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.
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.
Happy to have a new work in the second Mellom Press online exhibition, curated by Silje Ree. Some excellent visual works in there, worth a look, on the theme of home. https://mellompress.com/home/ My work is about where I grew up, Exeter.
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.
I’m lucky fish to be part of the Arnolfini and UWE supported Centre for Fine Print Research book and print summer festival https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/book-and-print-summer-festival-2020/ I am presenting a video talk on Asemic poetry with some prompts to make asemic poems as the festival is all online due to obvious reasons! The programme is various and good and runs Monday 20 July to Sunday 2 August with “a series of free talks and things to do or listen to, and some creative challenges set by our CPD summer school artists and poets. CFPR staff will also be hosting some free talks to dip into.”
Vik Shirley is a poet whom I think is proper good. Vik recently released a really good thing, called Corpses, from Sublunary Editions and I happily wrote about it. https://sublunaryeditions.com/?product=Corpses
"What is the word for the end of our bodies? What is the sound of the corp singing? Vik Shirley is really such a brilliant writer to be able to evoke the absurdity of what death might be, beyond us, beyond what we can conceive, and what language might do with that, in such a darkly funny, wry, vivid set of poetic texts. This is doing the work poetry needs to be doing, its about language itself as much as it about the absurdity of our own physical lives and non-lives."
Vik also did an interview with another excellent poet Matt Haigh where she generously mentioned my interest in actually funny poetry https://www.matthewhaigh.net/vik-shirley
Your most recent chapbook is Corpses from Sublunary Editions. Corpses is a pretty dark title for a poetry collection. What would you say is the role of poetry that is perhaps darker in tone than the usual declarations of love or breathlessness at nature?
People expect poetry to be about love or breathlessness at nature and that stereotype makes my skin crawl. Working against that expectation is what interests me, whether that's Matthew Welton's series on colour, in the style of university marking schemes, or Gabriel Guddings' poem 'On the Rectum of Peacocks'. There was something that Steven Fowler was discussing in his Lunar Poetry interview last year, about certain bands of aesthetics that are often missing in poetry, one being 'genuinely funny poetry', as opposed to unfunny, supposedly 'comic' poetry, the other being negative aesthetics, the equivalent of a horror film in poetry, something that makes you feel 'bad as a pleasure'. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about being human. There is something undoubtedly grotesque about the world we live in …
2020 - £10.00 Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 210 x 148mm, 60pp
Produced to a remarkable standard, a volume of 50 original art-poems, written entirely with crayons. The books is closed with a new essay, explaining why it exists. An excerpt = “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?”
From the publisher “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. In an intrepid interrogation of what it is to write, SJ Fowler’s art poetry collection offers a take on childish play and death’s tenacity that is compelling in its abjection. A cheeky nod to the unknowable, it is a gift you don’t want but should be grateful for. Fowler’s colourful crayons, like the bird’s intestines, are bodily, fascinating and undeniable.”
These poems overflow the pool and belch broken pinwheels and algae blooms. They originate the faces and traces of those dreams that wake me. The ones I cannot describe to the adults around me. My lack of words or the words they have over me. Hold a crayon one day and convey. Here there is no illegible or illiterate. Kim Campanello
SJ Fowler's Crayon Poems enter the realm of hauntology, a special place in which the sensible child finds expression in the day-dreaming adult. This line of Electronic Voice Phenomena is sketched into cardiogram in shaky and colourful wax. Who says the colours of Crayola are just for the under-tens? Chris McCabe
The fifth book in my Poem Brut series. www.stevenjfowler.com/artbooks The book was released with a special podcast by Penteract Press, between editor Anthony Etherin and I. https://penteractpress.com/p-p-p/2020/7/5/episode-10-sj-fowler-crayon-poems-launch
Was really happy to contribute to this extraordinary resource on the brilliant Photo Pedagogy project exploring Photo Poetry. https://www.photopedagogy.com/photopoetry.html
The site is for teachers of photography who are happy to share aspects of their practice. The site is about the art (and science) of photography teaching. And what an incredible job Jon Nichols has done with the Photo Poetry section. Really it’s more comprehensive than my resources, which I developed for the Photographer’s Gallery and currently have a 100 slide powerpoint from I subject some students too. It really is worth a dig.
