On a boiling hot saturday evening an intimate group of attentive people took up a back room of atlas grinds, a cafe in Stamford Hill, open late to celebrate the launch of Jordi Larios' On Yellow Evenings. We crowded round a table after chatting for an hour and the formal divisions of readings were stripped away. It was so much better for this, memorable in the closeness and heat. It was like an evening from a film in the 70s, the street noise and humid thunderstorms at our backs, we listened to Jordi read from his poems brought together in English for the first time. The book is bilingual and takes from his four collections published in 1984 2006 2013 and 2020. He and I then had a discussion and like the rest of the evening this comfortably blended into a wider discussion with the friends present. A lovely evening celebrating a grand book from an excellent poet, these are the kind of things it is such a privilege to be invited to do - unique, memorable, generous. What better way to spend a saturday night. The volume is available here and recordings below of Jordi’s reading and our discussion. https://www.fumdestampa.com/shop/p/on-yellow-evenings
A note on : Babs on Mercurius - a feature of the Surreal Absurd
https://www.mercurius.one/home/sjfowler
Very nice for my employer Babs the cat to get a proper feature on Vik Shirley’s surreal absurd series on Mercurius. It not only features a new intro from me, below, but also two new poems made from the Babs live improv performances - proper talk poems. Then there is also a series of responses to Babs by poets I admire and Babs threatened.
“I first met Babs when I first met Babs in London. I was spending a lot of time in Bethnal Green because of my events at Rich Mix and my workshop at St Johns. I went into a shop on the Bethnal Green Road, surrounded by people pretending to be poets, and met her basically. I thought I had seen it all, but here was this purple cat. And she had a heart of gold. She really did. She showed me the film Villain, with a young Ian McShane. And she was there for me, to loan me money, give me advice about how people really are. And she was proud of being a Londoner, and of being English. And that wasn’t something I was used to. I looked the other way at her constant casual violence towards dogs, whom I love. But it is what it is as they say. She knew Bob Hoskins back in the day. Before London changed. And she was a connection to the past for me, and she isn’t even old, you know what I mean? And it really helped me, to have her to rely on when I was asked to read poems and I thought wow, that is going to be so boring, for me and everyone else. And wow I know some of these people don’t like me because I’m not necessarily all nice and soft like them even if I am quite nice most of the time, and that’s just like Babs. And she told me, if people don’t really know how to react, then they probably stuck ain’t they? In your lucy locket, all sewn up sweet like. And that’s something I’ve tried to do, that Babs has helped me with, going around people who aren’t as sharp as they think they are. But who is at the end of the day? Babs.” SJ Fowler, April 2023
Words on Babs by other poets
Chris Kerr - Here are 145 words. I hope this is ok. I love Babs
pspspsps there is Babs stuck in the tape spooled between cassette and Smurfette. Babs runs away with the tape stuck to her fur, not in on the joke sometimes. Get your horror camcorder out for the Babs who do the funniest things round and round the foley artist leg. A lucy locket does look like a cats face and other nice things. Babs was once a little cat, a catette, not a big cat scary roar in hollow red plastic house on Fenchurch st. Babs is not your fur baby, tickling the belly of language. watch suddenly it’s the previous decades. having nostalgia for marketing language. Cat sit on the looper pedal and like things. Oohh sweet. When tape fast forward it’s high pitched observational. What if jim Davidson was Virgo? What if a purple snooker ball potted history? then Sound poetry that make u laugh scream
Susie Campbell - 7 things I’ve learnt about Babs from trying to film a performance.
1. Babs is unpredictable and can’t stand still.
2. Babs loves a gossip.
3. Babs can’t leave stuff alone. Nothing is safe from Babs. Anything might be nicked, rattled, broken open, or transformed into a tractor.
