Minimum Security Prison Dentistry

My third collection, Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (Anything Anymore Anywhere press 2011 - 93 pages) is an exploration of prison language and prison violence with suitably aberrant use of experimental syntax, found text, rewriting and language excavation. The notion of prison and incarceration occurs to me of one of extreme horror and this collection reflects that, responsible to the environment that it is exploring.

http://www.anythinganymoreanywhere.com/sjfowler.php

"If you think poetry is some sedate pursuit carried out in an ivory tower then you obviously ain't read Steven Fowler. He makes Bukowski look like Billy Childish and Billy Childish look like William MacGonagall!"      Stewart Home

"Imagine a Boys Own Paper landscape with True Crime architecture. Laurence Harvey dodges from building to country trying to evade CCTV whose sound footage runs through Babelfish.  The smells are Jack London, the light is Genet and the memories are Edgar Lee Masters.  Equally in words is Steven Johannes Fowler's Minimum Security Prison Dentistry: elegant, coldly funny, at times emotional, textured with occasional accidental/intentional solecisms; but getting the work done.  Nowadays most pages labelled "poetry" are unreadable and uninteresting: these give hope. Anyone who can name-check Joe Arpaio and Jacky le Mat, and reference the cover-texture of an Anselm Hollo book from the sixties rides my particular range."         Tom Raworth

“This could be the worst book you will read this year, the discussion is violence, but really it’s a punch from a cup cake, using narrative and expressionist syntax. His celebration of where is, has a clipped disgust.”        Allen Fisher

 “Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct, these kaleidoscopic poems enter the house of prison language via the back door and take no hostages.  If Captain Beefheart had done St. Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this.”         Philip Terry

Andrei Codrescu reviews Minimum Security Prison Dentistry at Exquisite Corpse 

"Steven Johannes Fowler, Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, anything anymore anywhere, 1 Spence Street, Edinburgh, EH 165 AG, www.anythinganymoreanywhere.co.uk . I know "minimum" is in the title but it still hurts. Fowler's poetry hurts a little more, in a good way: there is living and thinking in these generous breaths of fresh lyric air. "sensitive to the next day regret & poverty/ melancholy northern soul, false and twisted/ moisture menagerie -- human ear alchemy," simultneously a report on the poetic state of the colder areas of Europe, a critique of the (cultural) climate, and an urging to listen. There are some very fun sexy poems in here too, like "buff my pylon," which must be Brit for "spank the monkey." The man is alive, his poetry, too." http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=506&Itemid=65

Minimum Security Prison Poetry launch

Minimum Security Prison Poetry, The Horse Hospital
Wednesday November 23rd 2011 @ 7pm - Entrance free

A huge thanks to everyone who read and attended and supported on Wednesday night. It was another unique and memorable reading, the 17 voices of the poets spilling together like the contents of a magic intestine. It was a lovely evening to launch my new book and the venue, the Horse Hospital, was really exceptional. Special thanks to Catherine Carncross, Livia Dragomir, David Kelly and Andy Spragg for helping out. And to Colin Herd for the book.

Contemporary British poets read original poetry on the subject of incarceration & imprisonment.

Tim Atkins / Richard Barrett / Julia Calver / Tom Chivers / Matthew Gregory / Stephen Emmerson / Jeff Hilson / Colin Herd / Holly Hopkins / Kirsty Irving / Antony John / Mendoza / Tamarin Norwood / Chris Page / Holly Pester / Sam Riviere / Jon K Shaw / Marcus Slease / Andy Spragg / Steve Willey / SJ Fowler, launching the collection Minimum Security Prison Dentistry published by Anything Anymore Anywhere press.

 

Recipes published in Otoliths 


a new issue of Otoliths for spring 2011. As ever it's one of the most considered and wide ranging poetic publications online. Features a mass of poets including excellent standouts Márton Koppány, J. D. Nelson, Felino A. Soriano, Grzegorz Wróblewski and sean burn.

I think this is my fifth or sixth time in Otoliths. These poems are from Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, the collection launched this month.

http://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2011/09/sj-fowler-recipe-1-pale-of-boiling.html

Published: 8 poems translated into German on Karawa.net

March 8, 2016

Really so happy to have some of my work in excellent German translation, eight poems from my third book Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, have been translated by Konstantin Ames for www.karawa.net, edited by Konstantin Ames, Sonja vom Brocke, Richard Duraj, Mara Genschel, Norbert Lange and Léonce W. Lupette.

http://www.karawa.net/content/minimum-security-prison-dentistry

I'm also in amazing company with KONSTANTIN AMES / GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE / SEAN BONNEY / RÉGIS BONVICINO / SONJA VOM BROCKE / FRANCIS CARCO / BRIAN CATLING / CHRISTOPHER ECKER / FÉLIX FÉNEON / RAQUEL FERNÁNDEZ / ALLEN FISHER / CRISTIAN FORTE / JÜRGEN GHEBREZGIABIHER / MICHAEL GRATZ / THOMAS HAVLIK / NORBERT LANGE / GEORG LESS / LÉONCE W. LUPETTE / AINSLEY MORSE / WSEWOLOD NEKRASSOW / MEINOLF REUL / SOPHIE REYER / ZÉ DO ROCK/ BELA SHAYEVICH / IAIN SINCLAIR

Had a grand day at Kingston Uni with Zuzana Husarova, my fellow TRYIE collectivist, visiting from Bratislava and Maria Mencia, who teaches in the media dept with a focus on E-literature, sharing some found text poetry, and discussing reappropriation and technology. Most importantly this special seminar with Maria's students and the wonderful Mariusz Pidarski also presenting his work (an amazing adaptation of Bruno Schulz into videogame format amongst that), was the launch of a journal which seems to be a brilliant summation of much of the pioneering work Maria and Zuzana have done, exhibiting in Kosice as well as commissioning a myriad of articles. I read from Minimum Security Prison Dentistry and Recipes, couching my use of found text as a way of actualising my poetic engagement with the world of language around me, emphasising my work as the result of a refractive, reflective process, rather than an originary one, right to the roots of that thinking, and that the use of the language of the internet is a necessary engagement with the language world I live in. Moreover, it is a very specific language world, one that is founded on community and generosity but is in fact the ultimate example of the ethical notion that what a person does when no one is looking is who they are, morally, as people on the net are regularly awful en masse because they are relatively anonymous. So my use of net text is really an ethical injunction, attempting to show we need new tools of discussion to tackle new realms of language, and how throwaway it can be. I also emphasised how this wasn't a strict practise, but blended ambiguously with other writing methods and approaches. I finished by reading some trolling text, my poem Black Pepper Enchilladas, which finishes with fuck you, fuck you all.= We all then had crisps and a long pleasant chat about the potential of technology and spying and such.