Cool to have a new poem, written for this book in fact, in a new anthology, entitled Slovakia in Poems, edited by Eleni Cay and available here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Slovakia-Poems-Eleni-Cay/dp/1737405415/
My poems is about my last trip to Bratislava, going the dinosaur park there and other adventures, it has an epigraph by my collaborator zuzana husarova and has also been translated into Slovakian for the book, with an excerpt below.
Quite the way to release my latest book, my selected collages, Bastard Poems from Steel Incisors, into the world. In the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific society, surrounded by dinosaur fossils, a dozen friends and co-readers, and a surprisingly full audience, who were game, and generous, and receptive. The other readers were uniformly on, everyone was really great, and enthusiastic. Got to see some old friends and collaborators - Max Porter, Lucy English, Carrie Etter, Angie Butler, Dave Spittle - and travelled to Bath for this. It was also satisfying to have this night as a chance to say thanks to James Knight, who has worked so so hard on Bastard Poems and done such a great job. The book can be bought here https://www.steelincisors.com/product/bastard-poems-by-sj-fowler/2
All the videos from the launch, performances and readings, are available here https://www.poembrut.com/thepast
And below some great pictures of my performance, a live collective collage, and more, by Madeleine Rose Elliott.
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution www.brlsi.org/ 16-18 Queen Square. BA1 2HN
Doors 6.45pm for a 7pm start - Free entry with a booktable with books for sale
To celebrate the launch of SJ Fowler’s ‘Bastard Poems’ from Steel Incisors press, a Poem Brut event will see readings and performances by an extraordinary group of poets, writers and artists, all based in the region.
Expect an evening of new experimental literary performance works, made for the night, alongside readings of poetry and prose. This event will present a true range of what’s possible in contemporary British-based poetry and prose, celebrating collage, liveness and textual play.
My new book, one I really am happy with. The press has done a brilliant job with it. 'Sticker Poems' from Trickhouse Press
£10.00 128pp, A5, full-colour. https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-sticker-poems-by-sj-fowler/6?cs=true&cst=custom
From the publisher “Forget everything you thought you knew about stickers and everything you might have suspected about poems. From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of human cognition, narrated by Fowler’s idiosyncratic poetics. This book offers a bold new take on what poetry means, a playful shock treatment for arthritic literary convention, and the kind of crystalline insight which is usually reserved for the deranged. These poems will stick to you like gum to your hair. Strawberry gum.”
The book contains 99 sticker poems, full colour, on photographic as well as essays by myself and David Spittle. Every order includes two free stickers of sticker poems which you can stick to that which you wish to stick to.
“Screw your courage to the sticking place! SJ Fowler has invented a new poetic form, and traced out all its kinks and convolutions in one deliriously weird book. Let your nail grow out a bit to really get under the corners of his language and prise them off the page and you’ll be rewarded. I found at least one of these adhesive little poems at the back of my knee after a particularly hard reading session and now it’s stuck. What is there in life but adhesion?” Colin Herd
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
I am so excited for this. I have had so much joy making this book, the next in my visual poetry series, and over a year in development. It has been such a pleasure to work with Dan Power of Trickhouse Press on the project, which is 99 full colour, full bleed, complex collagic weird poems made of actual stickers and digi-text. Launched on June 10th, more soon on that, but available for pre-order now https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-pre-order-sticker-poems-by-sj-fowler/6?cs=true&cst=custom
Forget everything you thought you knew about stickers and everything you might have suspected about poems. From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of human cognition, narrated by Fowler’s idiosyncratic poetics.
This book offers a bold new take on what poetry means, a playful shock treatment for arthritic literary convention, and the kind of crystalline insight which is usually reserved for the deranged. It contains 99 original and striking sticker poems, as well as essays by SJ Fowler and David Spittle.
“Screw your courage to the sticking place! SJ Fowler has invented a new poetic form, and traced out all its kinks and convolutions in one deliriously weird book. Let your nail grow out a bit to really get under the corners of his language and prise them off the page and you’ll be rewarded. I found at least one of these adhesive little poems at the back of my knee after a particularly hard reading session and now it’s stuck. What is there in life but adhesion?” - Colin Herd
Very likely the last burst of poems to be published in a journal from my 9th collection, out recently in April 2021, Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : Poems on Films, with Broken Sleep press.
