Crayon Poems is the poetic equivalent of a cat gifting its owner a dead bird, only it’s done with greasy, gentle colours on the page. It is a gift you don’t want but should be grateful for. https://www.mercurius.one/home/crayon-poems
One of the highlights of the year, publishing my book CRAYON POEMS, with the brilliant Penteract Press. Thanks to Thomas Helm, over at Mercurius, a few more of the poems have been published online
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2020/09/sj-fowler-adult-waste-and-childish.html
I tend to write essays for my poem brut books for a myriad of reasons. Initially, it was a sort of justification, knowing the work might seem intense / brutish / opaque to literary eyes, I knew that if I described the process, the reasoning, there would be some valuable context. I knew too that if I avoided the deep theory I’m allergic to then the essays would be more than bewildering apologia and allow me knowledge that might bode well for myself and my future work. Increasingly, the essays are for me. They allow me to understand what I’m doing and why, and they give me a structure in which to research purposefully.
This essays features in the back of my Crayon Poems book from Penteract Press https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler and has been generously published by Periodicities, a journal Rob Mclennan edits with great energy. An excerpt….
“Here is a formulation I would not say I believe, but have often thought of, making these works. If the crayon is for the child, and children are the most living of human beings, the most life orientated of us, being new, being closer to birth and further from death, and the crayon is their artist tool, evoking bio-matter, edibility, refuse, mulch, excrete, bodily colours and vegetation, then are crayon pictures not somewhat symbols of mortality? Otto Rank, given to me by Ernest Becker, suggests the primary trauma of life is birth (not the Oedipal Complex, causing Freud to cast Rank aside for this break in psychoanalytic dogma). Being birthed then begins our uncomfortable relationship with creatureliness. Going for a shit reminds us we were born and we will die. We are repulsed by the reminder, the smell of it, and the gushing of blood, popping spots etc.., and with good reason. These things are often, unlike their imitation in crayons, disease bearing. This is why, I believe, I was drawn to crayons to write poems, and that these poems became illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. Things alive but not alive in the way the human mind thinks they are alive. Perfect for kids and a book which is a celebration of life.
If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts. In a sense, these ‘reminders’ that interest me so much, in my work and in all things, can be equated to wonder. They are the shock of realisation. Surprise. This may stretch beyond extreme emotions like love and near-death, into any kind of alive consciousness or moments of distinct knowing. These moments also evoke both our childhood, that process of constant discovery that masks the confusion of our adult lives, and our end, that we cannot imagine the world without us, in one moment. The shock of wonder, like the reminders of creatureliness, put us in time. They force us to realise, in that temporality, we are.”
Well happy to be in this brilliant anthology with a Rune concrete poem… Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 148x210mm, 56pp https://penteractpress.com/store/myth-amp-metamorphosis
“Myth & Metamorphosis” presents a collection of poems inspired by an array of ancient mythologies. The poetic styles on show are similarly varied, showcasing the breadth of contemporary formal poetry: constrained poetry, concrete poetry, erasure poetry, asemic poetry, found poetry, prose poetry, photo poetry, puzzle poetry, translated poetry, typewriter poetry, as well as original and traditional verse forms..
Merlina Acevedo, Sacha Archer, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Luke Bradford, Marian Christie, Franco Cortese, Clara Daneri, Lucy Dawkins, Anthony Etherin, Kyle Flemmer, SJ Fowler, Mary Frances, Greg Hill, MD Kerr, James Knight, Alex McKeown, Annie Morris, Ben North, Rachel Smith, Dani Spinosa, Alex Stevens, María Celina Val, and Martin Wakefield.
Colin Herd has been gentle enough to review my latest poem-brut visual poetry book, CRAYON POEMS, at the online journal known as Adjacent Pineapple. Do read here, with excerpts below, https://www.adjacentpineapple.com/sj-fowler-review
“There's one piece, for example, called 'Way Overboard', in which a scrawl of letters congeals for me into "Water Board Confessions", "Water Bard Confessions", and "Watl baro confessions", with what could be three alphabet-creatures, teeth and eyes and tails in a squeeling "eee" I don't know what they're frightened of? Themselves? Like Stephen Ratcliffe said of the drawing poems of Robert Grenier in Fowler's Crayon Poems, the "words are also physically in space". And because of that suddenly the kinds of tidy neat meaning arrangements we're so used to start to melt, bleed, congeal, emulsify etc. I think of these poems as events of a sort - they convey an immediacy of composition - the event of the drawing itself - but they also need to be sort of rubbed, felt with the eyes, in the event of the reading (as all poems do).
In another Crayon Poem, "Visual Rinse Wig", a green and blue fretwork of o's and smileys also includes a dr's note scribble: I think I can make out "it's good" or "I like chaos" or "to be good", "other" "commas", "another person's freeze"
In an accompanying essay, Fowler emphasises crayons through their associations with childhood, the child-like freedom to "do text without planning": "If creatureliness drives the images in this book, then wonder drives the text"…
And the book can be purloined here https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler
2020 - £10.00 Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 60pp
Produced to a remarkable standard, a volume of 50 original art-poems, written entirely with crayons. The books is closed with a new essay, explaining why it exists. An excerpt = “There is a part of me that wants to be messy, dumb, clumsy, childish, ape-ish and impatient because I am quite naturally these things and these things are preferable to pretense. I never wish to be a child again, and will be granted this wish, but I’d rather be one than a fraught, bourgeois adult, and so robbing the techniques of infants seem a valuable, if petulant, path to safety. What better reason than childishness, amidst the recreations of mortality, animalisms, literacy and colourfulness, could there be for me to author and labour a book of poems made exclusively from the wax crayon?”
From the publisher “Crayon Poems is the poetic equivalent of a cat gifting its owner a dead bird, only it’s done with greasy, gentle colours on the page. In an intrepid interrogation of what it is to write, SJ Fowler’s art poetry collection offers a take on childish play and death’s tenacity that is compelling in its abjection. A cheeky nod to the unknowable, it is a gift you don’t want but should be grateful for. Fowler’s colourful crayons, like the bird’s intestines, are bodily, fascinating and undeniable.”
These poems overflow the pool and belch broken pinwheels and algae blooms. They originate the faces and traces of those dreams that wake me. The ones I cannot describe to the adults around me. My lack of words or the words they have over me. Hold a crayon one day and convey. Here there is no illegible or illiterate. Kim Campanello
SJ Fowler's Crayon Poems enter the realm of hauntology, a special place in which the sensible child finds expression in the day-dreaming adult. This line of Electronic Voice Phenomena is sketched into cardiogram in shaky and colourful wax. Who says the colours of Crayola are just for the under-tens? Chris McCabe
The fifth book in my Poem Brut series. www.stevenjfowler.com/artbooks The book was released with a special podcast by Penteract Press, between editor Anthony Etherin and I. https://penteractpress.com/p-p-p/2020/7/5/episode-10-sj-fowler-crayon-poems-launch
To celebrate the launch of my new book CRAYON POEMS with PENTERACT PRESS, editor of the press Anthony Etherin and I had our second podcast conversation. It’s a grand one I think, open and relaxed and covering some new ideas.
Join us on Twitter, at 7pm UK time, Thursday July 9th, to help launch the book: Ask questions about the book, about topics raised in this podcast, and about poetry/publishing in general, using the hashtag #PenteractChat. https://penteractpress.com/p-p-p/2020/7/5/episode-10-sj-fowler-crayon-poems-launch
