A note on : Tangible Territory journal with Švankmajer, Josipovici et al

My friend and collaborator Tereza Stehlikova has started a new journal online, entitled Tangible Territory “a platform that offers a space for various voices to meet and discuss themes relating to the role of the body, the importance of place and embodied experience, in giving meaning to our every day experience of life and art.” For the first issue, which rather extraordinarily includes Jan Švankmajer and Gabriel Josipovici amongst others, a genuine conglomeration of unique artists, I wrote a small piece on London and walking https://tangibleterritory.art/journal/issue1/s-j-fowler-experiences-of-necessity/

“My exploration of London is a sacrosanct subject I do not normally write about. This is because it is for the future, or because it is not a material to make things out of, but a thing I just do. I’m likely better to write about it when I have left London, if I do that upright.

What I do know is that I’d rather walk than write, which is why I have yet to complete longer works of fiction or non-fiction. I am literally out walking instead. I know how to walk from anywhere north of the river to anywhere else north of the river within the bounds of say, zone four, without the aid of a map. Mapless I wander, impressing friends and loved ones with my ability to end up where I had intended to.

But I also do not write about my London because I have often noticed, and recoiled, at those professional artists who turn everything they like into work, without fear of the thing being despoiled, or it being uninteresting to others. I shan’t write about it here. Simply to say, I walked a great deal during the lockdown of 2020. I keep a pedometer because I find in it a curious companion and across London I would average forty miles a week.”….

A note on : on collaboration for Poetry Society's Young Poets Network

I was asked by the Poetry Society to write a little burst for their young poets network and a collaboration and poetry challenge, worth a peek at https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/features/how-to-get-started-with-collaboration-in-poetry/

Steven J Fowler on The Enemies Project, his latest project and collaboration

Steven J Fowler is the originator of The Enemies Project, a long-running programme that started in 2010 and has resulted in hundreds of collaborations and events. He shares some wisdom:

I’m lucky to work collaboratively often. I organise events where I pair poets and ask them to make new work, over 300 of these events have happened around the world, and I’ve published two volumes of selected collaborations too, having written with over 100 artists and poets. I collaborate a lot because it’s generous, it builds friendships, and it forces one to be inquisitive. To be a good collaborator, you simply need to be interested in how the other person creates, as much as what they create. You need to so interested in this, you’re willing to allow their idea prominence, to let it supplement yours. I’m currently working on a book-length poem with Russian poet Maria Malinovskaya. We’ve spent a year exchanging lines, fragments, paragraphs – the project constantly changes, and this has been the joy of it. It’s an act of friendship, where the normal creative and editing processes I’d have in my head for my solo work are mediated through the originality and brilliance of another, of Maria, who thinks in ways I’ve never encountered. The book is now a series of questions and answers, it’s taken a year to find that form. I ask a question in the form of a poem, Maria answers in poetry and poses me a question. On it goes, and we don’t know, or care, when it finishes, or how it will finish. This, to me, is pure collaboration, the joy of the process over the product.

A note on: Babel Between Us ends

Babel Between Us has been one of the most ambitious collaborative writing projects ever made, without a doubt. It’s an immense project, massive. I’ve been writing stories and texts with over a dozen writers around the world, kind of anonymously, for a great part of 2020. Now it is over. It’s strange to me I’ve not written more about it on my site or blog, but because the because includes so much anthropological analysis and itself feels like a kind of commentary, somehow, creatively that felt redundant to me. / If you want to have a look at the project in general, do have a butchers at https://bbu.world/ and all my posts, starting fiction and interrupting it, is https://bbu.world/u/werebear/activity with some screenshots below.

A note on : Beijing October Literary Festival online

I had such a lovely time being part of The Beijing October Literary Festival online recently. I had the pleasure to visit and read in Beijing in 2016 and made friends there who remain correspondees to this day and so this was, for me, a reconnection. The online festival has two themes - the city and tradition with modernity. I gave a talk on London, on its relationship to my writing, reflecting on how physical space, proximity, alters the reality of the writer, and how the modern city demands a modern literature, that looks forward, future facing, rather than looks to history for writing. History is for history. It seems to go down well, which was gratifying, but for me, the other speakers were exceptional and this was arguably the best online event I’ve done. It was especially cool to watch the Chinese poets and writers talk about Beijing and the modern Chinese megacity. It was a frank and playful conversation at times.

