A note on : The Printed Poetry Project

A new page dedicated to the PPP www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp

Aiming to create overlaps between poetry and letterpress, as well as publishing and book arts, I’m lucky to be the poet at the centre of this project so far, thanks to Angie Butler and Sarah Bodman. Evolving organically over many months of correspondence, the PPP is creating a generous, generative space for real collaboration between those with the expertise to realise printed matter and those who might write the poems within.

Supported by the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE, Bristol, the current form of the project is really the brainchild of Angie Butler and has taken in, so far, a short residency at The Whittington press working with Pat Randle of Nomad Letterpress in May 2021.

This will be followed with a limited edition publication, entitled 25 poems, which was written during, and about, the project, before being collaboratively typeset and printed by Angie and Pat. This will be followed by an ambitious symposium in October 2021 and more happenings into the future.

A full diary of my time in Bristol is a available too, www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp, an excerpt here “The process then was a whirl. The evenings in my airbnb, doing long runs through Bristolian suburbs, the sharing of ideas with Sarah Bodman and the the postgraduate students at UWE, and the conversations with Angie, both for an online event and in her motorcar - these all fed into the poems I wrote, that were to be finished in this week so they could be printed there and then! We found an old cast in the press that said ‘25 poems’, next to an image of a cock and bull, and i leapt on this as the title. So 25 poems. A perfect chance for me to exorcise a desire to write one word poems I thought, following Aram Saroyan and 16 were created, for the opening and closes pages. Then notes, fragments, overheard conversations, things I thought when I was not thinking, these began coming together for the remaining 9 poems - with a sense always of the vernacular of letterpress and printing, of the terminology, the vocabulary, the intense sense of workable knowledge.

A note on: my Asemic Poetry talk online for CFPR and Arnolfini

Part of a brilliant online summer festival organised by UWE’s Centre for Fine Print Research and Arnolfini, I was asked to talk about Asemic Poetry for a bit https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/book-and-print-summer-festival-2020/

Never easy to do it from the top of your head but that’s how I prefer to teach, obviously leaping from idea to idea but hopefully being more immediate / engaged for that leaping. Asemic work is important to me and the feedback I’ve had suggests this has bled through.

Silk & Thomas Duggan

This is the most groundbreaking collaboration I've ever been involved with, and one of the highlights of my career as a writer. All thanks to the remarkable artist, Thomas Duggan, who has been a friend of mine for nearly twenty years now. What he has gone on to achieve professionally is really no shock to me, he was always ahead in his thinking, and somehow he has managed to turn his powerful mode of thought and aesthetic engagement under really strict and challenging, self-imposed, expectations of quality and validity into a vocational life practice that benefits not just himself, not just his peers, not just those who might attend a gallery, or handle an object, but our entire understanding of materiality and form and presence and environment and permanence. It's breathtaking. I feel privileged to have reconnected with Thomas in such a fashion, our artforms fusing, coming together, like our corporality, after so long, into a palpable thing which has a life and legacy all of it's own.

He has printed a poem of mine in silk – silk fibroin, entirely biocompatible and biodegradable and programmed to disappear, when required, without leaving any trace – it is three dimensional poetry in a revolutionary new material developed using the very latest design technology, that has the potential to realise new environmentally sustainable modes of substance - material never seen in public before. It is actually a world first. Hard to say how much that means to me. The poems were written for Thomas and his work, and now seem a feeble gift in the light of what he has given back to me.

Come and see the piece on July 6th, at the Hardy Tree gallery in St Pancras London. http://hardytreegallery.com/