Crocodile Tear Waterfalls
Selected uncollected visual poems
2011 - 2023 : Penteract Press

https://penteractpress.com/store/crocodile-tear-waterfalls-sj-fowler
Paperback, 105x148mm, Full Colour, 40pp

Launched February 20th, 7pm, free at Writers Kingston at the Town House, Kingston University, with more events to follow.

A beautifully produced pocket publication, with 32 visual poems and an essay, the last of Penteract’s longstanding and groundbreaking enneract chapbook series. Drawn from a wide range of my visual poetry work across a dozen years, it contains

  • Invisible Poems : art poems exhibited at my summer solo exhibition at the Poetry Society, London in 2019

  • The Rain of Poems : commissioned by Southbank Centre and Casagrande dropped from a helicopter in the summer of 2012.

  • The Hoi Polloi : Carved into the granite paving stones of the Aby Library in Denmark, the original in The New Concrete Anthology 2015.

  • Mahu : A novel handwritten onto walls at The Hardy Tree Gallery 2015..

  • Poethetical Pathogens (after Michaux) : Asemic poems for an exhibition at the Avivsion Gallery 2018 exhibited alongside an original Henri Michaux asemic poem.

  • Asemic Animus : Part of the Poem Atlas exhibition Text-Isles, at the Art Park Gallery, Rhodes, 2021. 

  • Plus Mosaic Poems, Lego Poems, Bag Poems and new visual poetry series in the asemic, concrete, poster poem, minimalist, art poem and conceptual traditions, as well as new sequences following the work of Karel Appel, Asger Jorn and Kenneth Patchen.

A note on : launching Crocodile Tear Waterfalls February 23, 2024

A slightly flippant, though I hope fun, performance to launch my new publication - Crocodile Tear Waterfalls : Selected Uncollected Visual Poems 2011 - 2023, from Penteract press, the last of that brilliant press’ Enneract editions, a passport sized colourful traipse through over a decade of my various visual linguistic experiments.

Published : Crocodile Tear Waterfalls essay and vispo in Periodicities April 28, 2024

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. 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”