors.
  • Poem Brut: poems exploring handwriting, abstraction, illustration, asemic and pansemic writing, visual poetry and material process, colour, scribbling, scrawlings, crossings out, ink, forgotten notes, found text, interaction between paper and pen, and pencil, geometric poems, inarticulate poems, minimalism, collage, toilet wall writing. No works produced on a computer.

A note on: an interview with Kathryn Lloyd for Jerwood Open Forest

A great interview with Kathryn Lloyd up on the Jerwood Arts website, speaking to David Rickard primarily, with me in a wee bit, about the Jerwood Open Forest. More info on that here www.stevenjfowler.com/openforest "

KL: Steven, collaboration also seems to be a vital part of your practice. Would you be able to discuss this a little bit — in terms of what sort of role collaboration can play in poetry and performance?

SJ. Fowler: Collaboration is pivotal to me. So much to say here, but to cut to the quick, collaboration is not a method; it is human interaction, just with a creative goal as the excuse. Friendship, love, family — this is collaboration. I wish to spend my life in the company of people happily making things, being challenged by their intelligence and thoughts, being provoked into that which I wouldn’t have seen alone. It in no way eats into the solitary process — one so exclusively associated, bizarrely, with poetry, it often seems. In this specific case, with David’s gesture, to open his project up to a stranger, I took it be an extraordinary act of hospitality, of generosity, of humility, that he and I shared some essential methodological appreciation of collaboration, and so I felt responsible to really commit to the work, in all ways. It has proved to be a really brilliant time — all of it positive, a real highlight of my year.

KL: David, your proposal incorporates text through the use of Steven’s poem. How do you associate with the role of writing — do you also like to write? Or is text something that you find more natural to incorporate when written by someone else?"

http://www.jerwoodvisualarts.org/writing-and-media/returnings-kathryn-lloyd-conversation-david-rickard-sj-fowler/

A note on: Jerwood Open Forest exhibition opening

A privilege to be part of the 2016 Jerwood Open Forest Exhibition at the Jerwood Space in London, thanks to my collaborator, David Rickard, and the staff at Jerwood, who have all been exceptionally generous in supporting my work.

David was shortlisted earlier this year for the project and invited me then to work with him in producing new texts for his proposal, and as the process of the project moves towards the award being granted, the Jerwood Space hosts an exhibition with representations of the works being proposed by each artist. David created a wholly new work for the exhibition, conceptually connected to the Returnings idea, that saw him source an out of commission memorial bench and gently dissect it into its constituent parts. I then wrote a poem / text responding to this work, a word for each piece of the exhibited bench skeleton. My words are beautifully projected in the gallery against a wall, becoming a kinetic poem, the entire text on loop, revealed over exactly three minutes.

The launch event was lovely, so great to spend time in that space, meet the other artists, and see my work exhibited in a gallery I often visit and admire. David and I also had a chance to appear on Resonance FM talking about our work on the day of the opening. A wonderful collaboration that I hope spawns lots more work with David in the near future.

A note on: Open Forest Exhibition at Jerwood Visual Art

November 2nd to December 11th at Jerwood Visual Arts, London.
171 Union Street. Bankside. SE1 0LN / jerwoodvisualarts.org
Gallery hours: Monday – Friday 10am – 5pm / Saturday & Sunday 10am – 3pm

I'm pleased to have a newly commissioned text responding to, and collaborating with, the work of artist David Rickard on exhibition at Jerwood Visual Arts as part of their remarkable Open Forest project. The work explores the notion of dissection, the breaking down of things into their component parts and the fragmentation of recollection, all expressed by way of a deconstructed memorial bench. The installation is part of a wider work entitled Returnings www.stevenjfowler.com/returnings

The Jerwood Open Forest exhibition brings together the work of David Rickard and the four other shortlisted artists for 2016, with new bodies of work spanning installation, film, ceramics and performance on display. Jerwood Open Forest is a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Forestry Commission England with the support of Arts Council England. http://jerwoodopenforest.org/

A note on: Jerwood Open Forest with David Rickard - Part #1

Over the last few months I've had the opportunity and pleasure to work with the artist David Rickard, in quite an inspiring context. David, whose remarkable career as artist has been marked by a particularly complex and deft relationship to space, object, architecture and process, has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Open Forest scheme.

