Great to have some new asemic poems in the Australian based online journal Authora.
The poems were featured in my early 2019 February exhibition at Avivson gallery, responding to Henri Michaux’s work in their collection.
https://www.authora.net/artworks/empty-spaces/steven-j-fowler
I’m in the art section, but the poetry section has some grand stuff, including Andrew Taylor https://www.authora.net/issueone
The magic Klangfarbentext (www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/klangfarbentext )festival in Munich that I was part of and helped create earlier this year continues to get good coverage and have a lasting impact. It was, already at a six month remove, an important happening for us to recount what concrete poetry is in the 21st century. The paper deutschland funk has this slightly funny article up https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/erstes-festival-fuer-visuelle-poesie-worte-wie-gemaelde.691.de.html?dram:article_id=471898 It contains audio toooo
“Participation was the focus of the first British-German festival for visual poetry, which was jointly organized by the British Council and the Lyrik-Kabinett. One of the moderators was Steven J. Fowler, who carried colorful letters with him in a fanny pack. He laboriously unpacked it on stage, then washed it in a bowl with gurgling mineral water to finally form the word “troublemaker”, troublemaker - an allusion to Brexit?
“Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Steven Fowler and after having been mentioned so many times I am sure to be a disappointment to you. We are now experiencing twelve very short performances by the aforementioned poet teams who will be here for the next three days and create “sound colors text”. If I weren't one of them myself, I would be sorry for them because they now have to follow up on Eugen's incredible twenty-minute performance. We're all ruined now because you were so good. "
An online course beginning September 14th 2020, running for seven weeks. £200. All information & booking at www.poembrut.com/courses
What are the possibilities of poetry on the page, or screen, beyond, or expanding with, its semantic content? Far from being a domain of contemporary experimentation in marginal literatures, what we know as visual poetry reaches back into the very origins of poetry, far more than more formal, mainstream writing. This online course exposes the roots of the language arts, from cave paintings to undecipherable manuscripts, before touching upon the possibilities of the modern manifestations of visual poetry - Asemic writing, Collage Poetry, Concrete Poetry, Art Poetry and Photo Poetry. This is a course rooted in making over theory, method over all else.
Poet-artists featured on the course will range from the historical to the contemporary, from canonical modern artists to "outsider" poets, from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to Henry Michaux, Bob Cobbing to Rosaire Appel, Sophie Calle to Sophie Podolski, Jean Michel Basquiat to Cy Twombly.
This is something I’m really happy with - a podcast in the remarkable HIPOGLOTE series, thanks entirely to the amazing Tiago Swabl - which recounts my ten years in sound poetry this year, 2010 to 2020. A unique audio document, I was invited to provide performances and commentary explaining my path though the noise poems as part of their Carte Blanche series.
It traces my first steps as part of the post Bob Cobbing Writers Forum, my early improvised vocalisation work with Ben Morris and Dylan Nyoukis and at the British Museum, then my travels around Europe working with Zuzana Husarova and Maja Jantar amongst others, then my Soundings project with Wellcome Library, my participation in the Palais de Tokyo sound poetry retrospective and works with British artists I admire like Nathan Walker and the legendary Phil Minton. All this with brand new works made for the show, loads of solo works I’ve dug out of my archive and cover versions of Cobbing and bp nichol, also new for this ambitious hour.
It’s pleasing to not only have had the invitation, but to have Tiago’s editorial assistance (he did it all!) in making this document. It succinctly looks back on so much work I’ve found myself doing in a field which has always intimidated / excited me and it’s made me realise things, in making this summation, that had escaped me. More than anything, it’s made me realise I want to do more sound poetry. https://www.mixcloud.com/Hipoglote/183o-hipoglote_2020-08-17_-carte-blanche_-steven-j-fowler/
A grand burst of publications around my latest Poem Brut book - CRAYON POEMS with penteract press (buy it here https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler ) that features works not found in the book. Three more have been published by Sober magazine here https://www.sober-magazine.com/#/new-page-35/
I added this note “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?”
