A note on : Seven Rooms anthology

https://tenementpress.com/Seven-Rooms

Tenement Press & Prototype Publishing present ... SEVEN ROOMS
Edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler
Forthcoming October 2023  PREORDER HERE 

Seven years following the publication of Hotel #1 (2016), and in tribute to the cessation of the “paper hotel” with the publication of Hotel #7 (2021), Seven Rooms—a collaborative publication from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing—is a document of the project’s unerring commitment to pioneering creativity, literature’s idiosyncracies, and shared space; to new approaches to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Published : How Do You Do In Devon from Moormaid Press

My latest publication, a chapbook of poems and prose poems about Devon and death, released by Ailsa Holland's Moormaid Press. £5 here in a hand-bound limited edition of 100. https://www.moormaidpress.co.uk/product/how-do-you-do-in-devon-by-sj-fowler 

How Do You Do in Devon is launched on July 2nd at Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London. 6pm doors for 6.30pm start. Free entry https://www.poembrut.com/events Alongside a dozen brilliant new performances celebrating poets, artists, writers and musicians, exploring experimentation and playfulness in live poetry with James Knight, Sophia Mold, Jacqueline Ennis Cole, Michael O’Mahony, Stephen Emmerson, David Spittle and the Popogrou Collective (Laura Davis / Ailsa Holland / Bob T. Bright / Lucy Furlong / Patrick Cosgrove / Juliet Sprake / Martin Wakefield). 

A note on : Interview with Michael Sutton on Recently Attracted Reality Influencers

https://overgroundunderground.co.uk/blog/f/a-conversation-with-sj-fowler Excerpts below

The following is a conversation with SJ Fowler on his new pamphlet Recently Attracted Reality Influencers, recently released from Overground Underground Books. Purchase a copy HERE

MS: When I think of a meme the first thing that pops into my head is the image-text combo we see so regularly. However, many of the first most popular memes were videos i.e. ‘Star Wars Kid’, ‘Keyboard Cat’; no doubt these are poems too, but what does the obsession with corresponding, communicating text and image tell us about the (visual)poetic inclinations of the modern human animal? 

SJF: I spent a long time during lockdown writing a course about photopoetry, and this emerged from teaching I did at the Photography Gallery in London, which I went into almost knowledgless and blagging about photos. What it left me with was a sense that for photopoetry specifically, the most interesting thing is hybridity, rather than illustration. To answer your question, I think we forget how new photo illustration is, and the illustrative instinct is probably significant to do with language development in humans I don’t know and something to do with attention spans decreasing I don’t know I don’t know.

But anyway, hybridity I realised, this is interesting photopoetry, not some tennis match rendition of image and text. This could literally mean superimposition, or compositional play, or conceptual documentation. But what it also opened up was what the meme was, as a poem. It is illustrative, of course, but it’s also often a lot weirder than that. There’s something uncanny often going on.

But I looked at this purely through method, as I do with most things, because I found in the last decade, now quite stringently, after studying philosophy, that analysis really doesn’t help me and I don’t like it. You can tell, sensibility wise, work made after mind grinding leaps to insight that are random and specious. 

So I wanted to not really make meme poems, but to scratch them up, cut them, mix them with what would’ve have been newspaper clipping in the past, and essentially make collages, just like my book Bastard Poems, but digital. So I think your question I can answer by saying for myself, my inclination was to just source another set of chaotic, language-based aberrant things and make them into my thing because it was fun and funny I think.

MS: Richard Dawkins, the coiner of the term ‘meme’ pre its co-option by the internet hive mind, once tweeted: 

Kafka’s Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature. Why? If it’s SF it’s bad SF. If, like Animal Farm, it’s an allegory, an allegory of what? Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist. I don’t get it. Where are the Emperor’s clothes.

I ask the same questions to you: If Recently Attracted Reality Influencers is an allegory, what is it an allegory of? and Where are the Emperor’s clothes?! 

SJF: Amazing! What a tweet. He really went for the jugular with that one. All the Kafka fans must have gone batshit. Holy moly. I think for the Emperor to have clothes the thing itself has to be lauded and popular and significant? Hmmm. Well it is an allegory for the human capacity for deadpanning existence. For how insidiously stupid internet news or ads are, how they seem to seep into the actual means of scrolling down through shite when you’re on the toilet. Of how funny awful and stupid things are when presented in certain contexts. How much trash there is that people like. How the most talented people mostly don’t consider themselves poets or artists? 

MS: Recently Attracted Reality Influencers continues your series of comical, collagic books following Bastard Poems (Steel Incisors) and Sticker Poems (Trickhouse Press); what is it that compels you to so vigorously explore this unserious mode of your practice? Is there a seriousness underpinning your unseriousness? 

