A note on : poem of the day at National Poetry Library

https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/photographer

an unexpected thing, my poem The Photographer, taken from my 2014 book The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner, has been featured on the National Poetry Library’s website as their poem of the day for May 5th 2021.

it’s an audio recording of the poem, one I gave years ago I think, I don’t remember. it’s a very short clipped work kind of about my friend alexander kell, who took the photo featured on the site, while we were both working at the british museum

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.

Published : The Mystery Book on Tar Press

Tar Press publish new short fiction on twitter, in an episodic unleashing over one long Sunday. The editor, Henry Johns, shared my tale, The Mystery Book, along with illustrative photos I took on the trip that inspired the story.

Henry said of the work, “In this story we’ll follow the narrator on a walk. But there’s a notable disparity between the passing of diegetic time and reading time. We’ll spend about two days following this walk that presumably took the narrator just a few hours.”

You can read the other Tar Press tales in their archive https://www.tarpress.co.uk/, including an excellent one by Tom Jenks. I have been on record saying twitter is something I am partially ashamed to engage with, but you have to try to make that which is corrosive bountiful, even if it’s inherently a failure, so good on Tar Press for doing what they do, and I was happy to be a part of it.

Here are six parts of a 20 something part story. You can read the whole story at www.stevenjfowler.com/themysterybook

Published : Time of the Wolf in Poem Atlas' Refraction online exhibition

Very cool to be in this online exhibition which celebrates the Streetcake Magazine writing prize, of which I’m a patron and is hosted by Poem Atlas, which is doing great things with sculpture or 3d poetry. https://www.poematlas.com/refraction

This poem-brut lo-fi concertina is a deliberately aberrant pop-up book page. It combines found material, abstract painting, stickers of three different origins, or packs, and is part of an ongoing exploration of the possibilities of collage and an experimental poetry of humour. It is taken from the book 'Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films' (Broken Sleep Books 2021)

EPF Digital #8 - Messages from the Other Side

Thanks to everyone who has supported our digital festival over the last two weeks! To close European Poetry Festival 2020, we’re delighted to partner with the longstanding public video poetry project "Messages from the Other Side", founded and curated by Max Höfler. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/messages

Six poets from Graz and London each have written short poems for public screening in both cities. These video-poems or kinetic texts are styled as literary "news" for the other city, London to Graz, Graz to London. Projected onto the side of the Forum Stadtpark in Graz and Hardy Tree Gallery in London, passing civilians have witnessed the ludic newscasts of Natascha Gangl, Ghazal Mosadeq, Stefan Schmitzer, Vik Shirley, Thomas Antonic & Steven J. Fowler. The films have been screened publicly November 18th to December 11th 2020 and are available to view at the link above and vimeo.com/channels/nachrichtenvondrueben with German language versions.

The entire digital European Poetry Festival 2020 can be viewed www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2020 and we will return, in physical proximity, in 2021.

A note on : Subverse on Hotel, features Great Apes and more

Excerpts of three books of mine, from BEASTINGS, I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) & THE GREAT APES, have been remixed and mashed and edited by Diamanda Dramm for her new solo show, Subverse. Hotel magazine, edited by Dominic Jaeckle, have published the parts of the texts used alongside a video of Diamanda performing. https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Dramm This clip below is from my book The Great Apes, which is due from Pamenar press in 2021!

you know that life for a minute?
let’s pretend. we’re in the jungle.
the jungle, where ugly finds itself.
but you get used to it, because it is you, that smell
worried about things you can’t change

and while you were worried about your mother’s drinking
and what kind of poetry is going on, and AI
it was chimp who landed on your shoulders
and stuck his middle fingers into your ears
like a medieval helmet covered in oliver oil
and made two fists and ripped your ears off down
and as your hands came up to cup your lost ears
chimp grabbed your fingers in a flower bunch
like it was the brakes on your fancy city bicycle for the green future
and squished them together with strength you didn’t know
and then broke them back against themselves
and tried to pull them off
and partially succeeded
and put some of them in Chimp mouth
and chewed
and looked around and looked at you and waited and couldn’t tell
what species you were even ?

THE HUNGARIAN VACUUM - a poetry film : EPF Digital #5

Four talking heads. Three Hungarians. One vacuum cleaner.

