Crayon Poems - Penteract Press

Available penteractpress.com/store/crayon-poems-sj-fowler

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

The full essay included in the book was published here by Periodicities https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2020/09/sj-fowler-adult-waste-and-childish.html

Further excerpt from the essay in the book, Adult Waste and Childish Wonder “Crayons are the domain of children because they are less messy than most paints and markers, and they are blunt. They smell, faintly of excrement, in a pleasant way, and children often try to eat them. Dogs eat them too. Thus, they are required to be non-toxic. They occur to me as a means of getting to a tactile process of writing that embraces instinct, the symbolic and an aesthetic that needs not even countenance figuration or font-love. They are a thing of potential, because they require loyalty to their actual physical constitution. They rub, they snap, they stink. They are small in adult hands and their mark is unmistakeable. Moreover, they appeal because most adults don’t wish to be seen making pictures with a little scat stick any more than they want to write poems that don’t offer an immediate insight into their emotional intelligence. Of course, most adults don’t want to write poems at all. Perhaps it is because this book of crayon poems is so potentially appealing to everyone except poets and artists, that it might very well end up appealing to no one?

Review of Crayon Poems by Colin Herd on Adjacent Pineapple - August 2nd 2020

"But even as I speak, I put the wax by the fire, and look: the residual taste is eliminated, the smell goes away, the colour changes, the shape is lost, the size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you strike it, it no longer makes a sound. But does the same wax remain? It must be admitted that it does; no one denies it, no one thinks otherwise. So what was it in the wax that I understood with such distinctness? Evidently none of the features which I arrived at by means of the senses; for whatever came under taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing has altered - yet the wax remains - Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Descartes went nuts for the materiality of wax, captivated by its plasticity, impermanence, changeability, metamorphosis. It's not surprising. Wax as a material is so suggestively malleable, so excitingly soft.

These same qualities characterise the poems in SJ Fowler's new book Crayon Poems from Penteract Press: the scrawl and rub, the imprint and the residue, the smush. Wax is a material with a memory (it can take your finger print), it can seal a letter. And in the hands of SJ Fowler it can create the most exciting weird textures and forms.   

Perhaps the most obsessive, rich and full study of the materiality of wax is Michelle E Bloom's Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession (2003). There's a section in that where Bloom considers Ovid's Pygmalion and the ways in which "the dissolution of wax" is linked to the "dissolution of gender boundaries" (45). In Fowler's Crayon Poems I feel like gender and a lot of other socially constructed strictures besides are constantly being dissolved, melted, in the thrilling greasy, waxy scrawls. The book is populated by genderless bodies and faces that look linguistic as much as anything else, saturated with the animated loops of script.  

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"

I love this artwork by Cy Twombly and the accompanying poem by Ross Gay. The phrase in the interview with Gay is "nestiness". Oh I love that word in relation to Twombly's drawing but also these drawing poems by Fowler. Nestiness, which also suggests messiness, nastiness, and nesting - text maybe too somehow although I am not sure how. This sense of gathering a waxy scrawl around oneself for protection. 

Another wonderful artist of the crayon is Minnie Evans. And while he worked in coloured accountant's pencils rather than crayons, I also saw a connection here with the work of Frank Jones, whose spatial visions of creatures are haunting, moving and somehow liberating.  

It's hard to know what to make of these gorgeous poems other than to wonder at their spiralling, insistent forms. After reading this book a few times now, I feel like I have been left in a hot car to melt for a while: my mind is an oily, joyful, lipid goo. https://www.adjacentpineapple.com/sj-fowler-review

Crayon Poems on Abandoned Playground June 6, 2020

Daniele Pantano’s brilliant online journal - THE ABANDONED PLAYGROUND - has published four of my crayons. https://www.theabandonedplayground.org/sjfowler These works are not to be found in the book, which has 50 works and a new essay, as I created over 130 crayon poems / crayon artworks, over two years, for the project.

Crayon poem in SPAM, megabus edition May 26, 2020

The last edition of SPAM in print, almost 100 pages, over 52 contributors, good to have two poems in there. You can buy it here for 5.50 https://shop.spamzine.co.uk/product/spam-10-millennium-mega-bus-double-issue/30

I have a poem poem in there, which is about animals used by humans as symbols to represent how people think of people as single ideas while demanding others think about them as many things, and a crayon poem! The crayon poem is from my big series of crayon poems which will be published by the amazing Penteract press as a full book this summer.

You can read more about SPAM here https://spamzine.co.uk/about

Crayon Poems in Poetry Society Cafe Summer Exhibition : July 2019

www.stevenjfowler.com/invisible A pleasure to have my third solo exhibition in London take on the walls of the Poetry Society in Covent Garden, in their Poetry Cafe. The exhibition brings together new and existing poems, drawing together my explorations in the hand-made since late 2017.