A note on: Seen as Read - arguably my favourite course

I always try to try all iterations of professional creative work once. Running adult courses face to face, with lots of different institutions, has been one of the most up and down endeavours for me. Some have created extraordinary new pathways for me, and loads of new friendships, genuinely. Others have been draining, pressured experiences, where participants use the format to unload after a hard day at work. I’m always up for doing them at new places, but when I had done online courses in the past, I found them rewarding but difficult - the removed nature tends to obfuscate the main reason I teach - to meet people, to communicate. Recently, with the lockdown bla blah I decided to go again, more seriously than before and set up a course called Seen as Read. I wrote entirely new material for it, blended that with previous explorations. I put my heart into it really, as it felt a new venture, a new moment. It has just ended and is perhaps the most exciting, rewarding, generous experience I have had teaching, including face to face work. The level of those involved, the insight, generosity, innovation - it really felt like a brief community. So many people signed up, which was inevitably very validating, and then so much support was offered for my approach, detailing a prehistoric to present history of visual poetries, then going into asemic writing, art poetry, poster art, text art, concrete poetry, collage and the like, this also was uplifting. The screenshot above shows the tiles of the blogforum set up as our interface. Each tile represents a post by a participant poet, each filled with their work and thoughts, responding to the themes of the week. Extraordinary. You can look at the work too, it’s now made publicly available with the permission of the poets https://seenasread.blogspot.com/ & https://visualpoetrycourse.blogspot.com/

A note on : European Poetry Festival goes digital

I moved my festival, which was the be the biggest yet www.europeanpoetryfestival.com from April to October to November and now entirely online. Spilt milk, inevitable, fine. What I am excited by is that my suggestion for how it goes online have been met with great generosity by the various poets, friends, institutions and supporters who make it what it is. By the end of November I shall have multiple poetry films, zoomcasts and publications to share from poets across Europe and I look forward to barraging people’s inboxes with the stuff, currently being shot, edited and prepared. This all before I slowly, optimistically begin to begin planning a face to face festival in April 2021, which I will do, if it can be done.

A note on : Limbo, co-writing a film by Lotje Sodderland

A few years ago I worked with the filmmaker Lotje Sodderland on a project about the human brain, amongst other things, and more recently she asked me to co-write a film she was developing. I drafted her idea, added to the script, offered a version of it, altered some narratives and then writing took on new forms, with Lotje’s work and improvised shooting as a mode. A really collaborative process, common to cinema of course.

As is the way with films, it took time to grow, get production underway, edit and alter, finding it’s final shape. This shape is nearly fixed and the result is something really poignant and elegant. The film is called LIMBO and here is what Ken Loach said about it:

‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’

Pretty extraordinary, and for me too, as part of the writing team, it’s a great credit. The film should begin to see public eyes in 2021 and more can be found out about it here https://lief.london/portfolio/limbo The portrayal of real elderly men, isolated in London, found actors, is something so powerfully captured and really is painfully relevant given the announcement of a second lockdown here in the UK/

A note on : Poem Brut phase 3 and Hawkins at Second Step

Poem Brut is entering a third phase. I began the project hoping my approach would create a nice series of events. I wanted to promote poetry methods that engaged in their context, innovatively, in a contemporary way, with the handmade, the visceral, the visual and the live while also asking what effect our brains have on our writing. I wanted to include knowledge from those with alternative cognitive experiences. But I didnt want to make them definitional. I didn’t want to advertise it, or make the project about ‘outsider’ poetry, or people’s bio. This is all seems to have worked. I’ve had emails over the lockdown asking me about the ‘movement’ of Poem Brut. It’s a bowel word but that’s nice that people see the project as a thing.