“The term 'photopoetry' and its various alternatives - photopoème, photoetry, photoverse, photo-graffiti etc. - attempts to describe an art form in which the poetry and photography are equally important and, often, directly and symbiotically related…. These correspondences between photography and poetry are brought into sharp relief by photopoetry - specific examples of published collaborations between photographers and poets (sometimes the same person). Writer and artist S. J. Fowler describes the challenge of exploring photopoetry as follows:
To begin, we must ask ourselves what these mediums actually are, at heart, and then what they can be together? Finally, what is the purpose of their combination? What can they do together? And why is it relatively rare to see a cohesive combination of the two - with fidelity to poetry that isn’t just text, or discourse, or opinion, and photography that isn’t just pictorial?
-- S. J. Fowler
I have no love for tweeter, as mentioned on this podcast recently https://www.buzzsprout.com/834940/4443374, but, arguably, needs must. In the time of lockdown then launches of a sort must be digital. Anthony Etherin of penteract suggested we do a tweeter live to launch my CRAYON POEMS and I was willing. A lot of the questions and answers are here www.stevenjfowler.com/crayons but a few choice morsels…
To celebrate the launch of my new book CRAYON POEMS with PENTERACT PRESS, editor of the press Anthony Etherin and I had our second podcast conversation. It’s a grand one I think, open and relaxed and covering some new ideas.
Join us on Twitter, at 7pm UK time, Thursday July 9th, to help launch the book: Ask questions about the book, about topics raised in this podcast, and about poetry/publishing in general, using the hashtag #PenteractChat. https://penteractpress.com/p-p-p/2020/7/5/episode-10-sj-fowler-crayon-poems-launch
Paul Hawkins is one of the most interesting poets working in the UK and really a fundamental part of the Poem Brut project www.poembrut.com For the new year of poem brut I wanted to offer some commissions with those who had become deeply involved in the work - exploring method and mess, the mind and brain - but to make the nature of those commissions completely as open as the content of them. Paul, characteristically, used his to create a new set of workshops with Bristol based mental health organisation Second Step. It makes me proud that this is part of poem brut, and has happened just because it should, and not with some overt gesture. Paul is authentic is he is anything, and that’s why I admire him.
You can find out more about these workshops and second step here https://www.second-step.co.uk/wellbeing-college-blogs-poems-without-words-celebrating-vibrancy-scribbling-scrawling/ and attached is a work made by one of the people, Allison, who attended Paul’s sessions.
It natural to feel many of things one has done have been somewhat overlooked, but in the case of EUROPOE - an anthology of contemporary European poetry I edited in 2019 stevenjfowler.com/europoe - that is mostly my fault. It was intended as a compliment to my festival europeanpoetryfestival.com and not a comprehensive document in anyway. But it ended up being pretty ambitious, really bringing together a vast array of poets and poetries, from language to conceptual, visual, asemic and more. I feel quite proud of it, but putting it out very limited edition with Kingston University Press, who don’t really trade beyond the academic regions, was setting myself up for overlookedness. The poets in it seemed happy though. A few copies went out recently and one of the recipients was the excellent Cumbrian-based poet Andrew Hopkins, who wrote a really considered / considerable response or review, which is worth and a read and can be found andyhopkinspoet.wordpress.com/2020/07/08/europoe/
Back in the old world, when travelling was almost too easy, I had the pleasure of organising a Camarade event, and doing an hour long solo performance, at the Paviljonas Book Weekend in Vilnius, Lithuania. That was thanks to Ausra Kazilunaite, and I took some videos and shared them, but the brilliant conceptual poet Benediktas Januševičius also took better videos and they have been shared, and are also on what seems to be a Lithuanian TV station too. The Camarade included some fascinating collaborations so they are all worth a butchers here http://tekstai-tv.lt/naujiena/camarade-vakaras
My collaboration with Žygimantas Kudirka, whom I met years ago for a gig in London, was also pretty fun I think >>>
Nice to be a part of this, Nineteenth Circle https://www.nineteenthcircle.co.uk/ - a group of 19th Century-specialist performers who are producing a variety of interesting projects to expand interest, range and complexity in the canon of the 19th c - are doing video readings with artists, musicians and writers with their favourite letters from the time period. They asked me, very generous, and I chose the famous letter Johanna Schopenhauer wrote to her son Arthur, basically calling one of the intellectual giants of the modern age an annoying, big-headed jessop. I like this letter so much because Schopenhauer is the thinker who switched my focus to serious reading and thinking beyond instinct and conformity, and who put me into philosophy as an undertaking. Yet, within a few years, I had given that up, and it was precisely because of what was intimated in this letter. There is lived wisdom and there is a intellectual brilliance. It is a balance, I think. But I met, and perhaps was myself, lots of young Schopenhauers, who were very clever but not very clever. Schopenhauer’s philosophy is monumental, it changed the world, its influence on say Freud and Wittgenstein alone altered the modern mind, but that didn’t stop him being, when young, a proper fish. Lessons to learn.
