A note on : my TYPOETRY visual poem on the streets of East Ham

An amazing thing, my poem up on the walls of East Ham. And my reading next to it here, eating chipsss

This poem by Steven J Fowler, designed by Noam Benatar, can be found at The Old Fire Station, 1 High Street South, East Ham, London E6 6EN

The fish on the brink of the borough's best t-shirt says
easy come easy go, life ain't easy though.
Here the flats contain the houses,
and where there used to be trains, now there are horses.
A lot of us codeswitch. A lot of us have corners to beware…..

all poem here https://www.weareswitzerland.uk/posts/typoetry-steven-j-fowler-noam-benatar

EPF #4 - Typoetry walking tour in Newham

This was a brilliant, well attended and unique event, walking around the borough of Newham, with performances by poets whose poems are displayed on the streets as part of the TYPOETRY project https://www.weareswitzerland.uk/topics/typoetry

TYPOETRY has been one of the biggest curatorial undertakings of my year, and it’s been so good to work with David Beck and Julie Zeller. This event was a culmination of a lot. A small documentary has been made of the day, which captures the spirit. Some lovely pictures of the day too, below. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/newham

EPF #3 - Swiss poetry at Rich Mix

This event had its own energy. I had perhaps overloaded the card with highly experimental performers in the best possible way and it created a kind of chain reaction. The swiss poets were brilliant, standouts, and some of the pairs really brought remarkable new collaborations, Skapin Naffis-Sahely, Torgersen Fariello and others. All the videos with tonnes of pictures https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/swiss22

My own work was with the remarkable Tine Melzer. We had never met before. She was so so sharp. She is an expert in parrots. We inaugurated an award. Losers got prizes.

EPF #2 : Norwegian poetry at St Johns on Bethnal Green

The second event of the fest at the unique St Johns on Bethnal Green this time hosting Norwegian poets. More of a grand camarade and with some really exceptional performances, and a real range of approaches to what poetry actually is. From local poet psychiatrists to AI to improv to live transcriptions, it was a lovely and constantly interesting night. For my own part, my collaborator didn’t show, so I did a Babs…

All photos and performances here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/norway22

EPF #1 : Swedish poetry at National Poetry Library

A charming opening to the 2022 fest! A searing hot night at the Southbank centre was marked by four performances by Ida Börjel and James Byrne, Lucija Stupica and Rushika Wick, Anna Svensson-Stoltz and Kayona Daley, Madame Cryptica and Chris Kerr. Really the event happened because of my partners in the enterprise, Pia Lundberg and Sofia Lundstrom of the Swedish embassy and Chris McCabe of the NPL. And it was so good to mix these poets, friends, old and new, visiting from Sweden and those local to London.

All performances on video here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/sweden22

A note on : My collaborations at the European Poetry Festival 2022  

One of the greatest privileges of running the European Poetry Festival is that I get to collaborate with some of the poets coming for the festivities. I mean, one could argue it’s narcissistic that I participate at all, given I curate it all (for years I didn’t, because I feared it appears this way). But then again, I’ve done so many collaboration performances I have found, over recent years, my own shenanigans tend to relax others sometimes, that as long as my work has a humorous edge, it can set a positive tone. Anyway for the mega EPF 2022 I am collaborating eight times. Some old friends, some poets I have never met before. Cassius Fadlabi, Tine Melzer, Fabian Faltin, Alessandro Burbank, Krisjanis Zelgis, Phil Minton / Audrey Chen / Jaap Blonk, Tom Jenks and Nick Roth. A more intimidating lineup you perhaps could not get. The reality is, collaboration is pedagogy. I learn every time I work with another poet. Moreover, it is pressure. It forces invention. Without committing to these collaborations so often and in such volume over the years I am sure I would’ve never developed my improvisation poetry work as I do it now. Each one of these poets is remarkable in their own right, but here are works I’ve made before with Fabian, Burbank, and Krisjanis for example, and wow the quartet with Minton Chen Blonk, a dream, and Jenks again, and Nick Roth in Ireland, an amazing musician. Please come and watch me fail while others succeed, multiple times over. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2022

A note on : W:ORTE Festival in Innsbruck, collaborating with Robert Prosser

I first met Robert Renk, the director of the W:ORTE festival in Innsbruck after a performance I gave to open a festival in Frankfurt in 2019. It became quite well known in Germany as there were like 200 people in the audience and long story short I ended up eating the flowers on display and they called an ambulance. He liked that and invited me to his festival, delayed to June 2022, now, and I had the chance to open the festivities with a new collaboration with my old friend Robert Prosser.

Robert and I, to a slightly shellshocked audience in the Innsbruck library, did a nearly hour long improv performance which involved a fake press conference, staredown, chess, a manta ray, singing, me being mary Magdalene, skipping etc… The pictures here speak to the mood, and there was actually a 4 camera setup, so that footage is going to be good.

Apart from that the fest was so so lovely – hospitable, sociable, even a bit luxurious, very funny, relaxed. The atmosphere was so polite, friendly but layered with Austrian irony. I made loads of new friends. This really reminded me of the best experiences of my pre pandemic poetry travels, which were such a big part of my life – a miracle thing, to be invited to travel to share weird poetry, that never wears off.

A note on : MUEUM, my debut novella, words of support

MUEUM remains up for pre-order, sent out officially very soon and launched this October with a series of events. https://tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

In the meantime some brilliant and generous words of support on the book from authors I admire have been released by the press, Tenement.

A showcase, ransacked with horrid delight: Fowler's MUEUM presents the placid, lurid violences of surveillance and exhibition with startling and brutal stylishness. A seething triumph.
 Eley Williams

A book as powerful, monumental and strange as Alasdair Gray's Lanark in miniature.
 Joanna Walsh

Deeply, beautifully unsettling, and somehow so complete that I have screwed up and rewritten this endorsement seventeen times. As a text, MUEUM seems to eat any potential response to it. Sometimes I called it a mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation; sometimes I called it the psychopathology of the institution; sometimes I just made sub-animal noises. Initially I just felt awe at how compelling Fowler can make the sheer tedium of labour, in an environment terrifyingly regimented, curious (and intimate, like being let backstage behind existence itself), but this was gradually replaced by an increasing suspense and horror which got its claws into me for the whole last half of the novella. Anyway. It makes me very happy—and also insanely jealous—that works like this are being written.
Luke Kennard

Down in the mire of London's grimpen, above the drained marshlands and drift of the fatbergs, exist the cultural centres that shine like jewels in the mudcake of the greatest city on earth: London's museums. Their great domes are craniums through which pass the crazy, unbidden thoughts of a culture always moving closer to madness. With the apocalyptic vision of Ballard and the acerbic attitude of Céline, MUEUM scatters human detritus over the shiny Perspex of our most dearly loved vitrines. Rimbaud's visits to the British Museum reading room come to mind: scratching himself down for lice as he flicked through the latest encyclopaedias. And Bataille, assembling curios so strange the Surrealists wouldn't touch them wearing gloves. MUEUM is a novel of watchers and the watched, a testament to the fact that people are always more interesting—and far stranger—than things. And nothing is stranger than people's obsession with touching objects from the questionable past. Prepare to travel the world, from Rome to Japan, with a travelling troupe of unforgettable characters who walk the world each day but never leave a building. SJ Fowler's MUEUM is an essential artefact for our troubled times, proving that travel of the mind is always more powerful than the real thing.
Chris McCabe

A note on : TYPOETRY up and running in the streets of Newham!

Typoetry invites residents and visitors to go window shopping for poetry and graphic design inthe London Borough of Newham from 20 May to 17 July 2022.

Typoetry is a showcase of poetry and Swiss graphic design. Around thirty works by poets from Newham, the UK and Switzerland are brought to life through designs by the typography students of the ECAL/University of Art and Design of Lausanne and displayed on the front windows of businesses and public buildings across Newham.

A Swiss-Newham project : Led by the Embassy of Switzerland in the UK, Typoetry aims to bridge art forms, languages and communities. As a multilingual and multicultural country, Switzerland regards intercultural exchanges as essential to sustainable societies. The Embassy found ideal partners in the London Borough of Newham: the collaboration with Newham Council, as well as the enthusiasm of local businesses, were key to the development of the project.

Combining its partners’ expertise, Typoetry is bringing poetry and graphic design to the streets in a bid to foster the well-being of Newham residents, to support an inclusive economy and to spark creativity. Enjoyed in trails, as selective interventions, via events and online, the artworks are awaiting you in East Ham, Forest Gate, Green Street, Manor Park and Stratford.

"Typoetry is utterly unique and has broken new ground for public poetry projects. Not only has it brought together poets across a real range of backgrounds and styles, from age 15 to 70, and celebrated the literary and avant-garde in a w ay rarely given in such ambitious enterprises, but it has done this in collaboration with design, unlocking the visual potential of the w ord. And this bold, brilliant and innovative methodology has all been in service of a purposeful and deeply resonant message - a celebration of the city, in and of the very streets w e live in, specifically the borough of New ham, as a metaphor for how we all experience the urban. I have never come across a project celebrating poetry in the streets of this scope and ambition, and that carries such considerable and complex works in its fundament." – Steven J Fowler, poetry curator and artist

Made possible by Presence Switzerland and The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. View all participants and partners here. https://www.weareswitzerland.uk/typoetry

A note on : Books I’d highly recommend : Kaye, Brightt, Tyrrell, Davis, Sunderland, Wakefield

I’m very lucky that the courses I set up in the pandemic, mostly online and around both specific fields of poetry methods, and also recently more open project-supporting workshops, have attracted some extraordinary people who are equally extraordinary poets. This has coalesced into really positive and inspiring things, a collective, events, and many plans for the future. What it has also done, I’m proud to say, is to bring the work of some of those poets into publication form. Not necessarily directly, but in terms of their projects coming to fruition through these various connections and explorations and ideas that I have proudly had a hand in encouraging and facilitating.

I feel a responsibility to the quality of their work, these poets who I get to work with regularly, because it speaks to their originality, and to what should be getting attention in the UK, at the moment. Six books are being launched in and around my festival this summer, six books that represent a range of authentic, idiosyncratic and quite daring explorations of what poetry is. From performance scores to photopoetry, from language poetry to selecteds, from radical translations to conceptualism – these books speak to something that I am so happy to have had a hand in, the POPOGROU collective and it’s many brilliant poets. (Links and and more to follow)

A note on : Filming WormWood again with Tereza Stehlikova

Tereza Stehlikova and I began filming our collaborative long form film poetry project in 2016, documenting the disappearance of industrial west London and all it’s intricate personal local intimate geographies. It continues to disappear and as such, we continue to film, for the sixth year. Following our premiere of the first cut of our film in 2020 at whitechapel gallery and our shared exhibition in 2021 at Willesden green library, we got back into the hot canals of Willesden green recently, and Tereza wrote this brilliant poetic prose blog about our explorations https://cinestheticfeasts.com/2022/06/01/trespassing-wormwood/

“We pass the Cargiant and head towards the canal. I film a man with an eclectic selection of junk who calls to me enthusiastically. Steve initiates a chat with a young man in a cafe which in the past has always been closed when we passed. Today it is actually open, fighting vigorously to survive in the midst of this fevered transformation of Wormwood towards an idea of middle class. They serve Steve oat milk with chocolate.”

also … Disappearing Wormwood (2020), will be shown as part of Chiara Ambrosio’s Raft: A fragile display programme at the Horse Hospital on Sunday 26th June. Check out the programme here: https://www.thehorsehospital.com/events/city-theatres

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2022

THIS IS GOING TO BE GOOD, PLEASE COME ALONG, June 15th to July 9th 
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2022


Our biggest festival yet, and one of the grandest celebrations of European poetry ever to take place in the UK. With 15 events over 3 weeks and 150 poets visiting from across our continent, EPF 2022 will be a free-to-attend celebration of literary liveness and cross-linguistic collective inventiveness. Events will feature made-for-festival collaborative and commissioned performances from some of Europe’s most exciting experimental and contemporary poets. Please click the links below to find out about each event, with more added soon.

A note : MUEUM, my novella, available for pre-order

Amazing my novella debut will soon by readied for reading, thanks to the tireless work of Tenement press https://tenementpress.bigcartel.com/product/sj-fowler-mueum Please pre grab now

“A novella of ludic menace, SJ Fowler’s Mueum is a puzzle without pieces. Following the grand tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (one who dirties their own nest, vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), Mueum pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.

Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion. Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.

Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit? In Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.

See here for further word on this title. 100 first editions will carry a cover sticker; SJ Fowler ‘on shift’ (at the British Museum), circa 2014, as photographed by Alexander Kell.”

A note on : an article by Julia Rose Lewis on Phil Minton and I

An incredible piece of writing that means a lot to me - https://overgroundunderground.co.uk/blog/f/kin-listener

“Minton is the king whisperer, beginning with some magnificent whispers. I hear and read these sounds as a way of calling Fowler to him as a chimpanzee might call out the discovery of fruit trees. Minton is signaling the promise of something fruitful to come. The opening encapsulates their shared history, beginning with the Feral Choir. Fowler and Minton’s performance is different in the sense that they have become each other’s ideal listener here. 

Fowler is the kind whisperer in the beginning of the duet. It is important to note that he is hosting the event which creates a kind of liminal double of himself. He is both human and chimpanzee. Fowler’s whimpering should not only be interpreted as an expression of his emotional state or pure imitation of chimps, it is giving the audience information about his relationship to Minton. The whimpering sounds he emits signal his position in the social hierarchy relative to Minton. He is identifying himself as more junior and lower in prestige. It is not uncommon for male chimps to form close friendships even and especially when they have unequal social status. In this performance, professional status is equated with social group hierarchy to reveal the similarities between literary scene and the forest.  

Fowler and Minton are commenting on the nature of community and the community of nature in listening. Their familiarity is made a metaphor for the relationship between chimpanzees and humans. I felt that I was observing an interaction in the way a scientist might observe two highly intelligent individuals and it felt immaterial to me whether they were chimpanzees or humans. This discussion of literary and primate community building is especially well suited to the university setting. It does not matter whether the students are poets or anthropologists. Fowler and Minton performed their duet as part of the Writers Kingston event: Sound Poetry and Sonic Literature (01/02/22), at the Town House Building, Kingston University, London; an event open to the public. …. /

Fowler is the king listener. He is using sound poetry not simply to imitate, but to develop a greater sympathy for chimpanzees within himself and without the audience. Fowler’s exploration of chimpanzee vocalizations has been an ongoing project. When reflecting on his participation in the Feral Concord at Cafe Oto in February 2018, he considers the difference between solo and collaborative performance. Fowler writes: ‘I am therefore often at a remove, which is a grand thing most of the time, but also cautious, in this case, to not be the chimp whistling when others are singing or singing when others are whistling.’ [5] This conflating of human and chimpanzee sounds is intentional. Fowler is illustrating the complex dynamics of an improvisational collaborative performance by representing himself as a chimpanzee and the other performers as humans. ……………” 

A note on : Orangutan excerpts in the Lincoln Review

Issue III of The Lincoln Review kindly carries an excerpt from the Orangutan sequence in my new book The Great Apes (Broken Sleep books 2022) and purchasable = http://brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-the-great-apes…)

for perusal https://lincolnreview.org/sjfowler



A note on : chimp by Diamanda Dramm

Diamanda Dramm has turned my poems into an album and I performed with her and Nick Roth at New Music Dublin in the National Concert Hall of Ireland to celebrate the pre-launch of this album. The songs are made up of poems stitched together by Diamanda from my books The Great Apes and I will show you the life of the mind (On prescription drugs).

The album is available for pre order from Diatribe records here https://diatribe.ie/product/chimp/

A note on : Launching Great Apes by being an Ape

I was temporarily what I am permanently. An Ape.

To launch my book, available here, The Great Apes. https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-the-great-apes

In my performance I was aided by friends and collaborators Bob Bright, Ailsa Holland, Chris Kerr.

The venue, St Johns on Bethnal Green was as atmospheric and brilliant as ever

It was part of a night with 7 other readers. All of whom were great generous, and helped me get this book out into the world with a sense of community and experimentation. Thanks Rishi Dastidar, Fiona Larkin, Alice Wickenden, George Ttoulli, Peter Zavada, Stuart McPherson. It was a really memorable night.

A note on : Catalan spectacular and Iklectik Artlab

Such a brilliant afternoon! Really so generous a vibe with such amazing work on display. A pleasure to curate, for the Ramon Llull centre and the focus on Catalan cultural program, with six Catalan poets and musicians, presenting collaborative performances in three duos, supported by British poets who responded to their work. All on a lovely sunday afternoon in waterloo, hosted by the lovely Isa and Eduard of Iklectik Artlab.

with performances by Mireia Calafell and Björt Rùnars / Amy Cutler / Maria Sevilla and Joan Martínez / Mischa Foster Poole / Laia Martínez and Jaume Reus, known as Jansky / plus a new film by David Spittle!

All the videos are here online ready to watched https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/catalan

A note on : Babs in the Nunnery

A performance in my Babs series, as part of a reading at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, organised by Julia Rose Lewis and Andrew Wells. Do you need life insurance?