Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire
Hesterglock Press : 2018
Available here https://poembrut.bigcartel.com/product/aletta
A book of visual poetry, art-poems, abstract paintings, asemic writing and illustrations, all in black indian ink. A book on pornography and disembodied sex.
Released in hardback limited edition January 2018, available here https://hesterglockpress.wordpress.com/sj-fowler-aletta-oceans-alphabet-empire/ and then softcover general release July 2018. dimensions: 15×23 cm pages: 64
From the publisher - A book that asks, abstractly, are letters shaped like bodies? Can words evoke faces, captured in a screen? Who, or what, is assimilating, who or what? Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is a collection of art poems, hand wrought in black, grey, silver and white, fashioned with indian ink, paint and pen, worked with techniques that edge around writing, vying with abstraction, constantly harrying semantic meaning and legibility. A book about sex, poetry and pornography and the disconnect between the former and the latter. These pages explore technology in its absence and aim to evidence the power of materiality and the body, and our hands, that are still required for touch."
Read the essay featured in the book here https://www.mercurius.one/home/aletta-ocean-alphabet-empire
The New Post Literate A review by Michael Jacobsen
Asemics.com A poem from AOAE
"Searching AOAE online (Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire) shows a YouTube clip of Japanese cats mating. What's a word in any case if not a monster? A monster that eats words. The toner explodes on the office carpet spilling out a perfectly formed oeuvre. Serifs skywrite like migrating gannets. The rorschach accidentally tells you what to think. The printed facsimile becomes original when the world goes JavaScript. The dollar sign is a duck walking backwards into a lake. The ATM dispenses glyphs. How do we know people have faces when they take the day off work? The tank rolls over the charcoal leaving a map of Iraq or a new version of Cathay. We're back in the world of Artaud's final journal where, thank fuck (and at last) we're not being told what to think. Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire is an almighty triumph, a well-earned relief. Picasso said it took a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Or, for that matter, like the mad." Chris McCabe
Launching the hardback AOAE at Rich Mix, January 13th 2018
Closing my exhibition HARD TO READ at Rich Mix, I decided to do a live take down of the pieces by disintegrating frames, salvaging works and painting over the handmade exhibition sign. The exhibition was a bit slap dash, i shouldve put more into it, so i felt i needed to roll with that energy in the closedown. The other performances on the night were brilliant and I had the chance here to show my appreciation to Hesterglocks Paul Hawkins, who published AOAE
Published : 4 poems from Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire in Mercurius February 17, 2021
My #poembrut vispo book Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire published with Hesterglock press in 2018 has 4 unpublished asemic / art poems now online at Mercurius, an online journal. https://www.mercurius.one/home/aletta-ocean-alphabet-empire
The publication includes the essay featured in the book, on poetry, eroticism and pornography.
“You can never discover for yourself what you’ve been given. Bodies and knowledge, both. The primary purpose of this book is to worry about the division between the experienced and the perceived, and what is lost between that ever expanding gap.
Bataille suggests that you try to imagine yourself changing from the state you are in, to one in which your whole self is completely doubled. He means this to be a disturbance. He reminds us, you would not survive this process since the doubles you have turned into are essentially different from you. Each of these doubles is necessarily distinct from you as you are now, as while you’ve split into two new versions of yourself, you cannot be the same, twice over. A kind of procreation is what he is suggesting and the metaphor is about writing, I think. To mark the pages then release them is to indulge oneself, fundamentally, in a productive onanism. Cells dividing, with some of that division escaping you. No wonder it feels sad, a let down, to release things into the world.
At some event, I’m watching a panel of speakers talking about something banal. The title is specious, it’s designed to intrigue but not offend. It’s a turgid literary festival, stuffy and fake, but the panellists keep talking about sex. They are almost battling each other over it. It is awkward, and insistent, but not, perhaps, for the reasons they’d imagine. They are desperate to appear comfortable with the notion of sex and in so doing are opening a gap between themselves and sex itself. Gone is anything remotely evocative of the experience, from within, within consciousness. I do not believe them too, it is a falsehood which is designed to make the audience comfortable while appearing to be discomforting. Aletta flits across my mind, as I’m actively daydreaming an escape, and it occurs to me there seems nothing more unerotic than poets talking about sex. “
JACKET 2 Extreme Texts special feature :'Atrocita,' 'Sphinxe,' and 'Your Own Double Entry'
STEVEN J. FOWLER https://jacket2.org/poems/atrocita-sphinxe-and-your-own-double-entry
“I felt it necessary to ask what is in the shape of a letter. What images do words recall? What is the meaning of color in poetry upon the page?”
