My residency at Shaldon zoo kicked off with a great event. Ellen Wiles, Amy Cutler and David Spittle joined me reading to the animals. When I read to the bintarong and the pygmy slow loris, they came out to see me. Big thanks to the amazing staff at the zoo and the lovely folk who turned up www.stevenjfowler.com/shaldonzoo
And the full event here above.
Once again Babak Safari has done an amazing job on the poster for the 2024 festival. You can see his work and commission him here https://babaksafari.com/
If you happen to be in Devon, tickets for my first reading at Shaldon Zoo, as part of my residency, are available now https://shaldonwildlifetrust.digitickets.co.uk/event-tickets/55487?catID=54246&
It will happen on May 22nd, at 5.30pm and then again at 6.30pm, and I will be joined by Ellen Wiles, David Spittle and Amy Cutler. A pretty grand lineup. Here’s more info on my residency www.stevenjfowler.com/shaldonzoo and I will reading poems on Bintarongs and Slow Loris.
Had a great time in Dublin and Newbridge in Kildare, running an event with Christodoulos Makris and thanks to Riverbank Arts Centre and County Kildare Arts, which led me to meet some brilliant new poets. All the videos here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/ireland24
I got to work with Nick Roth, for the third time, and much spinning was had.
European Camarade - Ireland: May 2nd 2024 Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge Celebrating collaboration and literary performance, this unique event brought European poets to Newbridge, to present brand new collaborations, made for the night, with Irish counterparts.
The EPF returns this summer with a dozen free events, as poets from nations across our continent, and across the UK, come together for one of the grandest celebrations of European poetry ever to take place in Britain. Celebrating collaboration, literary liveness and cross-linguistic inventiveness, our events at National Poetry Library, National Centre for Writing, Rich Mix, Kingston University Town House and more, are renowned for their energy, community and dynamic performative originality. This year the festival will be visited by poets from Catalunia, Flanders, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Latvia, Norway and many other nationalities, and the festival will once again be entirely collaborative, with new works presented as premieres, made, for the events, by visiting poets and their UK-based counterparts.
June Weds 19th - Catalan Poetry celebration at National Poetry Library
June Thurs 20th - Flanders Poetry celebration at Flanders House, London
June Sat 22nd - Swiss Poetry celebration at Rich Mix, London
June Mon 24th - Kingston : European Camarade at Kingston Uni Town House
June Weds 26th - Swedish Poetry celebration at Hundred Years Gallery, London
June Thurs 27th - Austrian Poetry celebration at Austrian Cultural Forum
June Sat 29th - Latvian Poetry celebration at Rich Mix, London
July Weds 3rd - Norway Poetry celebration at National Poetry Library
July Thurs 4th - Norwich : European Camarade at National Centre for Writing
July Sat 6th - Liverpool : European Camarade at Open Eye Gallery
Benedict Taylor and I have been collaborating consistently in an improvised duo over the last two years. It is Benedict, his experience as an improviser, and his understanding of the live environment, and his introduction of me to his contemporary improv music scene world, who has been a key figure in me going down a new road with performance. When we last worked together, at the farewell to Iklectik Artlab, the room was filled with really excellent musicians. One of them was Charles Hayward, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hayward_(drummer) a legendary drummer, and performer, improviser, who has an interest too in experimental vocalisation. He invited Benedict and I down to Lewisham Arthouse, where Charles is a custodian, to do a trio. Just back from Japan, and on a rainy night in South London, it was an atmospheric experience for me, meeting loads of new people, and they seemed interested in what I do, it seeming new in the music context. Charles and Benedict and I did two sets, two acts, the first for me a talking poem, and the second a found text mash. Just a fun thing, responsive, playful, alive, and good for it being un-neat and open.
The poems for my spring editorship with Rebecca Kamen, on science and poetry, or neuropoetics, have been coming out via email and on the Poetry Foundation’s website, thick and fast. Too many to list, that we chose, have been shared, but below, some highlights/ Poe, Ponge, Stevenson, Gander, Sikelianos, Dungy, Miroslav Holub, Alexander and special to me, my mentor, Tom Raworth. Each came with a short editorial note, some of which are below
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54722/errory A Note from the Editor SJF: “Raworth is almost describing impressions of discovery, of universes in language as sanguine as they are rapid.” RK: “Being dyslexic, words on a page are not my primary means for navigating the world. My neurodiversity was a catalyst for becoming a visual artist. As an artist, exploration of complexity systems at the micro and macro level is why I am drawn to this poem, the complex weaving of words creating a linear layering of thoughts feels like a stream of consciousness made visible.”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47004/above-the-human-nerve-domain A Note from the Editor With extraordinary virtuosity and vocabulary, Alexander is almost at some sort of molecular consciousness. Experiencing Alexander’s poem is like standing in front of a Cabinet of Curiosities. His woven words and phrases morph into a rich, visual tapestry, creating new relationships of complexity and forms. - Guest Editors S.J. Fowler and Rebecca Kamen.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48625/sonnet-to-science A note from the editor: Poe’s sonnet captures the beauty and mystery of the gifts that science continues to reveal, even if steeped in the 19th century’s grandiose and melodramatic language. Poe is also the author of “Eureka,” arguably the ultimate science poem and a foundational prose poem to boot. Poe’s words describe the process of science to alter and inspire, and we feel underneath the flowery phrases something akin to awe, and inevitably, fear. - Guest Editors S.J. Fowler and Rebecca Kamen.