They are poets, they are miserable, and they are cut off from the world. United by sardonic pride, they come together to represent their country and wage war on the dust bunnies of the mind in this poetic deepdive. A daring poetry film, The Hungarian Vacuum is part gripping mystery, part arthouse project, part literary podcast, part poetry reading, and part utter failure. You will have questions, but you’re not likely to get any answers.

Supported by Hungarian Cultural Centre, London. A film by, and starring, Steven J Fowler, Kornelia Deres, Kinga Toth, Peter Zavada. Music by Benedict Taylor. Edited by Botond Bartha. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/hungaryfilm

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.

Published : The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler

Years in the making, The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (me) is now available from Zimzalla. zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-scribbling-and-scrawling-2nd-edition/

From the publisher - The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler is an assembly of hand-drawn, instinctive visual poems from beyond the ragged edge of language. Arguably the most comprehensive book of asemic poetry ever published in the UK, this sizeable revamped new edition includes images of live asemic performances alongside over 100 visual poems divided, and introduced, in chapters. Asemic neurons butt up against poetic constellations, portraits and diagrams. The volume is bookended with new articles on the asemic endeavours of SJ Fowler from David MacLagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen and David Spittle, plus a written interview between Fowler and Zimzalla editor Tom Jenks. Click here for a sample.

Click here to buy for £11.99 in the UK.

I'm happy to announce the release of my latest visual poetry book, collecting the vast majority of my asemic writing in one beautifully produced volume. I had the best time working on this, developing the first edition, working with Tom Jenks. It means the world to me too that the volume is full of brilliant reflections on my scribbles by such luminaries in the asemic world - David Maclagan, Tim Gaze, Michael Jacobsen, they all influenced me a lot, and the long critical piece by David Spittle is brilliant. I spent all summer tinkering, theorising around these abstract writings, really working hard on my intros to each section, and this book is the result, a true consolidation of my travails into asemia

Published : Excerpts from I Will Show You The Life... on Mercurius

Very cool to have four poems from my book I WILL SHOW THE LIFE OF THE MIND (ON PRESCRIPTION DRUGS) published on Mercurius, a journal brilliantly edited by Thomas Helm here free and out like nowt. Please have a peek www.mercurius.one/home/i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs

These are four special texts, or rather excerpts (as the book is a poetic conceptual choose-your-own-adventure narrative with all text intermingled somewhat), as they include the book’s opening gambit, describing the human brain.

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.

Published : Zones of Darkness, on science writing and my book 'I will show you...'

I was sent this article by a friend, having not heard of its being written. It places my most recent book in its proper place - science writing on the brain, the hard problem of consciousness, experimentation as a purposeful means to get to insolvable problems of language - which is something that hasn’t happened too much, so it was gratifying to read. It mentions Francis Crick and Henri Michaux in the same article too, alongside analyses of Michael Pollen and Charles Murray, and then me. It’s an ambitious piece. More than this it contextualises the real issue of my book - the brain, the mind, what is happening to ours, our search in popular culture to engage / ignore this issue. Anyway, from Eric Jett, Zones of Darkness https://www.full-stop.net/2020/09/16/features/essays/jett/zones-of-darkness/

Published : Anthology, Arrival at Elsewhere

https://againstthegrainpoetrypress.wordpress.com/arrival-at-elsewhere

“In this book-length poem, curated by Carl Griffin, poets from across the world speak in one voice in response to 2020’s life-changing pandemic. Not a definitive voice, nor an authoritative one. But a contrasting, contradicting, confused voice, set both in the UK and everywhere else, represented by one narrator who, just like the rest of us, is made up of a hundred different people. A narrator cohesive only in his/her/their contemplation of Elsewhere. Elsewhere has arrived…to everyone affected by the Covid-19 pandemic – in aid of NHS Charities Together

THE POETS - Indran Amirthanayagam, Penny Boxall, Martyn Crucefix, SJ Fowler, Linda France, John Glenday, Rebecca Goss, Philip Gross, Rachel Hadas, Matthew Haigh, Sarah Hymas, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lorraine Mariner, Chris McCabe, Richie McCaffery, Michael McKimm, Jessica Mookherjee, Abegail Morley, Katrina Naomi, Sean O’Brien, Alasdair Paterson, Jeremy Reed, Eléna Rivera, Chrys Salt, Maria Sledmere, Julian Stannard, Alina Stefanescu, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Hideko Sueoka, George Szirtes, Helen Tookey, Bogusia Wardein and many many more