After being shortlisted for his idea David, very generously, began a conversation about how poetry might find a place in his idea. His proposal was to engage with Fielder Forest in Northumberland and create a trail throughout unmarked woods. The rail would be made of a reclaimed house or building, stripped and dissembled into the very rawest wood of a structure, bare planks, and on each of these planks, following a carefully selected route, would be inscribed one word. This trail would then be read as it is followed, neither a narrative, or a poem, or a story, but all of these. And then, vitally, the trail and its posts would rot, become once again the forest, and so my words would be edited by the very forest itself.

From the Jerwood Open Forest blog, David wrote: "Returnings: 29 Jul 2016 - So far my search for a forest has been headed simultaneously in two very different directions. Firstly, for a growing, photosynthesising cluster of trees, a forest in the current tense and secondly for a building with timber bones, a forest in the past sense. Eventually these two will come together, but for now they are poles apart. The living forest will be a plantation, established and grown for the eventual yield of its timber and Kielder Forest has been identified as the prime candidate – an expanse of 600 square kilometres of forest stretching across the northern half of Northumberland.

In parallel there have been conversations with demolition contractors, with names like Titan and Redhammer, and the hunt is on to establish how we can find a suitable building that will form the fabric of the installation. It will be a timber structure that has come to the end of its functional life and is ready for a return trip to its place of origin.

Carved into the surfaces of the beams and boards will be words.  One word on each piece, which together form an expansive poem with no beginning or ending; a meandering narrative that flows through the circuitous journey that the timber has taken. The voice of these words will be S J Fowler, a contemporary English poet that has agreed to collaborate on the creation of ‘Returnings’. Now there are fragments; a forest, a hunt for a building and words. There’s still a lot to do before these fragments combine to form a work."

Open Mouth Surgery, a collaboration with Morten Sondergaard, published in the Bohemyth

http://thebohemyth.com/2014/05/06/morten-sondergaard-steven-fowler/ Im proper pleased one of my favourite collaborations this year, with the extraordinary Danish poet Morten Sondergaard has been published in the great Irish journal the Bohemyth, edited by Michael Shanks. The work, Open Mouth Surgery, is a fusion of Morten's wordpharmacy project and its concerns, and my own aberrant attempts to run veins of speech fragments and surrealism through such a beautiful tailored poetic project. 

666 blows, one break at Open Work

If I'm doing what might be seen as art performance, and I'm happy for it to be seen as that, then it needs to be something that I feel is authentic to me. I need to feel an absolute internal assurance that the work is genuine, whatever that means. It might have heavy conceptual ideas behind it, but it can't be founded on them. Otherwise I feel I risk pretentiousness in a way I am not comfortable with, and this because I always feel a sense of exposure and a combative relationship to audiences. This performance, 666 blows one break, is another that calls out my martial arts background, looking to transpose a life practice into a new context in order to make it performative. The piece is supposed to be about a faux vedic ritualism, guttural voice, masculinity turning into emasculinity because of exhaustion and the dance like movement of muay thai pad repetition. All things wither, lose their lustre and decay in one form of another. Hopefully what begins here as shiny, blood covered, pad booming manliness devolves into emptied, failing, exhausted humanity. 

 I enjoyed the experience very much, though so much of it was actualised very late in the day and we had to stay simple to make it work. I owe a huge debt to those I collaborated with on the piece. Chris Page, who trained with me for quite awhile and is a great musician and old friend, was amazing holding the pads, bringing back my mcguffin dragon mask and generally taking the power with aplomb. David Kelly, my best friend and oft collaborator, who created the fundament of the piece with his buddha box soundscape. Robert Hitzeman, who is rapidly becoming someone close to me who I admire very much as an artist and a person, who curated the show along with Mohammad Namazi and Emily Purser

 Moreover, those in attendance were uniformly warm and qualified with their opinions, offering many different interpretations of the piece but all sensing that the work was just a process of transference from the practise of my life into the practise of my artwork, if it is that at all. The work featured in the show was also of a fine quality, a real interesting mix, and the space, at the very end of Kilburn Lane, quite close to my west london homestead, was a unique slightly emptied old leisure centre turned artspace. I was able to walk there and back, enjoying a night in the city with my pads and warpaintbloodbag and little incense elephant. Check out  http://www.openworkproject.com/ this is the first of a proposed series of shows.