Nemeses - my selected collaborations 2014-2019 - was produced really so brilliantly by Haverthorn press, and editor Andrew Wells. It was published beautifully in late 2019 and 8 months on, I couldn’t be happier with it. To keep a little fire burning on the volume, Haverthorn have published the essay I wrote for the rear of the book online as a pdf. Below is the beginning of the essay where I discuss the bind of writing of complex work and expecting it to be popular or well known, and why poetry might appear to be a singular art when it ain’t. Full essay can be read Nemeses+essay.pdf
The book is available https://www.haverthorn.com/books/nemeses-selected-collaborations-of-sj-fowler-volume-2
“One can have friends without wanting to see them.”
Charles Lamb
A problem shared is a problem doubled unless the problem is an essential and painful truth, that is awful, until it is inspiring, when experienced, in shared recognition, with other human animals. Can you achieve this anti-alienation of making things in writing poems? If you like.
Doing poetry can be proper lonely for reasons quite different than what many people seem to think. You hear people parrot on about the solitude of writing, as though the act itself were unusually isolated, or that the ways and means of creating or editing a poem require a removal of not just the body and the mind, but the soul. Everything that requires concentration is lonely. Everything worthwhile requires such attention. That’s how taste and skill is made.
The unusual monoculture of poetry is a stereotype responsible for quite a good deal of bad poetry. Poetry is less remote than fiction say, taking a comparison in the same field, for arguments sake. You don’t have to spend hours alone in your room on a computer to write a poem. No, poetry is lonely for me because of the very specific 21st century milieu. Poetry is out of these times, no matter what anyone says. It is a thing without market force, which allows it to create weird contextual manipulations of what quality is, and more importantly, it really really requires concentrated affirmative attention to be enjoyed as both writer and reader. No big deal, but we are in an era when everyone’s brain is morphed up by rapidity. This is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is bad for good poetry….
This is why a lot of (not all) ‘popular’ poetry is now resting upon a strong biographical context and why all the articles about poetry’s popularity mostly won’t mention with whom it is popular and what kind of poetry it is that’s popular. That’s not just because the journalists tend to not know there are types of poetry. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. It’s simply the world has changed around the poem and the poem can only change so much. It can only be so accessible when it is good. It cannot convince like the cinema, say, at its lowest common denominator.
All this means, fundamentally, and reasonably, no matter how much work you put into writing things that are not boring and predictable and sentimental, things that are concerned with language itself, and what has come before, and how unimaginably complex, mysterious and difficult existence and language is, and no matter how good you get at performing those things, in public, to audiences, virtually no one can care. That’s obvious though, isn’t it? Isn’t that a good thing overall? To know you are out of that kind of pursuit of success? Most of the time it is a blessing. Sometimes it makes you feel lonely. Hacking away at a seam somewhere remote, not wanting to make virtue of obscurity, not wanting to be swimming in language plastic with extreme artificiality either, and not wanting to court academic or tribal support systems of insulation and deluded bitterness, and yet, still being unable to swallow the anti-intellectual and sentimental thrust that dominates, without a common-sense quality control, the artform in your nation. You’re stuffed really, if you want something other than your own little trough. But again, what can one reasonably expect? To write difficult, strange, hermetic, coded, weird books and expect them to appeal to readers? Funny when I say it like that.
How could a poet from a Slavic country hope for anything more than a chamber audience confined to a few universities? We all entertain our illusions, but not when they overstep the bounds of reason.
Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Prize for literature
I’ve contradicted myself, and truly, I don’t want a lot of people to care, that’s inevitable with what I’m interested in and given the way people are, but this all provides a problem that must be solved. How does one create meaning, purpose, motivation, even joy, pleasure, excitement, working away at a medium that can feel repetitive and pointless (knowing it is supposed to)?……………………………. The essay continues, please read on Nemeses+essay.pdf
One of the best asemic journals in the world, out of Berlin, beautifully rendered, edited so well by Federico Federici, Antonio Diavoli, Nika Turbina all visible online here https://leserpent.wordpress.com/2020/06/22/die-leere-mitte-issue-6/
Three new asemic poems from me
dog’s eye
dog’s portal
dog’s shadow monster
This is a link to the issue directly also https://ia601500.us.archive.org/34/items/dlm6_20200621/Issue%206.pdf
Cool to be in there alongside John Bennett too, a legend.
