My dear friend morten langeland and I did a version of this once before and had planned to maybe work this out for norwich until, unfortunately, he missed his flight like a cheeky poet. So I furiously spent the afternoon nicking and tidying the idea into a piece I could do solo. It was alright. What I really aimed to do was to open up a perhaps slightly more cautious audience than those we faced in London. I knew some of the poet performers who followed my opening remarks would be playing hard with what some people take to be live poetry so if this conceptual poem intro could set a tone, that would be a success for me, as an organiser poet. In the end, it seemed to land fine and was glad I did it, though I nearly didn’t right up until the last second.
EPF 2019 Event #7 - The Norwich Camarade in Dragon Hall (April 12th)
I was so happy with the works, attendance and energy of this event. We were welcomed really energetically and sincerely by the ever generous folks behind the National Centre for Writing, Peggy Hughes, Chris Gribble et al, and we all felt really supported, so many of us travelling in, and many poets actually arriving at the fest for this event. This was all furthered by the near 100 people who came out to the beautiful Dragon Hall on a Friday night. A very impressive turnout.
In terms of the pairs and works, I think we achieved a good balance of the European and the locals, many from a new generation of poets, leaning into experimentation. It was inevitably a more literary and measured happening than previous london gigs, but quite right too, it felt fresh for that contrast and everyone stayed together post reading for a midnight curry in a suprisingly purple norwich friday night city centre. / All the videos and more https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/norwich
EPF 2019 Performance #6 - Water Rituals with Krisjanis Zelgis
I’m proud of this one. Krisjanis and I had met just once before, got on very well but have notably different aesthetics, and yet weput this together on the day, meeting an hour or so before, with the poems being written in the week before. It captured something beyond itself, the resonance of the symbolism, the christian pagan water rituals, which was perhaps intended as irony, but came through partially sincere, surprised us both, I think, during and afterwards. It felt succinct and alive. It was something that opened up a proper friendship between us, as these collaborations so often do. And for me personally, what could be a more fitting personal farewell to London after this amazing week than having a latvian poet shampoo my hair on kingsland road?
EPF 2019 Event #6 - Latvian poetry in collaboration at Burley Fisher (April 11th)
An absolutely packed Burley Fisher bookshop on Kingsland road, this event had its own character entirely, with a completely different tone and energy to the previous festival events. It was really distinct, the bookshop brought everyone into such proximity, it insisted on attention. The project itself was brought into being by the deeply welcome enthusiasm of the Latvian Literature staff, Inga Vareva and Ildze Jansone especially, and we had the luxury of four new collaborations driving the event. I had tried to make this event more literary, more communal, more local, and to open with short solo readings by lots of the visiting poets, as it was also the sendoff to London for the festival after a really rapid and brilliant seven days. All told, it couldn’t have gone better. Every reading and more pics are available here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/latvia
EPF 2019 Performance #5 - The Next Step with Fabian Faltin
This is definitely in the top five best performances / collaborations I’ve done. And performance is what I’ve been working at the hardest the last few years, and collaboration the last 6 or 7. Fabian was extraordinary. We had met just the day before to put it together, in my studio, discovering and discussing a myriad of topics and possibilities. I was fascinated by the similarities in our overall concerns and the specific connections we have in performance style and concept, because of details in our lives, how we both found ourselves in this field. This kind of kinship, very unusual given how strange both of our work is, can make a mess, it’s a danger. It can create excess. So we worked hard in creating a shell and a set of roots for the performance, and then just improvised it. So much of Fabian’s work is so brilliant precisely because it utilises poetic, literary and performance methodology to explore that which is absolutely not connected to any of these things. This is something I also seek, to use these artforms as means of exploration, as context, not content. To scavenge and pick up with the tools, but not look at the tool themselves, in our hands. In the end we both felt an ironised but sincere engagement with masculinity was fitting and due as a subject matter, as a response to other works during the fest and general discussions around our own works and lives. Lots could be written about this, but perhaps another time, and to let the work itself speak. People’s response to it has been really gratifying, especially on the night but also since it took place. Fabian and I hope to use this as a beginning, rather than a finished dialogue. / and more of my writing on the fest at www.stevenjfowler.com/epf19
EPF 2019 Event #5 - Austrian poetry in collaboration at ACF (April 10th)
The ACF have been my biggest supporter in these European themed events over the last many years. I owe them a lot. I always want the events they host during the fest, and in general, to be special. Last year’s EPF ACF event was packed and very memorable. Somehow we topped it. This really was a satisfying night for me, to be 5 events in, with standing room only every night, and to witness, arguably, the most intense event happen beneath a chandelier in Knightsbridge. It’s proof of the festival being important / appealing, I think.
