I fear my best work behind me
Stranger Press : 2017
A book of illustration, abstract art, handwritten literature, portraits and poem-paintings. A book about colour, mess, time, skulls, animals, monsters, subconscious outpourings and accidental insight.
Limited edition print of 100. 77 pages.
From the publisher - A high quality art book exploring poetry as a fractured, overwhelmed, handwritten victim of colour. A brutalist child-like portraiture is illustrated and exacerbated by poetic texts, hand carved into the page, bursting from the poet’s brain. Dead parents beside skulls, deer faces beside emails, monstrous eyes stare into red letters. I fear my best work behind me marks a point of natural growth for SJ Fowler, besides and away, from the formal domination of clean, centre aligned poetry in the UK, into a new field of groundbreaking poetic art.
"I could barely read this, this book changed my life." Tuur Van Balen
I'm just messin' about, Karel Appel once said. Nothing was further from the truth.
I'm just messin' about, says SJ Fowler. Nothing is further from the truth. Bas Kwakman, Director - Poetry International Rotterdami fear my best work behind me presents raw simulation of tentative and tender frailty. The respondent stares at fragments of attachment comprehension lost comprehension, becomes involved in a relationship of mark facture and scripted text applied sequentially or contemporary with each other, scripted in tandem or over the smudge. It is as if the intent has been hidden and that there rests an implicit coded discrepancy in each smudge demanding a decode, a search in the rubble, a decipherment that matches the pages of fleeting uncertainty and assured presentation without transcription. The work shakes with an engagement with these conditions. Allen Fisher poet & artist
Published by Leeds-based publisher Stranger Press, who have championed contemporary underground avant-garde British poets in the north west and beyond, . https://strangerpress.com/
The volume features an essay - On Time and Mess - about the book, online at The Learned Pig www.thelearnedpig.org/on-time-and-mess/5477
The volume features works published by Oxford Poetry, Test Centre magazine, Gorse Magazine, Hotel magazine, Wazogate.
Partisan Hotel http://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler
Oxford Poetry www.stevenjfowler.com/blog/oxford-poetry
Wazo magazine http://www.wazogate.com/wm10-1-orange-i-fear-my-best-work-behind-me/
The works call back to the post-war and latter 20th century explorations of Henri Michaux, Jacques Racquet and the CoBrA group especially – Christian Dotremont, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Lucebert, Gerrit Kouwenaars, Karel Appel – who have been enormously influential on my thinking and work. This book is a reconnection to their principles and practises, knowing it to be familiar ground, but one rarely tread and increasingly necessary in a still predominantly colourless medium.
Three works from the book were published as a Limited Edition postcard set by Stranger Press for the Poetry Book Fair in London, September 2017.
Excerpt from interview with Poetry Spotlight: November 2017
I understand you have a new artpoem book coming out next year with Stranger Press too entitled I fear my best work behind me featuring illustrations, logograms, and asemic writing. Do you subscribe to the notion that breaking down semantics in this way is an exercise in examining and questioning what exactly constitutes a poem?
I do, and I’m excited about it. Stranger Press is a really good press to work with, Christopher Stephenson does a grand job. I fear my best work behind me is primarily illustrated artworks, brutalist, child-like, comical paintings or abstracts, each with their own handwritten poem built into the work.
Just the fact that the poems are handwritten, often in coloured ink, might, in some people’s minds, make them visual art, rather than poetry. A lot of my work in this area is about my own curiosity. I can’t resist the idea that if I do something as banal as handwrite a poem, rather than print it, in a book, its meaning will change to readers exponentially and be considered experimental.
Context is absolutely equal to content, and yet the common understanding or perception of poetry at the moment, in the UK at least, is entirely focused on the content. Generally we have the same book, paper, font, letter size, language etc. But on that page the white space has meaning, the place of the abstract marking we’ve ascribed meaning to, has import. The logical conclusion of this basic realisation, which permeates all other arts (think film-editing, material and composition in painting etc) is that the poet has the potential to interrogate the context of their language.
