Vikings
is a series of poetic sequences. Whale Hunt was published by Annexe press as a pamphlet in 2014, Runes: the Futhark was published by POW poster art series in the same year. Runes: the Wunjo was published by Gorse magazine: issue 2 and The poem Ragnarök was published by Long Poem magazine, issue 13, in 2015.
Runes: the Futhark from POW (2014)
A concrete poetry poster, edited by Antonio Claudio Carvalho.
A further Runes were published in Gorse magazine, issue 2 http://gorse.ie/rune-poem/
More on the POW series here http://chris-mccabe.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/pow-final-series-perrone-melville-vas.html
From Chris McCabe The penultimate p.o.w. takes us directly into the heart of visual language and does so through a challenging emotive language. vikings by s.j. fowler is an anachronistic Anglo-Saxon poem spelt out through runic images. Fowler uses his biographical note to tell us that "he is of viking heritage, and his middle name is Bjorn, which means bear". The poems drives through an end-of-the-world landscape describing a violent love encounter with a woman called Erika. The poet captures the savagery of the viking death desire, as if language is the container in which all the offshoots of their hand-to-mouth struggles was captured in. This landscape of movement, uncertainty, lust and danger is propelled forwards through the compounded, a-syntactic language and the shifts in font type and size. The poem, it could be argued, represents a fierce and honest struggle with the self, although it concludes quite beautifully : "I shine only for you, dove / it's / time to introduce / my distant pres- / ent past into / the pres- / ent".
One of the publications I am most proud of. These are six poems rendered in the shape of the first six magical letters of the Elder runic alphabet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark The Futhark, left behind by the norsemen as a incantational representation of something I am bonded to, as an urge, but am happy to misunderstand and rerender as a plate for my own warping language. This is but the first of many interactions my poetry will have with Vikings in the next few years, a subject in my blood, and the first poetry I was exposed to by my dad, the Sagas.
"The invention of the script has been ascribed to a single person or a group of people who had come into contact with Roman culture, maybe as mercenaries in the Roman army, or as merchants. The script was clearly designed for epigraphic purposes, but opinions differ in stressing either magical, practical or simply playful (graffiti) aspects. Bæksted 1952, p. 134 concludes that in its earliest stage, the runic script was an "artificial, playful, not really needed imitation of the Roman script", much like the Germanic bracteates were directly influenced by Roman currency, a view that is accepted by Odenstedt 1990, p. 171 in the light of the very primitive nature of the earliest (2nd to 4th century) inscription corpus."
All the better that this work should be with Antonio Claudio Carvalho's remarkable POW series. These are poetry poster artworks, far too underappreciated, emanating out of Brazil via Edinburgh, and taking in 26 authors in their finality, now, with my Vikings being the 25th, and Hansjorg Mayer the 26th! Incredible, and with Chris McCabe, Peter Finch, Augusto de Campos and so many great others coming before, I am privileged to be in such company. I owe Antonio such a debt for the commission, it really challenged me to grow as a poet who is also an artist in aspiration. Thanks too to Anatol Knotek, ever aiding in my technical ambitions.
Whale Hunt from Annexe Press (2014)
Whale Hunt was reviewed by Billy Mills on Sabotage Reviews. http://sabotagereviews.com/2014/05/12/whale-hunt-by-sj-fowler/
The whale hunt in the title of SJ Flower’s excellent chapbook is of the Viking variety, these being Viking poems. There is no clear evidence that the Vikings actually hunted whales, although whales and Vikings did most definitely co-exist and the one scavenged the carcasses of the other when such carcasses washed up on convenient beaches. Indeed, the limits of Viking whaling may well have been to injure whales in the hope of facilitating such scavenging. Sadly the Sagas are relatively silent on the matter.
Tilikum the captive orca, on the other hand, very definitely exists and is reasonably efficient as a people hunter, having killed three of them. Maybe he mistook them for Vikings? Together, Viking whale hunts, real or otherwise, and Tilikum the angry orca form the warp and woof of Whale Hunt.
