Red Museum, from Knives forks & spoons press

The book is indirectly about the museum industry's necessary 'truths', narrated through aberrant histories, focused on European modes of relating history, fact and truth, both a celebration and a judgement of this often tortuous, detail orientated method of writing. It is also a conceptual book, an attempt to be as dense and impenetrable as many of the occult and liminal sources from which it draws its material. I wrote it while working at the British Museum and that institutions collection, and work culture, plays an enormous role in the book.

Below you can find a discussion of Red Museum by the critic Richard Marshall, a video of my reading at the book's launch and a large selection of poems from the collection published in online journals.

Poetry Book Society article

September 27, 2011

http://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/poetry_portal/knives_fists_and_spoonsHuge thanks to Peter Hughes

I hope Alec Newman and Steven Fowler are having a relaxing break this summer. They have been busy.

Earlier this year, Alec Newman's Knives, Forks and Spoons Press was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award for outstanding UK publisher of poetry in pamphlet form. It is easy to understand why. KF&S has been putting out an amazing range of innovative poetry at an extraordinary rate. There is a buzz and an urgency about the whole project which has made it a particularly welcome addition to the British poetry scene. The website is riddled with unpredictability - as well as some enticing offers, such as three books for £10.

The first KF&S pamphlet I can remember reading was by S J Fowler and was the first in his fightsseries. There are now at least twenty of these, each one inspired by a different boxer. The first fifteen have been assembled and published in a single volume by Veer books, in July 2011, under the title fights cycles I-XV.

Maggie O'Sullivan describes this as a dazzling, visceral, proficient, kinetic work. Tim Atkins agrees, saying there are not many books of poetry where you turn the page not knowing what is coming next, but this is one of them.

Steven Fowler was born in Cornwall in 1983. He studied philosophy at Durham, then at the University of London. Somehow he finds time to edit the Maintenant interview series for 3 am magazine, write extensively, study for a PhD in contemporary poetics at Birkbeck, and hold down a job at the British Museum. He has been an employee of the museum since 2007 and its vast holdings inform his recent volume Red Museum, (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2011).

It is difficult to convey the breadth of reference in this book. Perhaps listing a few of the titles will give some idea: a cubic mile is sufficient to contain one hundred billion souls, provided they are packed tightly, 'like anchovies'; the Crusaders treacherously Crucify those taken at Odessa; William of Orange; how to shorten the yard; Tamerlane harvests horses; how to enlarge the Pudenda; Porphyria; The Hospitalier grand master Guillaume de Villiers or Guillaume de Clermont defends the walls of Acre without enthusiasm; Blue cocoon; Pagan depression; the sixth fiddle; Oswald Spengler has a go; Jesus wept; I leave my meals to Neseus.

I feel that this should whet your appetite. Iain Sinclair is impressed too:
A tremendous and persuasive surge of the red and the black: conflicted doctrines, scorched paper. Gothic scripts and plague-year screenplays for an apocalyptic cinema. Death chess. Heretical crusades. Hurt flesh. Fire angels. Madness. A grimoire for a haunted river-city. The poetry lies in the interpretation of malfated woodcuts. It is sinewy, knotted, persistent. And true.

So it has been a year of formidable achievements by Alec Newman and Steven Fowler. Red Museum is just one of their accomplishments, but it is the most startling book of poetry in English to appear this year. I hope they are sitting somewhere sunny, nursing chilled drinks, enjoying well-deserved breaks. But something tells me that they're not.

Peter Hughes' poetry publications include Paul Klee's Diary, Blueroads, Nistanimera, The Summer of Agios Dimitrios and The Pistol Tree Poems. Nathan Thompson writes of it as ‘flickering, intense, innovative and utterly mesmerising'. Peter also runs Oystercatcher Press, based on the Norfolk coast, which has published more than 40 poetry pamphlets over the last three years.

Richard Marshall discusses Red Museum in his Eric Auerbach essay

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/time-history-and-literature/ Humbling to be mentioned by the extraordinary literary critic and scholar Richard Marshall in his epic essay on Eric Auerbach, which covers a multitude of interweaving subjects, and ends up discussing my first collection, Red Museum, which was launched in 2011. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Museum-S-J-Fowler/dp/1907812431

"...In the Middle Ages Dante’s poetry is described as a true umbra, a shadow of the truth. This suggests figura was Dante’s theory of inspiration. Auerbach suggests that ‘… we can say in Europe , the figurative method goes back to Christian influences, the allegorical to ancient pagan ones, and that the first is applied for the most part to Christian materials, the second, rather, to ancient ones’ but then admits that this is too neat and in the High Middle Ages ‘ the Sybils, Vergil, and the figures of the Aeneid, indeed, even the characters from the cycles of mythic sagas from Brittany (Galahad in the Quest del Saint Graal, for example) were absorbed into figurative readings.’
 