Miroslav Holub https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51048/wings-56d22e8a4d747
Francis Ponge https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/50909/the-trees-delete-themselves-inside-a-fog-sphere
Eleni Sikelianos https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/145220/your-kingdom
Forrest Gander https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55965/ligature-4
The journal Periodicities have kindly published the opening essay and a selection of visual poems taken from my recent book with Penteract press - Crocodile Tear Waterfalls : Selected Uncollected Visual Poems, available here https://penteractpress.com/store/crocodile-tear-waterfalls-sj-fowler for a fiver. The publication also includes a selection of the visual poems, many never published before https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2024/04/sj-fowler-how-crocodile-tear-waterfalls.html
“How the Crocodile Tear Waterfalls Flow…
Things are what they are where they are. This has been one of my pre-occupations. The poetry collection is never a suite of singularities, it is poems changed by the poems around them, the physical design of the book, the blurb, the cover, and indeed the endless unknowable subjectivities of the reader - their mood, prior knowledge and more. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and so content should then be cognisant of context, it is responsible to it even! And so so much of my work has tried to walk into this volatility, be it with textual, visual, conceptual or live poetries. Here then is not really a selected uncollected visual poems, but a new book made out an ambitious idea – what can a visual poem be? What is a visual poem?
That many poets concern themselves only with semantics is fair enough I suppose, though confusing for me when language, written, printed, plastered or carved, is innately visual as well as semantic. Inherently so. Leaving design to the publisher is one thing, but collectively being uninterested in how meaning changes as the appearance of language changes is another. Suffice to say, as I have passed a dozen years writing, the various modes and means of visual poetry have taken me in - concrete poems, asemic writing, handwriting poetry, collage poetry, photo poetry, film poetry, poster poetry, art poetry, minimalist poetry, parietal poems, conceptual poems, constraint poems, sculpture poems, illustrative poems and more. The found, and made, the painted and inked.
This book is about range, and moments in my learning process. A funny, weird, pleasant little passport of visual experiments that is trying to show what is possible for the curious. And trying to show those who think visual poetry a novelty are themselves naïve, or under exposed to the history of human written culture. This has been another passion of mine, rooting modern methods of poetry to historical context, and this floats around this book, the originary sources of our written literature, from cave poems to calligraphy.
What the book contains is something like 30 works from 10 sequences, projects and exhibitions. They are all works outside of my eight published volumes of visual poems as of now 2023. They have been chosen from 100s of pieces, and this choice was not made with a sense of what was best, but what was best for this selection, for what would fit the specific contents and confines of this book. So that together, this selection, would present a glimpse into my ten years of researching, collecting, sharing, and teaching, having shared these modes and methods to thousands of people across the UK and Europe. Crocodile Tear Waterfalls is a bringing together of the best of the lost, the glimpse of potential books that will never be and the various experiments across what is a vast and profound field – poetry that cares what it looks like”
I was really so saddened to hear of the death of the great poet Jerome Rothenberg. One of the grand figures of 20th century global, and originary poetry, his work was decisive in my starting to write. He was a huge influence on thousands of poets, and not just in his extraordinary style, but in his vision of a poet’s responsibility to extend their own perceptions to change and expand what we take poetry to be. It is easier to evidence this in his anthologising, and to say that a variety of his anthologies changed poetry as we know it, as a medium. But it went beyond this. He was a great example, and a wonderfully kind man.
In october 2016 I was very fortunate to spend a few days with him and his wife in London, having dinner, walking the city, getting to know him, all too briefly. On the evening of october 17th, Birkbeck college was kind enough to ask me to perform a piece in his honour, and I did so by reading and remaking and remixing some of his poems that had been particularly influential on me, in and around my poems that responded to his. At the very end of the performance, he joined me, painting on the scroll I had made, which remains in my studio. We corresponded a little over the years since, but the news of his death has really brought home to bear how extraordinary a man he was, and how enormous his legacy, and how deeply fortunate I am to have briefly crossed paths with him.