We had a set of solo readings by european poets, some weird powerful stuff from Keti Chukhrov, Andrea Stepec, Kon Papacharalampos et al, followed by three considerable collaborations. Really worth looking up the performances and more pics at https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/austria
EPF 2019 Performance #4 - Questions of Neutrality with Patrick Savolainen
I was very satisfied with this collaboration, not only given that Patrick and I wrote and planned it entirely on the day, but that it emerged, live, as far more subtle, layered, and playful than we could’ve thought. My instinct is often, in these events, to resist the entirely written, given liveness is a material, but it was such a good move to root this work in a text, and then to formulate it, first with my suggestion that we explore the theme of Neutrality and then with Patrick’s that we make it a strange, blunted and open ended Questionnaire. The final touches of the mimicry and dead pan gestures closed things perfectly. / more of my writing on the fest at www.stevenjfowler.com/epf19
EPF 2019 Event #4 - Swiss Poetry in collaboration at Poetry Cafe (April 8th)
An event to remember, entirely stuffed with people, we crammed nearly 100 into the basement venue of the Poetry Society, it’s cafe, in Covent Garden, for an event long mooted and brought together, thanks to Pro Helvetia and the team at Literally Swiss in London, finally, for the fest. Five new collaborations were at the core of the night, with six Swiss poets, that followed short solo readings by various poets visiting for the fest.
The range was really distinct, most especially across the collaborations, which were absorbed as representations of friendship and strangeness, which depicting the relations of the two poets in poetry and were embraced as this, in both directions. From Pantano and Fehr, close friends, but who mashed up entirely unconnected works, to Steinbeck and Calleja, close friends, who read diaries about first meetings of each other, to the clinical irony of Savolainen and I, to the fused fiction of Addonia and Bianconi, it was fascinating to watch these readings connected in one evening.
All the videos and loads more amazing pictures by Alexander Kell https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss and more of my writing on the fest at www.stevenjfowler.com/epf19
EPF 2019 Performance #3 and a half - Being asked to choke Ida, Astra and Lina
Of course poets know if I do choke them, they will survive. I must take it as a compliment that someone would put their neck in my hands, and thus I was asked twice, two nights running, while organising / announcing / performing to also stand up, during performances, in Ida’s case without any warning, completely improvised, and either slap on a rear naked choke or hold a pink rope around two poets’ necks.
With Astra and Lina, I really didn’t have to do much but not look like a douchebag. With Ida, who read part of a nighttime correspondence we had been writing since connecting last summer in macedonia, it was resisting the temptation to gently guide her into soft darkness. Some beautiful pictures of the act by Alexander Kell too.
EPF 2019 #5 : Event #3 - Celebrating sound and performance at Iklectik Artlab (April 7th)
Three events in, returning to the magical Iklectik artlab, which I find easy to find, but others must search to discover, hidden in plain sight, but intimate and unique, wedged between Lambeth and Waterloo. Last year’s sunday night performance event here was grand, this one was better. Another full house, packed out with people, standing room only. Over a dozen new live works made for the night, from poets from every corner of Europe. It was a really easy, energised and playful night, it really followed the camarade so well, and evidenced how important working with the actual material of liveness in contemporary poetry is a concern for those making the exciting work in the continent now. Moreover the fusion and range from the purely conceptual, to the talking performances, to the tech enhanced, to the sound orientated and language concerned - there is so much happening in this field right now and it’s why I put this event on, though it’s a hard one to curate and manage. Worth checking out all the performances.
All the videos are available https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/performance and some beautiful pictures by Alexander Kell as ever before.
EPF 2019 #4 - Performance #2 : collaborating with Maja Jantar
Maja Jantar is an inspiring poet and artist, a considerable influence on my work. She is as uniquely talented as she is a pleasure to be around. I began collaborating with her years ago to learn, actively, as a form of pedagogy. So it was special to work with her on this enormous Camarade event, with a mass audience and so many peers around.