Our first phase was events and publications. Our second was about continuing that energy, including exhibitions and then commissioning and mentoring individuals who are often left out of that kind of stuff because they are so original. In both cases the open submissions of our 3am series kept the people involved ever changing, growing, open minded and open doored.

This third phase, planned for 2021, will continue all these activities, but go further in helping poets branch out with their own projects. A brilliant example of this is the incredible teaching work of Paul Hawkins at the Second Step mental health charity in Bristol. Paul has done an amazing job sharing Poem Brut work and ideas to people using Second Step’s service. You can read about that here https://www.poembrut.com/secondstep and the tweet above says it all. / More coming soon on Poem Brut in the new year, when hopefully we are all able to meet again in person.

A note on: Austria day

I normally don’t ever mention events in the world in my work or on my site, even tragic ones, but given what has happened in Vienna just yesterday, as I write this, this is all the more important for me to say. Austria has given me a lot https://twitter.com/austriainuk/status/1320726880430002176

I really like it when my job puts me in places I wouldn’t have expected my work to take me. I was asked by the Austrian Embassy to make a little video for Austria National Day. I spoke about how much I admire the writers of Austria, how much they have influenced me - which they have, truly, with Handke, Jelinek, Bernhard, Fried especially really impacting my work, my way of thinking about literature - and how many contemporary Austrian poets have become my friends. Some of my finest correspondence friends and collaborators are in Austria, Max Hofler, Robert Prosser, Fabian Faltin, Esther Strauss and many others.

And my relationship with the Austrian Cultural Forum in London too, it’s been so so important to me. Their trust in my work as a curator, the creative freedom, the professionalism and support they have offered me, vouching for me, helping me build ideas, events, collaborations and more. I owe them a lot. www.stevenjfowler.com/acf Vienna has been a special place to me, and few places encapsulate what is best about Europe and European culture more than the city. My heart goes out to it.

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 : Forest Prospect in Poetry Dispatch

A beautiful project by Kyoko Yoshida, a mailart poetry journal, an object of wonder because it can be pocketed, it is materially there in these pandemic times, and because it creates a unique dialogue between the poets involved, who range across Kyoko’s world, from Japan to Europe to the US and beyond. This issue I’m in features some lovely work and my friend john Mateer, which was a surprise. I wrote a new poem for it too. Vist http://kyokoyoshida.net/archives/219

A note on : Robert Sheppard's writing on Poetry and Collaboration

Robert on the right

I hope this becomes a book. Robert Sheppard’s writing over the summer of 2020 on collaboration and poetry, in the UK, is timely, necessary and long overdue. I am biased as I’m featured and I obviously care about collaboration. But it is strange that so little has been written on the subject. Considering Robert’s standing as a poet and critic, and educator, it’s all the better he has done this work, eloquently, and with wit, and insight.

Robert has been a key influence upon the writing of multiple generations of poets in the UK. For my own part, he specifically influenced my sense of what place, space, biography could be within a complex poetry, he made me reconsider what poetics was and he allowed some light to be shone in the dark spaces where poets don’t make much and are proud of that - he has been prolific, for decades, and worked across the proper ways and means of poetry. I am one of very many who would say this kind of thing.

Finishing off his 14 part series on collaboration, he has concluded and provided a useful contents rundown. Posts include writings on my poetics of collaboration, the most comprehensive review of Nemeses, the second volume of my collaborations. In depth looks at my work on the page with Prue Chamberlain Bussey, and my work with Camilla Nelson, live and in print, with an appreciated nod to wrestling. I repatriate Robert’s concluding post here and enthuse that you should click through and read it all

Conclusion is here “This probably concludes my ‘Thoughts on Collaboration’. I think it is best that my remaining work on the theme is composed offline, for eventual publication as a critical article…. Only one final text to acknowledge, the extraordinary 500 page Poetic Interviews, edited and conducted by Aaron Kent, from Broken Sleep Books, 2019, in which Kent uses poems much as an interviewer uses questions - and various writers (I note SJ Fowler amongst them) reply with poems…. On a personal note, I am pleased to report that there are plans for Veer to republish both my collaborations with Bob Cobbing (which I talk about  here ). That’s a good way to end this rambling strand….