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
One of the highlights of this and last year is my collaboration with the brilliant David Rickard for an installation in Kielder Forest. The Northern Echo recently wrote a story on the work to be found here https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/18640831.new-art-installation-kielder-water-forest-beauty-spot
Timelapse, created by sculptor David Rickard for the Kielder Art and Architecture programme, is a new feature on the Lakeside Way, on the south side of the Bull Crag peninsula. Visitors can sit among the locally harvested timber that the structure is comprised of and take in the area’s timeless beauty.
The artist said: “The sculpture derives from the underlying materials that define Kielder Water & Forest Park: timber and time. With trees typically growing in Kielder Forest for several decades before harvest, the forest itself reflects various timespans through the scale of the trees in different plantations. This passage of time is also marked within the timber of individual trees.”
Texts from poet SJ Fowler are embedded in the floor and ceiling of the sculpture, subtly referencing the way gravity slows time, as first defined by Albert Einstein in 1907….
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/
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.”
We snuck in the amazing Klangfarbentext in Munich just before lockdown hit. A dozen of us in Munich, at the incomparable Lyrik Kabinett, hashing out 21st century concrete poetry. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/klangfarbentext
Nice to see the project was covered in the massive german paper Süddeutsche Zeitung with a small article back in March https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/literatur-zeichen-von-gestern-gedeutet-fuer-heute-1.4830995
Steven J. Fowler told of the 1000 ideas for his performance and the fear of choosing exactly the wrong one. He took the festival title "Sound Colors Text" literally, dipped capital letters in colored water and put them together in a variety of ways to sometimes more, sometimes less meaningful words.
I am happy to be one of the poets on the list for Broken Sleep in 2021, alongside some friends - Lucy Harvest Clarke, Luke Kennard, Emma Hammond, Jon Stone - and a lot of new names to me. Which is excellent.
The book I’ll be releasing in March 2021 is the second, far longer, instalment of my cinema poems. I’ve been working on them bit by bit for years. The first pamphlet I did with BS did really well and was a joy to put together, I STAND ALONE BY THE DEVILS, it was called.
This will be a full collection and more ambitious in terms of methodology too. Aliens is a film about more than one Alien, for example.
What Aaron Kent and his team have done with Broken Sleep is very impressive too, the press is growing exponentially. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/
All Particles and Waves is David Spittle’s debut collection. To celebrate it, he generously asked friends to respond to the book with new works. I wrote a poem and it is online https://www.dspittle.com/post/sj-fowler
from David “…I wanted to gather artists I have met during this time to respond to All Particles and Waves. All the artwork compiled mainly consists of individual responses to the book or works kindly contributed towards a curation of the book’s extended ‘climate’. This 'gallery' gathers together poetry, essay, photography, film, and collage. I am immensely grateful to all who took part. It is the friendship, underground / tangential inspiration, and enduring correspondence with such artists that I most value in poetry.”
The Glaswegian bookshop Good Press has two of my poem brut books in stock to buy, with profits to the brilliant Hesterglock press and the good cause of Good Press itself. They have laid the books out beautifully, with lovely images from within.
Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit www.goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/unfinished-memmoirs-of-a-hypocrit-by-sj-fowler
Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire http://goodpress.co.uk/writing-artistsbooks/aletta-oceans-alphabet-empire-by-sj-fowler
Thomas Helm has done a grand job with his new online journal Mercurius, bringing together artists from across the world. I have a series on the site which brings focus to some of my performance and film work, entitled Mercuries https://www.mercurius.one/mercuries Recent editions focus on performances about books, blades and time.
I have often said I am lucky to have got into poetry, by accident, around 2010. I came into British poetry just at a moment when dozens of genuinely open, intelligent, energetic independent presses arrived. More than that, it seems to me, I came around when hundreds of poets from the UK are out working at material that is contemporary because it is innovative. Poetry that is responding to the world as it changes. As it changes seismically, fundamentally, in language.