4. Don’t lend Babs your watch.
5. I think Babs might be dangerous.
6. Babs just wants to be your friend.
7. Babs might be Godot as a purple cat.
David Spittle - Babs is the cheery volatility of what shouldn’t be said but is all the better for being said. The improvised chronicles from an amiably rabid eccentric where ‘eccentricity’ is not a cultivated affectation or pompous curiosity but a rough-shod and noble condition that derives from a wheeler-dealing lineage of truly unhinged troubadours. Between vaudeville Dadaism and seaside surrealism, Babs is an affectionately torn postcard from a purple cat; signed with the blurting sincerity of a local grievance, mixed up and tumbled into the giggling debris of a traveller’s discovery; it is the friendly nattering of prophecy and pratfalls. The strange joy of Babs articulates a liberating claustrophobia, to be dizzyingly free whilst also plagued by the scuffed heel of daily existence.
Entirely serious and very silly, Babs is not to be trusted. For this slapstick seer, wide-eyed vulnerability is grafted messily onto the reckless frustrations of contemporary cat-life. The creation of Babs, though it seems more akin to a kind of spiritual ventriloquism, is as much a parody of banal English fury as it is a crazed plea: a nonsensical rallying cry for living and live-ness in all its absurd wonder.
Julia Rose Lewis
Be careful!
Bab’s tractor is absolutely a shark attractor.
Babs is an ambiguous figure, forever confusing the foreground and background for the love of the audience.
A cat is not interested in a line of people looking at him.
Babs is a cat’s cat.
Cat is only an abbreviation for a cassette tape.
Babs will unroll that yarn they told you about evolution in his human and yet impossible to hear correctly voice.
Babs is the fifth life-form to follow the Animal Drums film.
Fowler is alive “to often explore an uncomfortable ambiguity” in the words of David Spittle.
Babs is a cat caught on cassette tape, like a cats eye, look and grudge can fly flinging into time and distant libraries.
It is the feline function to go toward the most timid and bring them into the fold.
Babs is always looking into the beyond chrysoberyl eye to rice crispy to very brilliant to tough enough for polished concrete.
No cat ought to tolerate a closed door or being ignored by human beings on the other side of reading death.
A note on : Solution Opportunities, for Iain Sinclair at 80
https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/solution-opportunities-for-iain-sinclair-at-80-various
Very happy to have a piece in this remarkable book made for a remarkable man.
A unique tribute to a remarkable writer, film-maker and walker, in an edition of only 400 numbered copies – each signed by Iain Sinclair – this 192 page A4 illustrated publication features over 170 contributors. Featuring original essays, poems, images, letters and reflection from writers, artists, musicians, publishers, friends, critics, booksellers and readers, it is not only a celebration of a unique body of work but also a de-facto history of the last 60 years in experimental literature and culture.
It is conceived and edited by Gareth Evans, and designed by Joe Hales Studio.
A note on : Babs on the radio - Resonance Extra
Fortunately for all ears, the entire Babs album was broadcast on Resonance Extra at 9pm on saturday July 1st 2023. Check it out, listenable here https://extra.resonance.fm/series/bab-s-london-adventures-talk-poems-by-sj-fowler
A note on : Seven Rooms anthology
https://tenementpress.com/Seven-Rooms
Tenement Press & Prototype Publishing present ... SEVEN ROOMS
Edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler
Forthcoming October 2023 PREORDER HERE
Seven years following the publication of Hotel #1 (2016), and in tribute to the cessation of the “paper hotel” with the publication of Hotel #7 (2021), Seven Rooms—a collaborative publication from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing—is a document of the project’s unerring commitment to pioneering creativity, literature’s idiosyncracies, and shared space; to new approaches to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Published : How Do You Do In Devon from Moormaid Press
My latest publication, a chapbook of poems and prose poems about Devon and death, released by Ailsa Holland's Moormaid Press. £5 here in a hand-bound limited edition of 100. https://www.moormaidpress.co.uk/product/how-do-you-do-in-devon-by-sj-fowler
How Do You Do in Devon is launched on July 2nd at Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London. 6pm doors for 6.30pm start. Free entry https://www.poembrut.com/events Alongside a dozen brilliant new performances celebrating poets, artists, writers and musicians, exploring experimentation and playfulness in live poetry with James Knight, Sophia Mold, Jacqueline Ennis Cole, Michael O’Mahony, Stephen Emmerson, David Spittle and the Popogrou Collective (Laura Davis / Ailsa Holland / Bob T. Bright / Lucy Furlong / Patrick Cosgrove / Juliet Sprake / Martin Wakefield).