For 2024, the Japanese tour over, and over two weeks of collaborating, travelling, exploring comes to a close. Such an extraordinary time, memorable for my whole life, and built on the sincere and remarkable hospitality of so many people in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. Colin and I felt really looked after, with people going out of their way to invite us into experiences we couldn’t have imagined. I felt a responsibility to the rarity of the opportunity, especially repeating itself, to push myself out into the places, staying in five different areas of Tokyo, walking over 100 miles all told, and taking any opportunities I could to talk, eat, work with people living there. I discovered so much, spent so much time learning not only about poetry, but calligraphy and other artforms, as well as about how people think, spending lots of time reading and talking about Buddhism and Shinto. I felt welcomed in, every day. Moreover, Colin and I had real fun. Travelling across the earth is never easy, even when in great fortune, and this trip felt like a reward.
All the event videos and pictures are also up now on our project site too https://www.theenemiesproject.com/jupe/
Our first time in Osaka for the Japanese UK Poetry Exchange, and the city has a reputation for experimentation, in music certainly, so we partnered up with the brilliant venue Environment 0g. This event was always designed to be more of a salon than a camarade, with a much smaller number of poets, and a kind of playful exchange of performance and ideas. Our host, Junja, shared with us his collection of Seiichi Nikuni’s concrete poetry before we began, and played us Nikuni’s sound poetry too (which I didn’t know existed and have been teaching Nikuni for years) before playing his unique DJ set using vinyl’s of poet’s readings, especially Anne Waldman and John Giorno. Then we had readings from Rina Kikuchi and John Newton Webb before Colin Herd and I did a collaborative one hour conversation poem, as an experiment. It was all heightened by the venue, underground, near the busy strip of Osaka, but hidden away, with just a small group. It was really productive and intimate and we talked for long after, precisely because it was so different to the size and energy of the Kyoto and Tokyo events. https://www.theenemiesproject.com/osaka
So good to be back in Kyoto. On the first day I tried to do everything, and it was boiling. Up in the middle of the night with the reverse body clock, drinking holy temple water and into the red gate hills, up the top of Mount Inari, sweating through my legs and then the Golden Temple, which isn’t golden but covered in gold leaf, and then I found a charity shop, which was amazing.
The Kyoto Camarade itself, on a friday night in the Uradera Gokurakuji Buddhist temple, right in the middle of the centre of the city, in the Nishiki market, was atmospheric to the max. Disco music in a low lit temple, people giggling and eating, and hosted by the father on Monk dynamic duo of Uzai and Yoshiki Ikumi. Such good laughs. Amazing people. And lovely to be around Fukudapero and Kyoko Yoshida too, who co curated the last Japanese tour Colin and I did and are proper friends now.
The event was proper memorable - shouting, potatos, card games and kimonos, improv music, sword fights, live webcams. Not typical temple fare, but very good camarade style. The highlight was Pero’s academic paper as performance, and the huge finish by the lead monk Ukai Izumi with Decalco Marie. They fought and painted and smashed screens and it was a piece of theatre.
More on the event https://www.theenemiesproject.com/kyoto
For my own part I worked with the amazing double bassist Naoki Nakajima, who is out of a novel. Absolutely chill, up for anything, throwing his double bass around. I wore a mask I found in a bin and made some talking.
A profound experience, thanks to remarkable generosity of Miya, she kindly invited me to attend a private Noh Theatre lesson she had recently begun taking at the national Noh Theatre in Tokyo. She was undertaking this lessons under the venerable Noboru Sano, to learn the chanting, singing elements of Noh.
The environment was everything one would expect from a theatre associated with such tradition. We entered a private room, adorned in the Noh style, and waited while other students finished what appeared to be stoic, strict instruction. I had the privilege of watching Miya’s lesson and the atmosphere felt reverent, but hypnotic and completely memorable. My expectation conjured a picture of Noboru Sano as a great sensei, and someone austere in that, which was perhaps reflected in the environs. However, with me dressed all in pink, and Miya telling him about my work, his humility, hospitality and humour were remarkable. We joked, he gave me gifts, and then adapted the lesson to tell me all about Noh, show me dances, songs, movements, and we shared so much in common in terms of approach to our work, which was surprising and not, given the sense of play he seemed to feel came from the rigour and discipline of his 50 years acting and performing. In time he suggested we even collaborate in the future, melding a talking performance with a Noh dance / movement performance, even playing with improvisation. What an amazing man, and in our conversations, translated through Miya, I learned a great deal, about paradox, instinct, intention, repetition, discipline, immediacy, presence.