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As an object, this is the kind of chapbook that pleases my senses greatly. Its A6 page size is perfect for pockets, and the choice of a crisp serif font more than compensated for the small point size, meaning that the blocks of text are clearly readable. These untitled blocks, or poems, are nine in number and vary in length from eleven to seventeen lines, giving the whole the feel of a sonnet sequence. The inclusion of three interestingly complimentary illustrations, combining photomontage and angular line drawings, by publisher Nick Murray and the good-quality paper used add considerably to the pleasure.
The language of the poems is suitably jagged, given the Viking substratum:
Sparrows above, they are the size & colour of seagulls
Jokke saw they are so delicate, said their beaks
I told him & we throw rocks at them & eat them
with the preponderance of single-syllable words and fricative consonants combining highly effectively to create a suitably Nordic soundscape.
In a recent interview, Fowler mentions Pierre Joris and Tom Raworth as exemplars of the kind of poetic practice he admires. Anselm Hollo, a poet often associated with them, gets a name-check in the first of these poems; ‘now a skald in Valhalla’. On the evidence of Whale Hunt, what Fowler’s work most has in common with these older poets is speed. Speed of perception, of movement from one object to another, of language: these are the dominant characteristics of these poems. They are fast, disjunctive and unsettling of readerly expectations:
when war walked upright on the waves
bearpaw blackfish red arts admin.
that I surely shouldn’t do the recorded ruins
resurrected in Englishness tracery
intact in the tombing, parted company
heat dissolving delicacy, bound up
clow clear framing everyward to be heard
There is an additional undercurrent of animism running through the poems. Fowler’s whales and other animals are shape-shifting totemic creatures inhabiting a world in which ‘Time began with a bear then it became a Viking’. The bear is almost as much a presence as the whale; indeed they cannot really be distinguished:
Becoming Bear from Whale
Turns out the Whale is a Beaver
Bear > Beaver > Whale
Like Housman’s hunter and sailor, whalers, even putative Viking whalers, come home in the end. In fact, ‘home’ is the final word in both the first and last lines of the ninth and final poem in the set. For poet and Viking alike, it’s a hard-won landfall, ‘famished but alive’, wearing an Orca skull as helmet, home at last. It’s a neat resolution for such a restless sequence, final but somehow lacking finality, home until the next time, language, for the moment, at rest.”
Ragnarök published by Long Poem magazine June 2015
A magazine I've long admired, the remit of Long Poem is beautifully attended to by Lucy Hamilton and Linda Black, and I am so happy my poem Ragnarok, part of my Viking series, has appeared as the very last poem of this wonderful latest issue. I'm happy too to be in there with some great poets - Geraldine Monk, Claire Trevien, Will Stone, Ian Seed and more.
My poem draws a lot from the work of Pentti Saarikoski, and was something I worked on quite intensely while in Copenhagen last year. It mediates his sense of disjunction and magical contradiction between the banal and the profound by evoking the world's end.
You can order the issue here: http://www.longpoemmagazine.org.uk/page4.htm
P.O.W. poetry poster art celebration reading
June 29, 2014
Held at the Juggler in Hoxton, supported by the Bookart Bookshop and curated by the lovely Sophie Herxheimer, this was a really intimate, warm and enjoyable reading, a celebration of the brilliant work of Antonio Claudio Carvalho and this unique concrete poetry series that he has published. Good to meet some really brilliant poets too, like Robert Vas Dias and Victoria Bean. & I got to read with Chris McCabe, with some heavy male bond swaying.
Robert Vas Dias https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH-HsNc-CaY
Victoria Bean https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRg_WXh67lw
Chrissy Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqv1DNWWcSA
Edward Lucie-Smith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcXiqxut798
Sophie Herxheimer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adj8Yo4ZjEY
Richard Price https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VqvuwSN5YA