Lockdown brains us. If we are the fortunate unaffected, physically, as I am (I am mega-fortunate in all ways, I believe). It has inevitably turned many of us in. We reflect and find understandable negative and positive in what we are doing. I have been candid in telling many people I think I am wasting my life writing poetry, because that very well might be true, but not in a catastrophic way. I do not dislike myself for doing it, I am just suspicious of what I am doing, as I try to be suspicious about everything, in order to be more aligned / balanced / decent, and more contented.
I have then had many chats with peers, friends, who feel unappreciated. This is an existential reality. But it is often, in the context of British Innovative Poetry (The BIP) true. I can make a long list of people whose work should be lauded. What is lauding? I wrote something here I then deleted. All I’ll say is, the poets overlooked because they are complex, I read them, I see them, I fucking appreciate them. I appreciate the presses who keep working, keep digging in, keeping sharing. It is proper impressive. I know. People just keep doing the work. It’s brilliant.
I work abroad a lot and bring to these European citizens this UK poetry they have never heard of. They think the UK scene is 5 poets. I share with them the people I admire and I see, dozens of them, through their eyes, I am right.. And I reflect on this and realise further how lucky I am to know the work of these poets, to get the books, to follow their ideas and experiments. And there is no longer the concentric “scenes” where poets are represented by their tribe as well as their work, I don’t think, and brilliant. Who wants that? Petty patty. The internet has scuppered it. We are often alone working and connected briefly. But this is why I put on events, curate, to make those connections, but not make solid any movements, group or crew. Because that is naff.
How often have I shared a friend’s book with someone outside of the BIP to see them say surprised “this is amazing, why isn’t this in shops?” yes yes yes, because you don’t buy it mate. But it exists, it’s good. This cannot be denied. I see it. I see it. Do my eyes not count? Yes they do. I have made sure they do.
All this is leading to me saying simply, it’s a golden time for interesting, innovative British poetry. We are lucky. Many don’t know it but if they looked, they’d see. Here are some books out recently or coming out soon which prove what I’m saying. All you need do is get them and find out. iF YOU BOUGHT EVERY ONE OF THESE, IT’S 100 SQUID, AND IF YOU READ THEM, THE IDEAS, THE THOUGHTS THAT WOULD FLOW. WOULDN’T THAT MAKE LIVING BETTER? TO BE GROWING THROUGH THE LANGUAGE OF THE EARTH REFLECTED BACK AT YOU BUT CLEVER LIKE? IT DOES FOR ME. TRY IT NOW! JUST ONE HUNDRED SPONDULICS
HARBOUR EQUINOX by AARON KENT from SAMPSON LOW
Colin Herd has been gentle enough to review my latest poem-brut visual poetry book, CRAYON POEMS, at the online journal known as Adjacent Pineapple. Do read here, with excerpts below, https://www.adjacentpineapple.com/sj-fowler-review
“There's one piece, for example, called 'Way Overboard', in which a scrawl of letters congeals for me into "Water Board Confessions", "Water Bard Confessions", and "Watl baro confessions", with what could be three alphabet-creatures, teeth and eyes and tails in a squeeling "eee" I don't know what they're frightened of? Themselves? Like Stephen Ratcliffe said of the drawing poems of Robert Grenier in Fowler's Crayon Poems, the "words are also physically in space". And because of that suddenly the kinds of tidy neat meaning arrangements we're so used to start to melt, bleed, congeal, emulsify etc. I think of these poems as events of a sort - they convey an immediacy of composition - the event of the drawing itself - but they also need to be sort of rubbed, felt with the eyes, in the event of the reading (as all poems do).