PUBLISHER NOTE - When the idea for this book was pitched to us it was still fairly early in the global Covid-19 pandemic. We were all still probably in a state of shock. All locked down, uncertain what was happening – we certainly felt we had landed in a new place. All three of us, like many poets, were unsure how to creatively assess this new situation. That’s why we wanted to support this book. A collaboration of sorts, a creation of a road through all the work of poets who contributed to its making and a maker who has sensitively crafted this winding path of a poem from all our tongues. We are happy to support this work and its intention to support the NHS. Abegail Morley, Karen Dennison and Jessica Mookherjee

Published : Maadlejad, my collection The Wrestlers, published in Estonian

The longest book of mine to be translated and published, my book The Wrestlers www.stevenjfowler.com/thewrestlers has been published in Estonian by the publishers ALLIKAÄÄRNE.

All is due to Mathura, the Estonian poet, who did the translations. The book is available here https://www.rahvaraamat.ee/p/maadlejad/1399151/en?isbn=9789949746804

I like that they put my face on the back cover and the book is designed beautifully. What more can you ask for? Big in the Baltic.

A note on : Poet's Poem Podcast on Edward Lear

click the image or link below to listen

A really good experience appearing on Mischa Foster Poole’s great new podcast series - Poet’s Poem - where he asks the guest to choose a poem which is then explored over an hour. Well I chose a poem not because I have expertise in it, but because I wanted to explore its context, knowing how clever Mischa is, and how much more skill he has at certain kinds of analysis than I.

I explain in the talk how I have recently realised that nonsense poetry in Victorian England may be another link in a tradition I find myself in, that is so obviously known to be unknown to me. In a sense this chat was a chance for me to proof that idea, a bit. The poem resonates with my interests a lot too - a kind of muted surrealism, a pessimism and the use of animal imagery (in my case to ironise the anthropocence - with Lear, Mischa and I happily disagree on why he throws in Walrus after Crab…)

Moreover I think we had fun doing this, having a laugh, and going, not by design, 90 minutes, rather than 60. Please do give it a listen and support Mischa’s podcast in the future too. https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-n23ni-e669e1

this amazing term list from the cast that mischa made says it alll

A note on : The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling...coming soon

I’ve put my heart in this one. So much of my lockdown summer has been thinking through asemic writing / poetry, what I’m doing, what it is, who has come before me. I’ve found so much work that was new to me and shared some things too, for example doing this online lecture for Arnolfini UWE for example.

This is a 2nd edition of a book published in 2018 with Tom Jenk’s longstanding and brilliant Zimzalla avant objects press. It’s become twice the size, multiple chapters of asemic poetry with introductions, over 100 works, plus appendices including essays by David Spittle, David MacLagan (who is an incredible figure in promoting outsider art ideas and scribbling - the pioneer, critically, of the field) and others, and a long interview.

This will be the 3rd in the poem brut series, but now the 5th.

It’s a great time to be sharing this book, which should be out late September, early October, and in the meantime, I’m encourage any purchases of the Zimzalla backcatalogue, which is extraordinary https://zimzalla.co.uk/

Published : Asemic poems for Love in the time of covid

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.”

A note on: Dan Power reviews I Will Show You ... at SPAM magazine

Very good of SPAM and Dan Power to offer this review of my book https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/

A few excerpts from the review, which can be found in full https://www.spamzine.co.uk/post/review-i-will-show-you-the-life-of-the-mind-on-prescription-drugs-by-sj-fowler

> Using the second person throughout, Fowler directly implicates you, the reader, in the story. He speaks as your mind speaks to you. Considering this book opens by addressing the unknowability of the mind, what’s surprising is how relatable so much of this is. Is there a universality to even the most intimate experiences that we might prefer to ignore? Are everyone’s anxieties and anguishes the same under late capitalism? Are we wired up to process life in symmetrical ways, or do the drugs standardize our experiences in-house, making ideas digestible and easily transferable, while at the same time neutralizing them?

> It’s also a choose-your-own-adventure! So Fowler gives us a sense of control, the option to use our unique and free decision-making skills to try and steer ourselves back into the light. Of course, this also means that every terrible thing that happens to you is your own fault, the result of poor decision making, of failing to understand the thing that lives inside your skull. But at least you’re free to choose.