So the book explores how image affects language, how they are interconnected, dead space, handwriting and its own aesthetic meaning, and so on. This is old stuff, I know that. I’m deeply interested in poets like Henri Michaux or the CoBrA group, and I’m aware they covered this fifty years ago or more. But it’s exciting to me and hopefully the book has more of a sense of humour than my answer. http://poetryspotlight.com/sj-fowler/
Michael Jacobsen reviews two of my Poem Brut books August 11, 2018
http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/2018/08/2-great-new-asemic-writing-poem-brut.html
"Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is the more unreadable of the two. It contains mostly black and white asemic writing with the occasional "Picasso" blue page of asemic script. The art/writing has a storm like quality to it with lightning bolts of asemic writing. Other pages seem to contain illegible asemic animal tracks, and still others remind me of Morse code birch bark dashes. This book's main focus and general theme is the raw erotic power of creation of an excelled asemic mythology. AOAE is presented in a fine hardcover volume by Hesterglock Press and is limited to 40 copies.
I Fear My Best Work Behind Me is the slightly more legible of the two and is more colourful than Aletta. It has a spring-like playfulness and joy bringing qualities that makes me think of an asemic Kenneth Patchen crossed with finger painted art. There are a few more recognizable drolleries such as a deer's head and a crab, and the skulls on the cover art, but most of the text/art is nebulous. Fowler has acknowledged the influence of Christian Dotremont and Henri Michaux in this book, but from these predecessors he has developed his own calligraphic style and signature. The publisher Stranger Press has taken Steven's work and made an admirable codex which I will treasure.
Both works offer an excellent introduction to Steven J. Fowler's personal raw art poetry. This is Poem Brut in its finest form, a term I believed coined by Steven to describe the outsider poetry not created with a computer. It is refreshing to read/hold these handwritten books since they offer a respite and rest from the bloated techno-culture. Asemic books prove that we are not robots; they are the ultimate captcha. It is invigorating to read through these two works in a time when everything is being digitized, to have these two beautiful works of resistance now is essential. Find these books and you will know."
4 poems on Asemics.com August 5, 2018
One of the net's key hubs for Asemic poetry and writing, edited by the brilliant Michael Jacobson, has generously published 4 of my #poembrut works, 2 taken from Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire and 2 taken from I fear my best work behind me. both limited edition and available on those links
Published: a new essay on The Learned Pig January 21, 2018
As part of my new series of art book publications for Poem Brut I've written a series of essays. Each one acts as a kind of contextualised full stop to the books and their otherwise un-explained content, but they aren't explanations, just ruminations. The brilliant online journal The Learned Pig have kindly published the essay On Time and Mess, which closed out I fear my best work behind me, with selections of the work from that book
https://www.thelearnedpig.org/on-time-and-mess/5477
Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple. – Robert Rauschenberg
Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character
"Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to put it mildly, upon the regulation and control of grammar and correct spelling, in the final preparations for the publication of my book, ‘I fear my best work behind me,’ an exploration of the rudimentary character of poetry – that is letters and words – there was only one correction to make for my editor. Only one deliberate error, with all the obsequiousness that this phrase entails, for him to find and for me to defend. The title. I fear my best work is behind me. Remove the is. Then perhaps, to those dozen or so reading the title, and those few within the dozen who are concentrated by interest, the absence of the is will take on its proper significance. The primary significance I would posit that poetry has, outside of letters and words, is purposeful semantic omission.
I do not imagine my best work is behind me, literally, but in those whom I’ve discovered – and that is the right word to use (for they have to be unearthed, do poets, in England) – who have given me permission to make such works as those that often litter my pages, they are behind me, and are the best work, for they were and are not making what can be mine. What they have made was original, or based on poets they have buried with themselves, as I shall not do........"
Partisan Hotel : 6 poem bruts from 2 books
A really brilliant magazine is Hotel, and they've once again generously published some of my new art poems or poem bruts which will form the major output of my work over the next year or so, with a series of events at Rich Mix and four new limited edition books. These three works are taken from the book Memoirs of a Hypocrite. https://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler
Published: new artpoems in the latest Gorse issue 8 April 25, 2017
I've said before that I think Gorse to be one of the finest literary journals in the world. I read their impeccably produced issues cover to cover and feel the journal to be edited as beautifully as it made. To have some of my art brut poems, from my upcoming I fear my best work behind me book with Stranger Press in the latest issue is wonderful, not only to share that work, aberrant as it would be to most publications, but also because I knew how beautifully they would present the works. They look amazing on its pages, I couldnt be happier.
You can pick up issue 8 here http://gorse.ie/book/no-8/