• The introductory part one, flags up the themes and surveys the territory

• In part two, I talk about ways I've collaborated across media

• Part three, I talk more about literary collaboration, but I also try to account for my own transformative practices (in 'The English Strain' project) that are not collaborations, not translations, but are transpositions.

• Part four, on some of my literary collaborations, is here.

• Part five is about SJ Fowler's 'Enemies' collaborative project, in general, and my part in them (with videos). It may be accessed https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/02/thoughts-on-collaboration-5-literary.html

• Part six is on the literary collaborations in Twitters for a Lark; poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (the EUOIA) here.

• Part seven considers some of the ways female coauthors have operated and whether the term 'coauthors' isn't a better term… Here.

• Part eight consists of two parts: my considerations of the past collaborations of Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey here.

• Part nine contains some thoughts on SJ Fowler’s Nemeses: Selected Collaborations of SJ Fowler, 2014-2019. HTVN Press, 2019 : here: https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on.html

• Part 10 is an account of Fowler’s poetics of collaboration. Here: robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/robert-sheppard-thoughts-on_3.html

• Part 11 is an account of Fowler's collaboration with Camilla Nelson (on the page)
  https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/thoughts-on-collaboration-11-steven.html

• Part 12 continues to analyse Fowler's collaboration with Nelson, but it takes account of the extraordinary dynamics of its 'Enemies' performance (which was filmed), https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2020/04/thoughts-on-collaboration-12-steven.html

A note on : Ed Hadfield's exhibition opening chat

I met Ed Hadfield years ago and we’ve stayed in contact, with Ed being one of the most interesting poets working with public art that I know. His work’s background is in an area very different from my own, and its through my awareness of Ed’s work that I’ve slowly built up proper knowledge of those I’d see as poets who are known as text artists like ruscha, weiner, holzer, baldessari et al.

Ed has a year long exhibition / installation at Cable Depot, run generously by Iavor Lubomirov https://cable-depot.com/About, and asked me to pop down to talk with him about it, for a chat on instagram live, because he couldn’t do a normal opening due to the pandemic.

I had a really magic time going down to woolwich dockyards on a friday night, with gale force winds battering in as i walked down the thames path and emerging into an industrial estate to discover this incredible intimate gallery, surrounded by mechanics and warehouses. The video here shows Ed and I’s chat, which is a bit wind affected, but captures a moment - its almost a performance in itself, trying to talk in the gusts as the light fades - and its worth listening to to glean Ed’s sincere and intelligent insight into his piece, which is admirably elegant. Ed’s website is here too https://edhadfield.co.uk/wall-mural/

A note on : Atomised by Robin Boothroyd

A brilliant new book of minimalist poetry has been ejected into the world thanks to Dan Power’s Trickhouse press. I was lucky enough to blurb it, below, and the book can be snapped here https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-atomised-by-robin-boothroyd/2?cs=true

“Hey listen poetry is about language first and it's more artificial than speaking even. So if a poetry is reduced down to its atoms, small clusters of letters, single words and their slight variations, misspellings, mishearings, well that's important literary work. And hey listen Robin Boothroyd is not only able to do this, which is hard, because the smaller poems get the more every single tiny gesture is exposed, but he has done it with a humour which suggests a great emotional intelligence as well as a linguistic, poetical, intellectual one. Atomised is a concentrated gem of a book. It's Brain Eno and a whole whale. It's froth and sore eros. You'd be lucky to see it slowly!”
- SJ Fowler

Published : My essay, Adult Waste and Childish Wonder: On Writing Crayon Poems

https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2020/09/sj-fowler-adult-waste-and-childish.html

I tend to write essays for my poem brut books for a myriad of reasons. Initially, it was a sort of justification, knowing the work might seem intense / brutish / opaque to literary eyes, I knew that if I described the process, the reasoning, there would be some valuable context. I knew too that if I avoided the deep theory I’m allergic to then the essays would be more than bewildering apologia and allow me knowledge that might bode well for myself and my future work. Increasingly, the essays are for me. They allow me to understand what I’m doing and why, and they give me a structure in which to research purposefully.