In another Crayon Poem, "Visual Rinse Wig", a green and blue fretwork of o's and smileys also includes a dr's note scribble: I think I can make out "it's good" or "I like chaos" or "to be good", "other" "commas", "another person's freeze"
In an accompanying essay, Fowler emphasises crayons through their associations with childhood, the child-like freedom to "do text without planning": "If creatureliness drives the images in this book, then wonder drives the text"…
And the book can be purloined here https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler
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.
https://sandjournal.com/product/issue-21/
“To mark a decade of publishing SAND, we are calling 2020 our “year of archaeology” and have filled this issue with a mix of new discoveries and excavated favorites. And in the midst of a pandemic, we’ve gotten to know the pieces even more intimately, seeing them in a surreal light we could not have imagined when we began this issue.”
I am one of those excavations with my suite of poems on bears, called species.
I wrote it in 2011 or 2012, whenever, when I was little, but i remember i was working on the galleries of the british museum, when i was a visitor host or guard, and I think in gallery 33, in India.
Here is the reading i did of these poems for the online launch, with bears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEy4yti0kEs
Ranjit Hoskote once wrote to me the following, “I recall reading, once, that many of the great friendships of the Renaissance were, in actuality, epistolary ones. Given the geographical distances and political turbulences involved, some of these individuals might have met only a few times in their lives, but the intensity of their friendships - their mutuality - was conducted through letters and the sharing of thoughts and feelings. Sanskrit words carry across the centuries, to gloss such moments: abhijnana, re-cognition, the translation of half-glimpsed connections into persuasive affinities; sahridaya, meaning 'aesthete', but meaning, literally, 'of the same heart'.”
When I was young, I had a palpable sense that I needn’t have connections in the world that were immediate and regular, but would be happy, if not better served, by friends of considerable character and intelligence who I would see from time to time, crossing swathes of the planet, and staying close through writing. I aspired to this, growing up in rural Devon and Cornwall and feeling small and trapped. When I think of the finest fortune my mode of writing has brought me, roving, organising, collaborating as I have, I think it is the meeting of people like Ranjit. He is a brilliant poet, a translator, a theorist, a curator and a critic. His work, across these mediums, is generous, subtle, and constantly insightful
Ranjit published a book in 2018 with penguin in India, called Jonahwhale. It has now been released in the UK, with Arc, entitled The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. I wrote a small piece on the book … “What is each poem in the world but a moment of land lost upon the ocean of language itself? We must then navigate ourselves through poets like Ranjit Hoskote and books like Jonahwhale. As ever before, through his imagistic, complex, dazzling poems, Hoskote’s grand grounded intelligence, and the width of his learning comes concentrated into brilliant mediations of what poetry can do when reflecting upon an essential theme of human culture. For reading Jonahwhale it is clear to any reader the poet’s name is Ocean, and these poems are both the water and the sea creatures, with this book as our raft.”
It’s a really excellent volume and we’re lucky to have it out in the UK. The book can be picked up from Arc here https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/books/ranjit-hoskote-the-atlas-of-lost-beliefs-604
Sylee Gore
Remote or online courses aren’t necessarily suited to that which motivates me to teach. I’ve approached pedagogy in a way that the dialogue of exchanging information when leading a program isn’t a pretence. I have collaborated with students, learn from them every lesson, and this is the main reason for me to share knowledge I’ve accrued but naturally, already know. I’m maybe too reliant on that face to face, improvised style of teaching. So it’s taken me a few years to improve at leading courses online. The current course I’m working on with the Poetry School and about 20 quite brilliant poet-artists around the world, including folk from Australia, America and elsewhere, is the best experience I’ve had so far without immediate conversations. It’s likely due to the people who signed up, who are unusually talented and generous, and a maturation on my part, most especially in not overloading the source material and prompts. I would upload 100 pages in the past for one exercise, somehow I thought I needed to give participants their money’s worth. It takes time to learn it’s not just about that perhaps. Here are some works by poets who are on the course, really impressive asemic, handwritten, concrete poems and this is the true value of an online course - it allows access to people globally and you somehow then get poet-artists who are remarkably advanced in their work, seeking knowledge and insights, rather than fundamental approaches. Some of the work coming in is better than anything I’ve done, some professional standard work, and yet the exchanges in the group are supportive, and humble. https://poetryschool.com/groups/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry
