Edited by the brilliant Estonian poet Mathura, I’m happy to have two poems from my book ‘Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : Poems on Films” published this year by Broken Sleep, in the summer issue of Verseville.
Check out the full issue http://www.verseville.org/issue-xxxii-august-2021.html with friends Forrest Gander, Erik Lindner and more. Great selection.
The poems are on the Ghost and the Darkness, and the Estonian film, November http://www.verseville.org/s-j-fowler.html
Thomas Helm's work with Mercurius is something I am very pleased to say I have been involved in since close to its beginnings. I felt in Thomas' enthusiasm and taste, a kinship, and it reminded me of my Maintenant series – as a project that not only supports others, but aims to actively connect to them. To amplify. I felt a responsibility to then pass the connections I was given then on to Mercurius, and I'm happy to see links have blossomed since then, to lots of poets and presses.
This anthology marks a significant first light in what I'm sure will be a distinct and brilliant future for the journal. And though I say I have been keen to support Mercurius, realistically, they have supported me far more. And this anthology, containing my excerpts from two of my books, furthers that generosity. It's buyable here, with an impressive list of contributors. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mercurius-No-dreams-Mercuriuss-Poetry/dp/B097STF19V/
Now available for pre-order https://www.steelincisors.com/product/bastard-poems/2?cp=true&sa=true&sbp=false&q=false
Really happy to be sharing this new book from Steel Incisors press edited by James Knight. It brings together years of collage, includes an essay of mine and 80 plus full colour works. It’s a sister to Sticker Poems and Crayon Poems, it’s my fifth publication of 2021, and the last this year and it’s launched on August 2nd in Bath.
From the publisher : An unprecedented take on collage as poetic medium, SJ Fowler’s Bastard Poems is a book that defies description. Combining the found, the handwritten, the abstract, the irreverent and the archival, and the occasional text camouflaged as commentary, Fowler has devised a new form of poetry standing on the shoulders of a grand tradition. Here are labels and book pages, monkeys and footballers, self-help instructions and informational leaflets, plus lists, letters, tickets, drawings, maps, barcodes, birds, bears, and (!) more. Reading it is the equivalent of exploring someone’s abandoned attic only to realise they have been watching you the whole time.
This volume is SJ Fowler's selected collages, collected from works made 2013 to 2021, and includes an essay by the author.
92 pages, full colour, paperback, perfect bound.
Good to share a first excerpt of a weird found sound / sound poetry album I've been working on over the last year in London. I spent many days recording the sounds of the city, and then rambling in various accents, and then making sound poems next to London spaces close to me. This excerpt is an edit together of three separate tracks about birds, wind and a cockney cat buying a postcard https://www.mixcloud.com/Clouds_Tracks/sj-fowler-almost-no-poems/
It has been published as part of the brilliant Clouds and Tracks curated by John Hughes, Volker Eichelmann and Jenna Collins. Clouds and Tracks’ first iteration collates sound works conceived and realised since the spring of 2020. Contributions chart participants’ thoughts, feelings, driftings and wanderings since the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic, providing a sonic snapshot of the strange and unsettling times we are living through. https://cloudsandtracks.net/
A huge influence on my work, and on hundreds of poets in the UK and beyond, it's great to share this near 7000 word interview with Robert Sheppard on 3am magazine, as part of my Maintenant series.
Robert's writing has been important for four decades plus and our chat ranges over an enormous amount of terrain. https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-107-robert-sheppard/
Nice to have this small documentary as a kind of gentle summation of the EPF summer 2021 program, which presented a quartet of events in London, returning to live happenings across the city. From our showcase Camarade, with 20 UK-baed European poets presenting new works in pairs at St Johns on Bethnal Green, to an outdoor reading in Richmond Park and events held in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library, Peer Gallery and more. All events were free to attend and socially distanced.
The EPF will return in winter 2021, November 18th to December 3rd with events featuring international poets from across the continent, with events celebrating Austrian, Swiss, Spanish, Latvian, Hungarian, Swedish, Norwegian poets and more. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/
https://www.photopoetrysurfaces.com my chat with David Solo for the SURFACES Opening Night on June 17 2021, where I talked a lot about my approaches to photopoetry and my collaborative work with Bard Torgersen CROWFINGER https://www.stevenjfowler.com/crowfinger
Flowers Won't Grow, by Karenjit Sandhu and I, is now available from Sampson Low https://sampsonlow.co/2021/06/21/flowers-wont-grow-karenjit-sandhu-sj-fowler/
35 pages of poetry printed in a limited edition of 150. £4.99.
From the publisher “A unique epistolary poetry collection and a collaborative feat of rare acumen, Flowers Won’t Grow contemplates mundanity and gratitude with a mix of polite curiosity and tender contempt. The lettered, prose-ish poems of Sandhu and Fowler speak to a luminous private public exchange, and the writeable unspeakables of a long London summer. These are playful, complex poems, of a city, of soap and fizzy water, of a search for commonality in quiet, of paper birds and hardened workers. www.stevenjfowler.com/flowers
“‘Exchanges, transfers and transferrals of intimacy and stark urgency – a work of posed questions, thumbed noses and drawn blood’.
Eley Williams
‘This is a nurse’s attention on a knife edge. A pin-prick of address, a poem that says “let’s get out of here” to and about itself. Everything is external, but you can’t get outside, even if you don’t what to know what’s inside. It’s a hostile take over of mundane objects and day-to-day experience in a language that asks us to settle for fruit syrup but reaches beyond to the universe’
Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
The book was written across 2019, in what seems now a fever of activity and exchange, for this collaboration and in my work in general, and then revised in 2021 for publication. Karenjit is a really excellent writer and performer and I think the text is really good – playful, ludic, knotty.
It's the third in a series of collaborative pamplets with Sampson Low, following Beastings and Crowfinger, and as ever before, Alban Low has done a remarkable job bringing this to life.
Karenjit and I had two launches, following two performances of the text in late 2019. The first was in Richmond Park and the second in Hoxton Trust Gardens, both as part of the European Poetry Festival. Both performances included an exchange of reading and action between us, with very loose suggestions beforehand, and much completely improvised. For both I did forward rolls and some leaping and running, why I did this is a mystery.
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution www.brlsi.org/ 16-18 Queen Square. BA1 2HN
Doors 6.45pm for a 7pm start - Free entry with a booktable with books for sale
To celebrate the launch of SJ Fowler’s ‘Bastard Poems’ from Steel Incisors press, a Poem Brut event will see readings and performances by an extraordinary group of poets, writers and artists, all based in the region.
Expect an evening of new experimental literary performance works, made for the night, alongside readings of poetry and prose. This event will present a true range of what’s possible in contemporary British-based poetry and prose, celebrating collage, liveness and textual play.
An event long in development, excellent to work with the Scottish Poetry Library and Asif Khan on this for many months, this one saw Irish and Scottish poets produce new collaborations for the night. Some last minute changes saw us hosted by the remarkably hospitable Austrian Cultural Forum in Mayfair, and the poets put on four brilliant, concise, clever, charismatic performance.
Unlike the normally exhaustive mode of my events, this was rapid and memorable for that. We had a good time post readings in the chandeliered ballroom of the ACF, enjoying what we had all missed for the previous year.
All videos https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/irishandscot
A few years back I co-wrote a short film called, LIMBO, originated and filmed by Lotje Sodderland. Thanks to Lotje and the films producers, it has been doing festival rounds recently, after being screened the London Short film fest it has upcoming screenings at Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage, Manlleu festival in Catalunia and Dokufest in Kosovo.
“LIMBO is a true-fiction short following the story of Witold, a young, Polish Londoner who takes a new job as a care worker. Under-trained and underpaid, he speeds from home to home on his bicycle, feeling the enormity of his responsibility as he enters hidden worlds to administer care to a delicate but dynamic assortment of elderly men living alone.” https://www.lotjesodderland.com/portfolio/l-i-m-b-o
Ken Loach said of it ‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’
Another outdoor event, this time adjacent to Peer Gallery in Hoxton Trust Garden.
A little rained on but well worth it and brolly prepared, four pairs of poets followed Stephen Watts, whose program of happenings made this event come to be. Swirl of words / Swirl of worlds, worth checking out https://www.peeruk.org/swirl-of-words
I performed with Karenjit Sandhu - doing forward rolls and running round the garden, celebrating our new book - and it was good to see Fabian Peake, Clover Peake, Kristina Kuneva, Susie Campbell, Vik Shirley and others.
All videos are up https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/peer
I took over the role of poetry editor from Darran Anderson in July 2011.
In ten years, working with the brilliant Andrew Gallix and other remarkable colleagues, I have kept open submissions most of the time, at least 8 of the 10 years, and fielded often up to 5 submissions a day. Sometimes more.
It has been an immense privilege. It has actually started friendships for me, making contacts with poets kind enough to send their work, from around the world. It has been a way to discover what is happening now with people and places I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to encounter. And I’ve had the chance to keep up a continual correspondence with many making their first submissions, helping them work up their work for publication.
Moreover, with the literary / experimental publications of 2011 to 2017, all listed here https://www.stevenjfowler.com/3ammagazine followed by the Poem Brut series https://www.poembrut.com/3am (both pages need updating) I believe I have created a recognisable aesthetic for my editorial choices, and attracted practitioners working in that style.
I also think, without being arrogant, it is a space like no other online magazine for poetry, that supports brilliant work that wouldn’t find a home elsewhere. Or something akin to that. Over 300 publications and 100 interviews. More than that even. From Jerome Rothenberg, Iain Sinclair and other established names, to I would estimate at least 80 first ever publications, it’s a list I’m proud of, and I have no plans to give up the mantle soon.
A sincere thanks to Andrew Gallix for making 3am magazine what it is. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/
The grand event of this first iteration of the EPF, it was great to be back inside the inimitable St Johns on Bethnal Green presenting an event with 20 european poets sharing 10 new collaborations made in pairs. This event, happening while England beat Ukraine in the euros, so much so we could hear the screams from nearby pubs as the goals went in, turned out to be a celebration of european poets living in london and the UK, because travel restricted our international guests. This made it something else, an event about a community, as well as about a true range of what is possible in contemporary poetry. / All the videos and loads of pictures from the special night here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade21 (pics below by Madeleine Rose Elliott.
Very happy to be featured in the “The third instalment of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.” My work is an excerpt from THE GREAT APES, a long poem in five parts that was written a few years ago and is awaiting publication as a book. It’s a work I’m excited to share, and this excerpt also features an original illustration by me I made for the issue. Always lovely to work with editor Jess Chandler. https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/prototype-3/
Happy to add my name to this campaign from long time friends English PEN https://www.englishpen.org/posts/campaigns/uk-voices-of-protest-our-letter-on-the-police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-pcsc/
In recognition of the threat posed by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC) to these democratic rights, writers and free speech campaigners today write to MPs to highlight the implications of the PCSC for freedom of expression in the UK, and to express their solidarity with protesters and activists threatened by the bill.
The European Poetry Festival 2021 opened with the last event of the Writers Kingston program for the academic year. I led around 50 people from the Richmond gate of the park into the long grass, where some were eaten by insects and others haayfevered, but most seemed happy. We then had over a dozen performances from a range of poets, many local to the Kingston area, many students and member of the popogrou collective.
Four publications were also launched this night, by Sylee Gore in absentia, Nina Fidry, Patrick Cosgrove and myself and Karenjit Sandhu.
Watching the sun go down over the park, it was an atmospheric start to the festival punctuated by a genuine feeling of camaraderie and some fantastic live works. All performances are video’s here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/writerskingston
As part of my ongoing collaborations, through Writers Kingston and Poem Brut, with the remarkable publisher and artist Alban Low of Sampson Low, the start of the recent European Poetry Festival saw the launch of two debut publications I had the pleasure to support - Even Still from Sylee Gore and Slurps from Patrick Cosgrove. Both are original, conceptually remarkable poets and extraordinarily kind people. These booklettes were long in the making, as Sylee and Patrick and I have been in dialogue for many months shaping the works. It’s been uplifting to have a role in their debut works emerging into the world. Both have sold out, in fact, from Sampson Low, in limited editions. None the less, links here.