A note on : Interview with Michael Sutton on Recently Attracted Reality Influencers
https://overgroundunderground.co.uk/blog/f/a-conversation-with-sj-fowler Excerpts below
The following is a conversation with SJ Fowler on his new pamphlet Recently Attracted Reality Influencers, recently released from Overground Underground Books. Purchase a copy HERE
MS: When I think of a meme the first thing that pops into my head is the image-text combo we see so regularly. However, many of the first most popular memes were videos i.e. ‘Star Wars Kid’, ‘Keyboard Cat’; no doubt these are poems too, but what does the obsession with corresponding, communicating text and image tell us about the (visual)poetic inclinations of the modern human animal?
SJF: I spent a long time during lockdown writing a course about photopoetry, and this emerged from teaching I did at the Photography Gallery in London, which I went into almost knowledgless and blagging about photos. What it left me with was a sense that for photopoetry specifically, the most interesting thing is hybridity, rather than illustration. To answer your question, I think we forget how new photo illustration is, and the illustrative instinct is probably significant to do with language development in humans I don’t know and something to do with attention spans decreasing I don’t know I don’t know.
But anyway, hybridity I realised, this is interesting photopoetry, not some tennis match rendition of image and text. This could literally mean superimposition, or compositional play, or conceptual documentation. But what it also opened up was what the meme was, as a poem. It is illustrative, of course, but it’s also often a lot weirder than that. There’s something uncanny often going on.
But I looked at this purely through method, as I do with most things, because I found in the last decade, now quite stringently, after studying philosophy, that analysis really doesn’t help me and I don’t like it. You can tell, sensibility wise, work made after mind grinding leaps to insight that are random and specious.
So I wanted to not really make meme poems, but to scratch them up, cut them, mix them with what would’ve have been newspaper clipping in the past, and essentially make collages, just like my book Bastard Poems, but digital. So I think your question I can answer by saying for myself, my inclination was to just source another set of chaotic, language-based aberrant things and make them into my thing because it was fun and funny I think.
MS: Richard Dawkins, the coiner of the term ‘meme’ pre its co-option by the internet hive mind, once tweeted:
Kafka’s Metamorphosis is called a major work of literature. Why? If it’s SF it’s bad SF. If, like Animal Farm, it’s an allegory, an allegory of what? Scholarly answers range from pretentious Freudian to far-fetched feminist. I don’t get it. Where are the Emperor’s clothes.
I ask the same questions to you: If Recently Attracted Reality Influencers is an allegory, what is it an allegory of? and Where are the Emperor’s clothes?!
SJF: Amazing! What a tweet. He really went for the jugular with that one. All the Kafka fans must have gone batshit. Holy moly. I think for the Emperor to have clothes the thing itself has to be lauded and popular and significant? Hmmm. Well it is an allegory for the human capacity for deadpanning existence. For how insidiously stupid internet news or ads are, how they seem to seep into the actual means of scrolling down through shite when you’re on the toilet. Of how funny awful and stupid things are when presented in certain contexts. How much trash there is that people like. How the most talented people mostly don’t consider themselves poets or artists?
MS: Recently Attracted Reality Influencers continues your series of comical, collagic books following Bastard Poems (Steel Incisors) and Sticker Poems (Trickhouse Press); what is it that compels you to so vigorously explore this unserious mode of your practice? Is there a seriousness underpinning your unseriousness?