This essays features in the back of my Crayon Poems book from Penteract Press https://penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler and has been generously published by Periodicities, a journal Rob Mclennan edits with great energy. An excerpt….

“Here is a formulation I would not say I believe, but have often thought of, making these works. If the crayon is for the child, and children are the most living of human beings, the most life orientated of us, being new, being closer to birth and further from death, and the crayon is their artist tool, evoking bio-matter, edibility, refuse, mulch, excrete, bodily colours and vegetation, then are crayon pictures not somewhat symbols of mortality? Otto Rank, given to me by Ernest Becker, suggests the primary trauma of life is birth (not the Oedipal Complex, causing Freud to cast Rank aside for this break in psychoanalytic dogma). Being birthed then begins our uncomfortable relationship with creatureliness. Going for a shit reminds us we were born and we will die. We are repulsed by the reminder, the smell of it, and the gushing of blood, popping spots etc.., and with good reason. These things are often, unlike their imitation in crayons, disease bearing. This is why, I believe, I was drawn to crayons to write poems, and that these poems became illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. Things alive but not alive in the way the human mind thinks they are alive. Perfect for kids and a book which is a celebration of life.

If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts. In a sense, these ‘reminders’ that interest me so much, in my work and in all things, can be equated to wonder. They are the shock of realisation. Surprise. This may stretch beyond extreme emotions like love and near-death, into any kind of alive consciousness or moments of distinct knowing. These moments also evoke both our childhood, that process of constant discovery that masks the confusion of our adult lives, and our end, that we cannot imagine the world without us, in one moment. The shock of wonder, like the reminders of creatureliness, put us in time. They force us to realise, in that temporality, we are.”

Published : Anthology, Myth & Metamorphosis

Well happy to be in this brilliant anthology with a Rune concrete poem… Full-colour, Perfect-bound Paperback, 148x210mm, 56pp https://penteractpress.com/store/myth-amp-metamorphosis

“Myth & Metamorphosis” presents a collection of poems inspired by an array of ancient mythologies. The poetic styles on show are similarly varied, showcasing the breadth of contemporary formal poetry: constrained poetry, concrete poetry, erasure poetry, asemic poetry, found poetry, prose poetry, photo poetry, puzzle poetry, translated poetry, typewriter poetry, as well as original and traditional verse forms..

Featuring work by:

Merlina Acevedo, Sacha Archer, Gary Barwin, Gregory Betts, Christian Bök, Luke Bradford, Marian Christie, Franco Cortese, Clara Daneri, Lucy Dawkins, Anthony Etherin, Kyle Flemmer, SJ Fowler, Mary Frances, Greg Hill, MD Kerr, James Knight, Alex McKeown, Annie Morris, Ben North, Rachel Smith, Dani Spinosa, Alex Stevens, María Celina Val, and Martin Wakefield.

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.

Published : Animal Drums on Mercurius

My relationship with the Barcelona based journal Mercurius continues, this time hosting my film with josh alexander, THE ANIMAL DRUMS along with some new critical comments by the brilliant Jonathan Brooker https://www.mercurius.one/home/animaldrums

Jonathan Brooker on The Animal Drums - “…the episodic nature of it - reminding me a little, while having entirely its own character, of some of Chris Petit’s work with or without Iain Sinclair; that sense of a search without there being a clear objective & the requirement for the viewer to do the work of joining the dots. The route taken being as important as the destination. Of course it could just be the presence of Sinclair himself that brought it to mind! The underlying theme, of a changing & ever less accommodating London, defenceless against the manipulations of international capital, was one that has fascinated & saddened me over the years….

… I’m also interested in the way that the character appears to be SJ Fowler but isn’t - something I’ve always liked about the films of Jonathan Meades; that overt acknowledgement that the person you’re watching is only a version of the person as they actually exist. I guess it’s just a conscious application or heightening of Goffman, but using that disconnect between essence & performance & the idea of consciously blurring the line for dramatic or narrative effect greatly appeals.” More information here.