https://sampsonlow.co/2021/06/21/even-still-sylee-gore/
For Patrick’s books, I contributed a small essay to the volume, and here are a few excerpts “This is the first book of one of the UK's most unique poets, whose unforgettable performances over the last number of years, in galleries, libraries and arts centres, have been a feature of the British experimental poetry scene. Or certainly, I have come to think so, because these performances have influenced my own. Patrick's work emerges from a tradition of English eccentricity, encountered as so authentic and organic, so stripped of poise and self-awareness, that it is no longer unconventional, but entirely natural, even rational, by the given, unacknowledged logic of its happening. And this is what I am drawn to, after organising over 500 events and teaching for many years. A poet whose knowledge of themselves and their own true concerns is entirely present, without a single seam showing. Patrick is a real one……….”
“And beyond this daily, immediate, unpretentious abstraction, Patrick's interest in family, and in work, are present too. Slurps, like many of his performances, evoke the unconscious repetitive aspects of jobs that are learnt and held in the body and reproduced automatically through processes. For all the amusement of seeing Patrick smear Nutella on a radio, he also veers his work one step towards the living coma of a dead end job where the unthought, and unthinking within the body, becomes more than a metaphor between the coherence and incoherence of our actual lived lives.”
Michael and I at the Freeword Centre 2012
I moved to London 15 years ago this September and I spent a decade of that time living in Latimer road, West London. In that decade, the poet of the area, often visible on the street, by chance, and in every bookstore, was the inimitable Michael Horovitz. I met Michael through the brilliant Sheila Ramage, who ran the Notting Hill bookshop for decades, and together they patiently initiated me into a London poetry culture that has formed a significant part of my work and what I see as a tradition I wish to be part of. Erich Fried, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, Elias Canetti, Ginberg, Burroughs, Gysin and more, the stories were endless and often unrepeatable. Those times are long gone. Michael had lessons for me beyond the tales of the past too, and he generously passed on much of what he had learned from his iconoclastic intervention into British poetry in the 1960s and beyond. He spoke to me specifically about the perils of being perceived as an organiser and anthologist in a national poetry culture that still championed a certain kind of singular poets, whose talent was perceived as mysterious and particular. I mean this not as a slight, but at times his chagrin at having his own work overlooked, and perhaps his place in British poetry too, educated me in other ways, on what would lie ahead for me if I sank my whole heart and soul into trying to change things around me. I ate with him at his home a few times and was fortunate to have him do a series of my events, early on, around 2012 to 2013. His achievements were remarkable, the Albert Hall poetry readings and his Children of Albion anthology the best known, whose importance can't be overstated (and are overlooked, even for their fame – they should've marked a turning point in the UK but remain instead vital notes of resistance to literary parochialism) but he never stopped writing, working, performing, anthologising, printing and sharing. He was a completely unique man, gregarious, droll, ebullient and I only knew him in his 70s and 80s. The energy he must've had as a young man, I can only imagine. To me, his work was also representative of something vital, that beat poetry has a place in the UK poetic vernacular. His work was almost pure beat, if that might be allowed to be a phrase, carrying with it the confident directness of the post-war American enthusiasm and the influence of jazz music on literature. Notting Hill and its environs will be a more muted place without him, as will British poetry in general. I shall celebrate his 86 years by revisiting his poetry and sharing it with friends.
A very fine and detailed obituary has been written here by Douglas Field https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/11/michael-horovitz-obituary
Extraordinary to open up the summer issue of Sight and Sound magazine and find this article on page 30. I was pleased to find out recently the international film magazine, run out of the BFI, would have a feature on my latest collection ‘Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films’ but the way it turned out, written by David Spittle, is exceptional. It’s obviously really positive that editor Kieron Corless asked someone familiar with my work to write the article, and David has been extremely generous. A couple of my poems from the book are also featured, a pair of what i call my ‘screenshot’ poems. I found my copy in a big Tesco, which was funny, so it’s available all over, but also online https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/magazine/summer-2021-issue