Julia Rose Lewis has given me a gift I have never received before. Her new book, High Erratic Ecology from Knives Forks and Spoons press, is a new kind of poetry thing, and does me great honour by including a poem of mine, I think, and at times, documents Julia and I’s connection, correspondence, poetic exchanges over the last years.
Julia is one of the best poets working in the UK and America that I’ve been reading since I’ve been reading. She helped as many peers and friends as I have tried to do. Her and I have often lapsed into writing email poems to each other, without design. In this new book she has created something which is a singular collection, a collaborative book, an epistolary email prose poem abstract novel and a diaristic, ekphrastic reflection. It’s all of these things and none. And a lot of my concerns, and some performances, as a poet, find their way in and around the very distinct voice Julia has. It makes me actually feel some of my stuff has been worthwhile. Makes me feel my poetic friendships are sincere. I’m proud to be connected into this book. Wonderful it was to read. My words about Julia’s work is on the back of the book too, and at the book link
(Here is my poem in the book also…)
My third time moderating the Korean Culture Centre UK’s Literature Nights. It’s a gig that makes me appreciate where my wide ranging interests, methods, activities sometimes takes me. To be asked to deep read such brilliant books, come up with questions for mostly non-specialist participants, people who are just interested in Korean culture, and then talk about these books, for a few hours, is really such a pleasure. This time, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, as excellent at Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death and Han Kang’s The White Book. Choi’s book is powerful, deeply affecting, but also methodologically remarkable, blending commentary and poetry with found materials, photographs, documents, collage and more. It’s a rare book where method and meaning are in synch. / This session was really mellow, generous, unpretentious but really attentive. It was a boiling hot day and all of us, all 18 of our faces in squares on zoom, wilted and shared thoughts on the work. / Also if you are in London, really worth checking out https://kccuk.org.uk/en/
Filming again, Tereza Stehlikova and I’s film about disappearing / terraformed West London, and its mysteries, continues to grow, this time in the glowing boil of a heatwave. We were joined with others for this day, which is a rarity. www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood
I’ve been in residence with J&L Gibbons for six years now, that is to say I have built a wonderful friendship with landscape architects Jo Gibbons and Neil Davidson, and their team, over many years. We meet occasionally and they lay out all their remarkable work for me, bringing me into their processes, their conceptual thinking, their pragmatic practise - their constant efforts to think laterally and liminally with the design and shape of the places we live. They are inspiring people - outgoing, passionate, tireless, considered and considerate. Rarely do I meet people operating at such a high level of effect on the world around us who are never lost within a private professional culture or other personal motivation by the very demands of that work. (Worth checking out their new website too https://jlg-london.com/Practice)
Introducing Tereza and Jo and Neil a few years ago led to some grand moments, most especially in Kensal Green Cemetery and The Garden Museum, so it was natural we would get together to film. We met at Willesden Junction, traced Scrubs Lane down past towering new high rise flats, named Notting Hill Genesis - the beginning of all things. The new development Oold Ooak continues to grow, ebbing over the west lands, clearing space, jutting up into skylines. No Trellick Towers in stone, just rows of glassy plastic flats coming together, built by workers who poured through the lockdown still labouring at risk. Thousands of new homes coming, the HS2 burrowing underneath. Haunts now becoming glossy magazines alive, stuffed full of more people where there is now nearly no one. But us. We joined Wormwood Scrubs at its most northwestern tip, the scrubland as persuasive, quiet, welcoming and atmospheric as ever, before coming back to the grand union canal to finish. It’s a route I must’ve walked 300 times or more. Never with my friends, capturing snippets of conversation, knowing one day the brief connections will be part of the greater whole Tereza and I have been building
The second edition of the Mercuries series which focuses on a single performance work of mine. I do these performances with so much intensity, they drain, and then, by their very nature, they fly by, to the next one, until one day no more will come. Being in lockdown, redoing my website, I’ve had a moment to see how many I’ve done, to try and fix them as not so ephemeral in my mind. This series on the Barcelona based journal Mercurius helps with that https://www.mercurius.one/home/mercuries-2-one-hour-in-vilnius
This one is on the highlights of a one hour performance I gave in Vilnius, on the invitation of the brilliant Ausra Kaziliunaite
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/