Extremity is relative. The furthest thing from a given point, which is relative and changeable, cannot escape the tether of that stake. To some, within tradition, at the most surface level, any unusual gesture is severe. If one’s goal is to seek control over the uncontrollable, any submission to the unruly is a threatening gesture. If one has accepted that there is no control possible, only mediation, then only the fundamentally transgressive is extreme, because it touches on the opposite of life. All this begins within the human mind, not the poem, the strange secondary barrier of language that emerges, faulty and failing.
I came in late to poetry and without a clear orientation. I discovered many modes at once, had the naivety to hold them beside each other, and thought questions that occurred spontaneously to me to be obvious inquiries. The consequence of my own unpunctuality and gullibility is that, alongside what others might deem literary poetry, sound poetry, performance literature, and all the other ways of writing the poem, I felt it necessary to ask what is in the shape of a letter. What images do words recall? What is the meaning of color in poetry upon the page? And white space? The handmade? How does the situation of a poem change its meaning? Why is composition not a concept that applies to a medium that is innately visual? In poetry, why has content overwhelmed context? Why has product dominated process? There is nothing extreme about these questions; they are fundamental. But they have created poems of liquid and wood, ugliness, toilet wall draughtsmanship and mess. Water, ink, spit. And beneath the method lies the only thing that I might concede as extreme — that my work is about acknowledging in each banal mark on the page that these are useless impediments before what’s coming to each and every one of us and therefore quite pointless beyond time consumption, and yet I keep doing them anyway. Lots of them. That seems excessive.
All three of the works below are featured in my book Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press, 2018). Atrocita Sphinxe Your Own Double Entry June 20, 2019 TAGS: EXTREME TEXTS STEVEN J. FOWLER
Works from AOAE in Hard to Read solo exhibition at Rich Mix, London : 2017 / 2018
More on the exhibition http://www.stevenjfowler.com/hardtoread
new floppy softback cover version of AlettaOceanAlphabetEmpire September 28, 2018
Release of the softcover edition of my artpoetry book 'Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire' with the brilliant Hesterglock Press is coming. After we did a really successful sell out hardback glossy super limited edition Paul Hawkins (the editor) and I decided my scrabbleblack nightmare poems could do with more of a release into the world and so this beautiful book has been born.
Launched November 10th at Rich Mix at the last Poem Brut event for the foreseeable future, a huge night of performances bringing poets from all over the world to London http://www.poembrut.com/richmix4
“The toner explodes on the office carpet spilling out a perfectly formed oeuvre. Serifs skywrite like migrating gannets. The rorschach accidentally tells you what to think. The dollar sign is a duck walking backwards into a lake. Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire is an almighty triumph, a well-earned relief.”
Chris McCabe
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……….
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 http://asemics.com/4-asemics-by-steven-j-fowler/
The origins of Aletta Ocean Empire in 2012
A poetry collection that attempts to be methodologically innovative as each open spread features two poems that sit on opposing sides of the page. They are mirrors of each other, but warped, they are shadows of each other, non-identical twins. They have been written and are to be read as echoes or familial pairs, and centred by the ink art of Siân Williams, each page play with notions of symmetry, that are central to the Rorschach test aesthetic that underpins the book.
The poems themselves are about sexuality and pornography, ostensibly. The book has grown from three sources, the first a previous collection of poems called the Lamb pit, that was published in a series of journals during 2012, the second a limited edition chapbook of collaborative poetry and art with Siân Williams, called Animal Husbandry. And third, a commission from Annexe press editor Nick Murray for a thing called the Pheromone Party (where people are asked to sleep in a shirt for a week, then bag it, and then given to others attending the night to sniff, blindly, and then choose who they'd like to meet based on the smell) for which Annexe produced two zines for the events, as souvenirs, or things for people to read, I assumed, if it all got a little bit awkward. Having a predilection for the olfactory, having done commissions for Lush before etc...I wrote poems that became the model for this whole collection. They were accompanied by an inkblot by Siân Williams, that looks like the thing the poems are about, and then split into two, and the two lost halves published in the different zines. I have reunited them below, folding the separate zines together for a reunion as an example of how the books will appear.