We shaped something which lay between our two areas of performance, with my yapping conceptual improv turns and Maja’s remarkable sound song tech nobility regal dramaturgy. We unveiled a giant handwritten poem and shaped it like architecture before blinding dancing around the place. It was an hour long piece shaved into 9 minutes and the product of a real friendship for me.
EPF 2019 #3 : Event #2 - The behemoth ... The European Camarade (April 6th)
I think it’s the biggest event I’ve ever put on. Near 200 people. 34 poets, 17 performances. 17 new collaborative live works. Folks travelling in from all over Europa. It was massive and loopy and exciting and easy and fun.
A giant proof of concept, not only for the collaborative methodology with poetry but also the focus on what’s happening now in poetry in Europe. Very few of the poets were from London of course, so it was the concept that brought people in, it would seem, and this energy, this enthusiasm, really encouraged play and experimentation in the works themselves.
In a way, everytime such a seething happening takes place with my events I feel surprised and validated. These things are not to be taken for granted. 2020 will be ten years for me curating live poetry, at the Rich Mix too. To have evenings like this, so memorable and yet still ephemeral and experimental, it’s a really considerable thing. / All the videos are https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade19
EPF 2019 #2 - Performance #1 : Euroobear
My small short talking performance for the first EPF event was a celebration of the entity that is eurobear. I tried to stick to my recent constraint of pure improvisation, having a familiar / object / prompt, and then just aiming to elucidate some random talking poetics from it / on it. It was funny doing it with my friend eurobear, as I had planned to be souffle light but once i was talking I had to finish early because darkness began spilling from me mouth. I think my desire to hide my opinions was becoming perforated around my own festival, that people now use europe, being pro europe, as an armour, at times. As though it makes them good because they like Europe. Europe of war, Europe of etc… Euroobear saves though.
EPF 2019 #1 : Event ~1 - Opening the festival in Kingston (April 4th)
A brilliant opening to the 2019 European Poetry Festival. This fest has become my primary focus in curating live literature, and it has been the source joy for me, bringing so many brilliant poets to the UK, hosting them, showing hospitality, coming up with new ways to make live poetry happen, to write more, to collaborate, to build a cross continental community, to make friendships that are active, kind and lead to new ideas and travels. This event was a chance to overlap my work at Kingston Uni, and directing the Writers’ Centre of the university, with the festival. The focus was Norwegian poetry, and we launched four brand new books, translations and first time publications, amidst readings by visiting and local Europoets. The Rose Theatre room was packed out, full housed, which is not easy to do. The beautiful pictures by Alexander Kell below attest to how lovely the night was. Loads more info and videos www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/wck
Published : Nemesia #5 with Morten Langeland
BRIEF AND INACCURATE NOTES ON SLOVENIAN POETS (2019)
Very cool to have fifth instalment of my series of new collaborations with European Poets up on the unusually gregarious spanish online journal Wazo. https://www.wazogate.com/nemesia-5-brief-and-inaccurate-notes-on-slovenian-poets-2019/
We wrote this work in Ljubljana earlier in 2019 and will return to it, in an entirely new guise in just a week or so in Norwich.
Published : The Dot and The Void - an article on social media
Published by Versopolis in their e-book Anti Social Media, free to download and read read https://www.versopolis.com/multimedia/ebook/720/versopolis-ebook-anti-social-media An excerpt from my contribution below
“Constrain your linguistic and pictorial experience of existence into one dimension, and that’s just to begin with. This is of course, normal, for most. Adding a second dimension can be troubling. Opening the cover to a pit you might fall into. Do some even have that pit to worry about? Maybe it’s for them to choose, or maybe it chooses them.
I have a memory that comes back to me often, from when I was a child. Someone older is speaking as though I were also an adult. They express envy towards those who can be happy with simplicity. This recollection is pierced by watching a couple at a restaurant, both on their phones.
The endless idiosyncratic experience of existence in one dimension. It can be perfectly flat. You cannot even perceive its flatness. That’s how flat it can be. Now we can try and make the surface area of that expression as small as possible upon that which is flatter than flat. We do this not for the virtue of its smallness, what we might call restraint, rather than constraint. Not for minimalism’s sake either. Not to ally ourselves with the profundity of simplicity, for that is far rarer than people like to admit. Most often simplicity is stupidity. Stupidity is reduction. Stupidity is taking that which is innately complicated and forcing to not be so. Stupidity is not knowing what we do not know. What appears simple, is not, and that which is proud of its simplicity, outwardly, garishly, is actually the course of someone, something, which does not have the capacity, or the inclination towards labour, experience, growth, sacrifice, to be complex.
