A note on : Film with Thomas Duggan at Montreal and Venice

IMG-20210201-WA0018.jpg

I had a glut of film work and collaborations in the latter half of 2020, due to obvious reasons. Trying to avoid the ubiquity and pseudo deadness of zoom teams skype, though it has its uses for chats, film is the best way to make work that can be shared at a remove. One of the films was made with my long-term collaborator Thomas Duggan, an artist, architect, designer based in Cornwall. He took a 16mm old camera up to the highlands and cut the footage into a poetic montage, this just at the time I was teaching tonnes of poetry film stuff, and so having pushed the more experimental potentials of the medium, I decided in this case, an separated exchange was the best route, where I write and record poetry to go with the images. When I teach I often mention this form as the standard for poetry films but its that for a reason.

The film is called HERE YOU WERE NEVER A CHILD. It has a soundtrack by The Dirty Three, which is remarkable, and a connection through Thomas. Happily, already, the film has been accepted for screening and competition at the Montreal Independent Film Festival and the Venice Short Film Festival.

A note on: Nemici, one of the finest Enemies, & the irrepressible Alessandro Burbank

I first met Alessandro Burbank in Venice, and did so under the auspice of his old world hospitality. To the restaurants without tourists, like me, to readings where Venetians made up the audiences. A man so Venetian precisely because others, because of his surname, that of an American father, marked him out as not quite Venetian. But if ever I’ve met a man who allowed me to rediscover, to understand for the first time, a city, it is Alessandro. And meeting him, through the Incroci di Voci project, curated by James Wilkes and Alessandro Mistrorigo, through chance operation and not a decided search is the way in which I met almost all the Italians involved in the Nemici project. All 12 of them, through readings, events, friends of friends. The plethora, the size of Italian poets, artists and writers doing interesting things across Europe, made itself known to me, and demanded an event to celebrate such intensity and variance. So the event itself proved, huge somehow, intensive, generous, hospitable, energetic. Over 100 people packed into the upper floors of the Rich Mix to witness 12 new collaborations from Italians and British based poets and artists, covering everything from performance, to video, to lyrical poetry and translation, to theatre. It was an event which almost precisely evidenced the reasons for Enemies, for its format – that collaboration pulls down singularity and subjectivity, makes people kinder, makes a community, that by celebrating a nation across nations in this way, nationalism dissipates and individuals true idiosyncracies and creativity comes to the fore, in structure as well as content. That people want to enjoy readings as events, as artworks, that they need to be curated as an exhibition would be, and that those involved should be asked on their attitude to the world as well as their work. The generous create waves of generosity through their work, and people leave feeling something special, but powerfully transient, has occurred. And that’s what happened on November 7th 2015, at the top of Brick Lane, where Alessandro and I took hold of the camera, translated each other through jargon and noise and I got to yell at him ‘you are a roman god’ with half-irony. You can check out all the videos http://www.theenemiesproject.com/nemici

la dominate: a collaboration with Ariadne Radi Cor on Cordite

the last of the five collaborations published as part of my feature for Cordite magazine, this work with Ariadne Radi Cor came about from our time together in Venice as part of the Crossing Voices project. She is an incredible artist and filmmaker - a live writer, a calligrapher, a poet. Her speed and tone are very complimentary to my own in their difference and singularity. Im so glad our creative relationship has continued on into this year, and this work, to be published in its full form for an anthology about Crossing Voices is a true collaboration, with a suite of my poems written for the task having been rendered beautiful by Ari's talents. http://cordite.org.au/poetry/collaboration/la-dominate/

Phonodia - my profile at the University of Venice poetry project

I am really honoured to now have a profile up on the Phonodia project, curated by the amazing Alessandro Mistrorigo and housed at the University of Venice. http://phonodia.unive.it/people/sj-fowler/

This brilliant project brings together a wide array of poets from around the world with beautifully rendered sound recordings of them reading their works alongside the texts.

You can see from the site just how many really great poets are featured, and I got to do these recordings when visiting Venice for the Crossing Voices project earlier in the year. Another wonderful by product of that amazing project, if you click on my profile, you can hear a variety of my work from across from different books.