> When Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of Deutschland’ is filtered through a mind on citalopram, lines from the seed poem blossom into new poems in the sequence. 'lean over an old / and ask / remember? / can you raise / the dead?' (p.29) is almost the ghost of a thought, coming in blips like a distant transmission. But even when the connection is shaky, the consciousness is definitely streaming. Fowler illuminates the structures of the brain not only through the structuring of the book, but through the deconstruction of the text. Ideas spark up and fizzle away, lines bleed into one another. Like the mind, language is an internalized and navigable structure. when one breaks down so does the other. definitions shift across words, syntax dissolves letters drawn to their nearest partners like magnets. disjointed ideas meet / neurons collide at random when their paths are eroded. incoherence, fractured and erratic decision making. brain structure determines bodily action determines brain structure. We are trapped in constant orbit of ourselves.

> The book is also very funny (I should have spent more time saying how funny it is), it’s wry and sharp in a way that allows you to chuckle with the protagonist at their terrible situation, and without undercutting any of the effect. It’s an infectious humour that’s both sincere and playful, frenzied in a way that lets it emerge seamlessly from the ever-changing currents. It does the essential job of keeping the reader afloat through turbulent waters. This book goes to places which are unstable, alarming, vacuumous, but never beyond seeing in a comic, self-deprecating, self-affirming light. Fowler grins into an abyss of his own making. He shouts into the book and the book echoes back, circles itself, ideas like pages are turned and turned over long after it’s concluded. You feel your brain sloshing about in your skull. It does a backflip.

A note on : Poetry of rearguard consciousness on The Learned Pig

The Learned Pig is a really considerable online journal and recently they’ve been publishing thematic issues. The latest is on Rhythm, edited by Rachel Goldblatt and I have a series of asemic poems in the issue. http://www.thelearnedpig.org/the-poetry-of-rearguard-consciousness/7780

I wrote “The scribble or scrawl is not a secondary product born of distraction, but a primary neurological output triggered when concentration moves downwards, expressing the minds fundamental rhythm of brain to hand movement. The poetry of rearguard consciousness, it is more often a product of writing than visual art. So why does poetry, the language art, not hold scribbling closer to its chest as a mediator of our internal writing rhythm?”

The work is taken from my upcoming book - The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler : Asemic Poems - to be published by ZimZalla. The work is a 2nd edition of a 2018 book but will be greatly expanded with over 100 works in a dozen asemic chapters plus lots of appendices like interviews and articles.

A note on : Dennis Cooper includes I will show you... on his favourite stuff of 2020

>>> https://denniscooperblog.com/mine-for-yours-my-favorite-fiction-poetry-non-fiction-film-art-and-internet-of-2020-so-far/

Dennis Cooper is someone I read when I first started reading novels at all. His George Miles Cycle (an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) where startling. I remember reading excerpts to a friend while he ate chips and startling him. He has been writing, editing, organising and supporting others for forty years plus. His recent rundown of novels, poetry collections, albums he's liked from 2020 so far included my book I will show you the life of the mind (On prescription drugs) from Dostoyevskay Wannabe, which is really gratifying. There’s some brilliant works on the list around my depressing book also https://www.amazon.co.uk/Will-Show-Life-prescription-drugs/dp/B0849T1PRK/

A note on : my writing for The Origin by Ben Judd at Stanley Picker

For the last six months or so I’ve been collaborating with the brilliant London-based artist Ben Judd. http://benjudd.com/ Ben very generously commissioned me to be part of his Stanley Picker Gallery Fellowship which is entitled The Origin. I’m writing new texts and engaging in others ways with Ben’s remarkable project, which will see a floating structure appear on the Thames. It’s a complex and generous enterprise, fundamentally about community, with more here… https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/exhibitions/theorigin/?_thumbnail_id=54880

The Origin will consider the importance of community within a large city and facilitate meaningful exchanges between strangers, aiming to reconnect people both to each other and to their environment. Prior to the physical version, an online version will run for six weeks throughout June and July on these pages.

For the online version, I am contributing works for one week, with writer’s I’ve asked, who often participate in Writers Centre Kingston (Julia Rose Lewis, Simon Tyrrell, Silje Ree, Maria Val De Los Rios) and writers from The Bradbury, an over 55s wellbeing centre in Kingston. Our texts are available to view here https://www.stanleypickergallery.org/uncategorised/week-2/