Complexity is the shape of the jug. Water can only fill that which it is poured into. There is always a receptacle. We choose our vessel.
So, we have more humans being on the planet than ever before. Double since the mid-70s. Many times more than ever before.
So, we have expression in one dimension and it’s within a small space. Everyone can join in now. Everyone can have at this space. It’s easy to carry around with you. Here, in our space, everyone is equal. Equality in this space. An addictive equality one might not think possible. For example, if life seems never equal, at its root level, historically, essentially, consciously, then perhaps this equality – the equality of the small, flat space - might be illusory? No.
The small space is addictive, perhaps, because it is unreal? Not to be taken seriously. We’ve been here before though. Something to get you through the night. What’s the eventual consequence of the prescription drug that saves your life on the night you need it? What if you might’ve survived anyway? No space for small regret in the small space. Keep on tweeting.
One day, in 2020, we all wake to the death of the internet. I’ll have plans.
Oswald Spengler’s highly popular theory began a whole branch of sociological and historical thought, that human history is cyclical. That it is arrogance to imagine we are evolving in an upward curve. Around the corner, then, for us, is more autocracy. Dictatorship. War. These are our histories. The populace, on social media, during a world war. Imagine. Spengler predicted, specifically, that around the millennium, Western civilization would enter its death throes and on the edge of complete annihilation, we’d have to put in place a kind of Platonic benevolent overlord, to rebalance what is best about our societies. Maybe a group of people, Oswald? Maybe a conglomerate, or a corporation? They are popular, aren’t they? The argument of quality through popularity. This is the best thing because it was bought most. Though wildly popular in his day, Spengler was dismissed as an amateur and his theory unscientific.
Puritanism, filling the space provided for it, as a return. Those who think themselves good are ready to do battle with those they think bad. What kind of battle? Not physical, it’s a phone, it’s a computer. Glass houses remain intact, amazingly. As does the small space, flattening still. One might even observe it getting smaller. So small, in fact, that it squeezes itself into a tiny ball. We’re into microscope territory.
Spengler also said, ‘Optimism is cowardice’. “
To read the full essay visit here please https://www.versopolis.com/multimedia/ebook/720/versopolis-ebook-anti-social-media
A note on : The Soul Referendum - a performance with Iris Colomb
The second phase of my otherworldly collaboration with Iris Colomb took place at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury. With complete autonomy of will a month or so ago Iris volunteered to sell me her soul for a tenner in Surbiton. Since then I’ve been holding it close to my heart. She has made continued attempts to drag my horns through the european legal system and win it back on a technicality. This performance was the culmination of that….
A note on: the not-Brexit Camarade at Gulbenkian Foundation
Had a blast opening the unofficial program of the European poetry festival 2019 on the night that was supposed to be the official brexit date in Canterbury, Kent. The Gulbenkian is a special place, a theatre and arts centre on the local uni campus and I brought some local poets and many Euros from London to the cafe space where we presented six new collaborations in pairs. All the videos can be found https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/gulbenkian
Plenty of highlights, great to see my old friends, two of the most underrated poets in the UK, Stephen Emmerson and Lucy Harvest Clarke, along with some of the UK’s best non-UK writers like Theo Chiotis, Simona Nastac et al. I also had a blast helping Astra Papachristodoulou and Michal Piotrowski out of their performance with scissors upon tape. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0taEQOyG4vk&t=1s
A note on: Liberated Voice exhibition opens at Palais de Tokyo
I’m very lucky to have a sound poem in this exhibition, which recounts the great poets and works of the history of the field in Paris and runs from 22/03/2019 to 12/05/2019. Check it out if you’re in francais. Pics from the opening below https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/en/event/liberated-voice
A note on: A performance for those who pretend to have read
Another talking performance I came up with on the day, a stricture I’ve been putting myself through for over a year now, to maintain a sense of liveness and improvisation and roughness.
This time I had only in mind that Krasznahorkai is indeed an author that everyone pretends to have read but hasn’t, especially in the bourgeois london circles, and I also had some props, which is cheating. A spider. Some weird mirror paper that makes the looker look. A pirate costume.
It went alright. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/europeanwriters