An article on him https://timelesstokyo.com/experttips/noh.html
A return to Japan after a tour in early 2023, and returning to collaborate and explore, and learn, to be with old friends and make new ones. Colin Herd and I, supported by the Sasakawa Foundation, have the chance to put events on, and perform, in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, and do more than that, connecting with new people to build future things. A big travel, full of potential, but intense too, always, to go across the world. After a few days in Tokyo, and with the weather going rainstorm to boiling heat, we put on our first event at the Hazuki Hall house in Suginami, west Tokyo, co-curating with Sawaka Osaki and Corey Wakeling.
The venue is right on a park, and it was a hot sunday, full of people, in cherry blossom season, and this defined the aesthetic - the event was playful but charming, relaxed and communal. The audience were seated at two ends of this piano bar basement and we performed in the middle. Some brilliant new collaborative works, and the final three pairs were especially brilliant, Corey and Satomi Tanaka, Colin Herd and the co-originator of this whole project, Kyoko Yoshida, and then a sextet of poets musicians dancers.
The whole event can be seen here https://www.theenemiesproject.com/tokyo
And a blog by the venue on it’s happening. https://hazukihh.exblog.jp/30886834/
For my own part I got to work a pure improv trio with Miya and Yoshi Hogyaku, whom I’d worked with on my last trip, thanks to our mutual friend Benedict Taylor. Miya is a Flautist and Yoshi a poet. We fused these easily. I left via a window into the park, we named the animals in the room, I went under a piano and stole a coat, and in both languages, in the corners of the space, we made something I was privileged to be a part of, viewable below.
Happy to have edited Poetry Foundation's poem for the day program for the next month with the brilliant artist Rebecca Kamen. Our selections are on science poems, or neuropoetics specifically, the subject of our collaborations. Our guest editor discussion is here www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2024/03/correspondence-guest-editors-discussion-spring-2024
Our collaboration, Silent Spread www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/162206/silent-spread
And you can sign up the Poetry Foundation's poem for the day here www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/poem-of-the-day with the first of our selections up, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, (340) by Emily Dickinson
My 11th poetry collection, now available in a special limited edition hardback run of 50, to celebrate it's launch and available to buy here
stevenjfowler.bigcartel.com/product/theparts
“The thing that stinks the most … is you! Or this book. Who cares? That’s not what this is about at all. You stink, I stink, everything worthwhile stinks. Smell it while you can. This is an eccentric poetry book by most standards, divided into five chapters, each a long poem. Nose, pits, feet, anas, genitae. All about how we smell and what that might worry in us. For example, let’s not get obsessed with what we’ll smell of in the grave! After all, you smell right now. Let’s just read, and for one day, not give ourselves a scrubbing.”
More on the book stevenjfowler.com/stink
Such a nice evening. Such good people. Such talents in performance. A healthy crowd popped over to the Rich Mix on a saturday night to see about 10 performances mostly about the theme of my book, my 11th poetry collection, which was being launched - stink, smell, scent, aroma. Tereza Stehlikova shared sulfur. Laura Davis was a minotaur. Julia Rose Lewis imported a horsecoat from America. There was lots. https://www.theenemiesproject.com/londonstink/
For my actual launch launch I asked four friends peers to collaborate with me. We met that afternoon and made a thing from scratch, whereby we were perfumiers, reading from my book, and making a special perfume live. It was really good I think
An entertaining, and weird even for me, night of performances down in Kingston as part of Writers Kingston. Some new student collaborations and lots of hesterglock authors performing too. Someone pretended to be a horse. Someone measured paper. Someone put cake down a glove. It was quite rangey and a bit light headed.
I launched my 11th poetry collection to friends and many of my students, and used a fan to blow camembert air into the audience. Good to read from the final of the 5 long poems that make up the book.
All the event stuff here https://www.writerskingston.com/theparts/
Another brilliant event as part of my commission series for National Gallery, this time joined by Iain Sinclair, Jessica Pritchard and Oscar Rodriguez. A healthy crowd followed us through Galleries B, C and D, some of the older paintings in the galleries collection.
The footage of the entire event here shows the nature of it as a tour, moving and stopping, with the context being given by art educator Jo Conybeare. Just as I was honoured to have Iain accept the invitation to be a part of it, with him being someone I’ve always admired, and who has always been remarkably generous, so I was really proud of my students Jessica and Oscar, who were really charismatic. My poems were on The Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca and The Fight between the Lapiths and the Centaurs by Piero di Cosimo, and can be watched in full below