Published by Anthropocene, edited by Charlie Baylis, this selection features an asemic poem celebrating John Milius’s surfer classic Big Wednesday, Bela Tarr’s adaptation of Satantango and Andrew Kotting’s This Filthy Earth.
https://www.anthropocenepoetry.org/post/3-poems-by-sj-fowler-1
I had a friend who can take photos come into to see my new, brief, exhibition at Willesden Gallery, and try to turn chicken beaks into gold. The photos are excellent, and improve my works when seen in the flesh. In a sense, these works do consolidate a lot of my recent explorations in visual poetry - especially in the art poems field, which I’ve loosely theorised in a lot of my teaching. They were all made for the exhibition, on wallpaper paper, with indian ink and some acryllic paint. Tonnes more photos of the exhibition are at……. www.stevenjfowler.com/developments
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
Taken from my new book COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS : POEMS ON FILMS, available for pre-order https://brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-come-and-see-the-songs-of-strange-days… 3 new poems up on Andrew Taylor's brilliant M58 - You The Living, The Abyss, Ordet https://m58.co.uk
I’m especially happy with the Abyss poem, made from collaged screen shots from the director’s cut of the film and You, the Living, using screenshots from the film itself, with the subtitle repurposed as poetry.
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 very energised online journal from Ireland, Beir Bua, edited by Michelle Moloney King, has generously featured my art-poetry as their special focus in their second issue. It collates one example, one art-poem, from eight of my books. It essentially draws upon what I’ve been working on, in exploring visual poetry and the handmade, and the poem brut movement, since the summer of 2017 and prior. It’s satisfying to see it represented in this way, and the issue has some really fine poets in there too, from Gregory Betts to Susan Connolly and many others new to me. Worth checking out https://beirbuajournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/issue-2-15.pdf
The works are taken from my books Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep), due next month, then Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020), Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018), The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (2020), I fear my best work behind me (Strange Press 2017), Sticker Poems (due out later in 2021 with Trickhouse Press), Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit (Hesterglock Press 2019) and finally Bastard Poems (due out later in 2021 with Steel Incisors)
Also featured in the issue are short reviews of my books Crayon Poems, Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire, kindly penned by the editor, who also reviews my friend and collaborator Christodoulos Makris, as well as introing the issue. https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/journal/issue-2/
Very generous of Ghareeb Iskander to take a new poem of mine for publication in the Belgium based journal Eurolitkrant. https://eurolitkrant.com/OneBook.aspx?Id=81
The journal has featured some great European poets recently - Peter Zavada, Ida Borjel, George Szirtes, Kornelia Deres - and I’m particularly happy to have this poem up as it’s taken from my new collection, which is due March 2021, in two months time. It is entitled COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS poems on films with Broken Sleep.
The film the poem is about is an intense one, but also from Belgium, so some synchonicity jiggling.
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
EPF Digital 2020 presents presents new long-form video-interviews with poets from Latvia, featuring Inga Pizāne, Krišjānis Zeļģis, Marija Luīze Meļķe and Lote Vilma Vītiņa. More on their work can be found www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/latvia
Supported by Platform Latvian Literature / EPF Digital is 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. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020
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.”
A grand burst of publications around my latest Poem Brut book - CRAYON POEMS with penteract press (buy it here https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler ) that features works not found in the book. Three more have been published by Sober magazine here https://www.sober-magazine.com/#/new-page-35/
I added this note “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?”
One of the highlights of this and last year is my collaboration with the brilliant David Rickard for an installation in Kielder Forest. The Northern Echo recently wrote a story on the work to be found here https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/18640831.new-art-installation-kielder-water-forest-beauty-spot
Timelapse, created by sculptor David Rickard for the Kielder Art and Architecture programme, is a new feature on the Lakeside Way, on the south side of the Bull Crag peninsula. Visitors can sit among the locally harvested timber that the structure is comprised of and take in the area’s timeless beauty.
The artist said: “The sculpture derives from the underlying materials that define Kielder Water & Forest Park: timber and time. With trees typically growing in Kielder Forest for several decades before harvest, the forest itself reflects various timespans through the scale of the trees in different plantations. This passage of time is also marked within the timber of individual trees.”
Texts from poet SJ Fowler are embedded in the floor and ceiling of the sculpture, subtly referencing the way gravity slows time, as first defined by Albert Einstein in 1907….
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.”
I am happy to be one of the poets on the list for Broken Sleep in 2021, alongside some friends - Lucy Harvest Clarke, Luke Kennard, Emma Hammond, Jon Stone - and a lot of new names to me. Which is excellent.
The book I’ll be releasing in March 2021 is the second, far longer, instalment of my cinema poems. I’ve been working on them bit by bit for years. The first pamphlet I did with BS did really well and was a joy to put together, I STAND ALONE BY THE DEVILS, it was called.
This will be a full collection and more ambitious in terms of methodology too. Aliens is a film about more than one Alien, for example.
What Aaron Kent and his team have done with Broken Sleep is very impressive too, the press is growing exponentially. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/