SJF: Thanks for knowing they exist. Yes this has been such a lovely patch of things, with my cassette Bab’s London Adventures in there too. My weird poetry series. It’s come from thinking during the lockdown when I passed ten years of making stuff and realising I did actually have a very strong sense of what I wanted to do and what makes that stuff unique and how I could go on to do more of that, and feel contented in doing that. That this was important, to have a strong sense of why. I am making poems because it pleases me and because I’d likely be doing something worse if not. No other reason is primary. I have not changed a single thing to suit anyone else recently. I have never really thought about this until recently, I just did my thing as though there was no choice. But now I am aware of my instinct more, and I follow it. These works make me laugh, and make others whose opinion I trust, laugh too. There are satirical, definitely works of satire. But also very personal, hidden in oblique forms. I could say how strange that so few poetry books are funny, or colourful, or deeply weird, when other artforms hold that stuff well, but who cares? There is probably loads of poetry like that, that I haven’t read, or because people don’t want to know about it. But you’ve published it Michael, and that’s enough for me, thank you.
A note on : Kingston University feature
Nice to be appreciated by the place you work, where I’ve worked for 8 years. An article from Kingston University on my recent republic of consciousness shortlisting, National Gallery commissions and other stuff
“These experiences and projects feed into Mr Fowler's teaching, during which each student will produce 20 poems, have taken part in public readings and collaborated with other writers. "They complete the course, I hope, as different people to those that started it, having developed a richness of self-knowledge and expression," he said. "Poetry is attempting to express that which cannot be expressed by any other means, in language. Many of my students become published poets, but all of them gain skills that can be used in a variety of paths, and careers, and more importantly enrich their lives through the development of creative processes."
The National Gallery - June 30th Lates poetry walking tour!
…In this third and final event for our Friday Lates programme this year, poet and performer SJ Fowler returns to the Gallery to read new ekphrastic poems about chosen paintings in our collection, offering alternative interpretations of their meaning, history and standing.
Fowler is joined by Gallery Educator Fiona Alderton alongside invited guests Safia Kamel, Marcia Knight-Latter and Andrew Kötting, for a tour and poetry performances around the Gallery.
Published - Recently Attracted Reality Influencers
My new publication! Selected meme and screenshots poems. Made a fair in lockdown, scrolling through me phone, clipping image text and net weirdness. Michael Sutton at OU press has done a great great job fitting this, setting it and ordering and making a proper pamphlet, gaudy as the material itself. I’m really happy with it, the latest in my weird poetry series, buyable here for a fiver https://overgroundunderground.bigcartel.com/product/recently-attracted-reality-influencers
Recently Attracted Reality Influencers
SJ Fowler’s new pamphlet 'Recently Attracted Reality Influencers' exhibits the ephemera of the internet through a broken kaleidoscope, disarranging and reappropriating the eerily familiar fragments of digital life in a hyper-collage quite unlike anything published before.
“If you are looking for poetry of maximum concentration of thought and feeling you won’t find it here. But if, like Wordsworth, you think poetry should be made out of everyday speech — which for Fowler is the automatically generated lingos of the internet — this could be the book you’ve been waiting for.” —Philip Terry
”It’s just meme, meme, meme with Steven J Fowler. Like some svengali of internet trash, here he orchestrates social media mishaps and clickbait into a warped chorus, which simultaneously engages and disassociates in its absurd and mocking warble.” —Vik Shirley
And below, my launch performance! a presentation which explains all…
A note on : Poem Brut at Open Ealing
Poem Brut IV : vii / June 3rd 2023 at Open Ealing https://www.poembrut.com/2023
A dozen brilliant new performances celebrating poets, artists, writers and musicians, exploring experimentation and playfulness in live poetry in one of West London most brilliant venues.
This was so fun. A dozen weird performances on a lovely evening, so friendly and explorative! And a real range of people and approaches, and I launched me book too. Long live open ealing. All videos on the link above, worth a peek
EPF 2023 Fin, some photographs
I did not have the time to properly diarise the European Poetry Festival this year. It was a huge endeavour, and one full of joy, truly, but none the less, a great administrative undertaking. I’m going to put together my own page more fully later in the summer (here for now https://www.stevenjfowler.com/epf23 ) and then reflect properly on what was a huge thing for me, and I hope, for the 100 plus poets involved, and the near 1000 people who attended.
For the time being I have made sure the EPF website is really well stocked with all videos of performances and photographs, (and it is all together here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2023 ) out of respect for the poets who were so generous. For my own part, some photographs below act as a memento of time with some great friends as a placeholder before more.