SJ Fowler’s poem ‘Benedict IX, elected Pope at the age of ten, shocked the sensibilities of the pagan age’ from his ‘Red Museum’ collection is a fiercely brilliant example of a contemporary poet working sensuous vigor into death, echoing Capaneo in ‘Inferno 14’ ‘I am in death as I was in life’, refusing the ascetic demand to sacrifice particularity even when in these vast poetic vaults of fantastic prodigousness. Fowler’s collection first strikes a reader as the imaginings of a cunning Gothic primitive, presenting a massive net of barbarian gothic figura. He’s picking up unmediated vital forces and threading them with legacies of late antiquity coupled with ideas and fantasies frozen in time immemorial to swarm across the page like their own ghastly phantoms. His voices span that gulf between allegory and history where, as Schelling says about Dante, individuals ‘… become timeless because of the positions in which the poet has placed them, positions that are themselves timeless.’ The grim sculptural visions Fowler achieves are a result of the synthesis of a vernacular pulse plus the imperishable spheres of locality as vivid and tragic as he judges necessary. Fowler is our contemporary tragic realist poet, capable of infusing passion with erotic hum as well as Auerbach’s ‘zealous and domineering egoism… ambition… gloire.’

The last stanza of ‘Canados’ from the same collection is this:

‘We are not a drought,
We need an artificial lake.
I have a book I would like to sell you, he says.
He whips back his long grey coat;
Its buttons stitched in blue thread,
And from within produces a book
As deep as a ribcage.’

I like to think the book is Dante but it’s just as likely to be some woman who, as in the Bowie song, ‘makes you feel so lonely you could die.’ The goal is not to enjoy individual details in quiet contemplation but to get caught up in the dynamic movement of the plenum like a fish in a net, struggling for a last astonishment."

Canudos published from the Citron Review March '11. Taken from the Red Museum

the Seven deathly sins / Ira, the Seven deathly sins / Invidia & the Seven deathly sins / Luxuria published by Otoliths February '11. 

Infortvnivm published by the Haggard & Halloo Feb '11, from the Red Museum. It is published with the Hans Memling picture that inspired, that sits blutakked above my desk.

{How to join the Hashishiyya in five easypieces} published by the Legendary Jan'11

{Jan Hus travels to the Council of Constance to argue the case for reform & is burned as a heretic, despite an imperial guarantee of safe conduct} published by the Toucan Feb '11

Infortvnivm, Tamerlane harvests horses & the Horns of Hattin published by Orion headless Jan'11

the Suicide note of John Downham & the Seven deathly Sins / Desidia published by Anastomoo  all the way out in Tasmania Jan '11

A second very generous publication by the Eunoia Review {illustrations to an unidentified collection of Dionysius' sermons}, {across Steppe come horsebound Infanta}, {erudite symbolists, mystic poets, they form, then pluck the most perverse flowers of wickedness}, {how to enlarge the Pudenda}, {Tunning of Elynor of Rummin} & {the Mereblut tunnel} Feb'11

{the seven deathly Sins / Ira} & {fog of guts} published by Weirdyear Journal Feb'11

{tell my beloved that his chamber is prepared & that I am sick with love for him} published by Quantum poetry Dec '10

Alcuin freehands a signet in blue ink, Veronica Giuliana, beatified by Pius II, who, in memory of the lamb of God, took a real lamb to bed with her, kissing it an suckling it on her breasts, the Mongol Princess & Endura published by the Eunoia Review Dec'10. All four poems from the Red Museum

Blood Bank #1 to Blood Bank #5 published by the Scrambler Dec'10. All five poems from the Red Museum (Knives Forks & Spoons press)

daughter of Aungil, sister of Alpga, Diogenes has a writing desk, Blue Cocoon, Jeanna des Anges makes a host of false accusations, a Clue Bucoon,Saint Catherina of Genoa suffers such infernal fires, Balthasar Cossa confesses to incest, adultery, defilement, homicide and atheism,Cue the Buffoon, I leave my meals to Neleus published generously by Peter Philpott at Great Works in Dec '10. Includes drafts of poems for Red Museum, some of which never appeared in the final volume

Benedict IX, elected Pope at the age of ten shocked the sensibilities of a barbarous age, I am a dancing Cathar, married twice, looming incest, Jus Primae Noctis, Nafkhae is the name of that particular form of air or vapour which the angel gabriel is said to have blown or caused to pass from his coat sleeve into the windpipe of Mary for the purpose of impregnation published by the Rufous Salon, a new ejournal from Sweden. All four poems from the Red Museum. Thanks to Jenny Enochsson.

{Pope Alexander VI, who, with his son, Cesare Borgia, carried perfidy further than it had ever ben carried before} published by the Clockwise Cat April'10. Included with a beautiful stained glass image

the Il-Khanid period AD 1220-1335, under the descendants of Timur AD 1370-1576 & Seljuqs in Iran ::: AD 1050-1200 published by Otoliths Oct'10. All 3 poems from the Red Museum.

The Mamluk Dynasty AD 1250-1517 & Notes from the Desk Drawer published by Otoliths Oct'10