SJF: Thanks for knowing they exist. Yes this has been such a lovely patch of things, with my cassette Bab’s London Adventures in there too. My weird poetry series. It’s come from thinking during the lockdown when I passed ten years of making stuff and realising I did actually have a very strong sense of what I wanted to do and what makes that stuff unique and how I could go on to do more of that, and feel contented in doing that. That this was important, to have a strong sense of why. I am making poems because it pleases me and because I’d likely be doing something worse if not. No other reason is primary. I have not changed a single thing to suit anyone else recently. I have never really thought about this until recently, I just did my thing as though there was no choice. But now I am aware of my instinct more, and I follow it. These works make me laugh, and make others whose opinion I trust, laugh too. There are satirical, definitely works of satire. But also very personal, hidden in oblique forms. I could say how strange that so few poetry books are funny, or colourful, or deeply weird, when other artforms hold that stuff well, but who cares? There is probably loads of poetry like that, that I haven’t read, or because people don’t want to know about it. But you’ve published it Michael, and that’s enough for me, thank you.

A note on : Kingston University feature

Nice to be appreciated by the place you work, where I’ve worked for 8 years. An article from Kingston University on my recent republic of consciousness shortlisting, National Gallery commissions and other stuff

https://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/article/2832/07-jun-2023-novella-completed-during-lockdown-by-kingston-school-of-art-lecturer-nominated-for-republic-of-consciousness/

“These experiences and projects feed into Mr Fowler's teaching, during which each student will produce 20 poems, have taken part in public readings and collaborated with other writers. "They complete the course, I hope, as different people to those that started it, having developed a richness of self-knowledge and expression," he said. "Poetry is attempting to express that which cannot be expressed by any other means, in language. Many of my students become published poets, but all of them gain skills that can be used in a variety of paths, and careers, and more importantly enrich their lives through the development of creative processes."

The National Gallery - June 30th Lates poetry walking tour!

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/talks-and-conversations-friday-lates-gallery-tour-sj-fowler-30-06-2023

…In this third and final event for our Friday Lates programme this year, poet and performer SJ Fowler returns to the Gallery to read new ekphrastic poems about chosen paintings in our collection, offering alternative interpretations of their meaning, history and standing. 

Fowler is joined by Gallery Educator Fiona Alderton alongside invited guests Safia Kamel, Marcia Knight-Latter and Andrew Kötting, for a tour and poetry performances around the Gallery.

Published - Recently Attracted Reality Influencers

My new publication! Selected meme and screenshots poems. Made a fair in lockdown, scrolling through me phone, clipping image text and net weirdness. Michael Sutton at OU press has done a great great job fitting this, setting it and ordering and making a proper pamphlet, gaudy as the material itself. I’m really happy with it, the latest in my weird poetry series, buyable here for a fiver https://overgroundunderground.bigcartel.com/product/recently-attracted-reality-influencers

Recently Attracted Reality Influencers

SJ Fowler’s new pamphlet 'Recently Attracted Reality Influencers' exhibits the ephemera of the internet through a broken kaleidoscope, disarranging and reappropriating the eerily familiar fragments of digital life in a hyper-collage quite unlike anything published before.

“If you are looking for poetry of maximum concentration of thought and feeling you won’t find it here. But if, like Wordsworth, you think poetry should be made out of everyday speech — which for Fowler is the automatically generated lingos of the internet — this could be the book you’ve been waiting for.” —Philip Terry

”It’s just meme, meme, meme with Steven J Fowler. Like some svengali of internet trash, here he orchestrates social media mishaps and clickbait into a warped chorus, which simultaneously engages and disassociates in its absurd and mocking warble.” —Vik Shirley

And below, my launch performance! a presentation which explains all…

A note on : Poem Brut at Open Ealing

Poem Brut IV : vii / June 3rd 2023 at Open Ealing https://www.poembrut.com/2023

A dozen brilliant new performances celebrating poets, artists, writers and musicians, exploring experimentation and playfulness in live poetry in one of West London most brilliant venues.

This was so fun. A dozen weird performances on a lovely evening, so friendly and explorative! And a real range of people and approaches, and I launched me book too. Long live open ealing. All videos on the link above, worth a peek

EPF 2023 Fin, some photographs

I did not have the time to properly diarise the European Poetry Festival this year. It was a huge endeavour, and one full of joy, truly, but none the less, a great administrative undertaking. I’m going to put together my own page more fully later in the summer (here for now https://www.stevenjfowler.com/epf23 ) and then reflect properly on what was a huge thing for me, and I hope, for the 100 plus poets involved, and the near 1000 people who attended.

For the time being I have made sure the EPF website is really well stocked with all videos of performances and photographs, (and it is all together here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2023 ) out of respect for the poets who were so generous. For my own part, some photographs below act as a memento of time with some great friends as a placeholder before more.