The Great Apes : Broken Sleep Books
Released April 30th 2022 // 114 pages // 978-1-915079-14-5
/www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-the-great-apes
From the publisher “An inimitable and eccentric suite of five long poems in the most aberrant tradition of epic poetry; this sequenced fable grinds human nature through its cousins and throws words like faeces at a confused tourist. Rabid and satirical, The Great Apes is a poetry collection utterly unique, extraordinary and linguistically exciting. As avatars for avarice, here is the chimp, a charming villain; the gorilla, a corrupted dignitary; the bonobo, Sadean and debauched; the orangutan, knowing both too much and too little. Here is the human, the final chapter, the brain that names itself though it knows not why. The brain which is also a particular ape delicacy. Bon appétit.”
It’s my 10th collection. It’s the third in a loose series which utilises satirical anthropomorphism to be critical of delusional human behaviour, or something like that, following The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Down Owner (2014) and The Guide to Being Bear Aware (2017).
It’s conceptual too, five long poems each on a different ape, and so more in line with recent collections. I wrote it in a real burst about three years ago. I have tinkered since, but also needed to find the right publisher as it’s full of sex and violence. In part it uses adapted tracts from Marquis de Sade in places. It has also already been partially adapted to song too by Diamanda Dramm and forms part of her album “Chimp” launched at Dublin Music Week.
Launching The Great Apes at St Johns on Bethnal Green, April 2022
ere’s my Launching Great Apes by being an Ape (April 13, 2022) For this performance I was temporarily what I am permanently. An Ape. 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.
Launching The Great Apes for Broken Sleep online.
A poetry film reading, from the sequence Orangutan. Fuses found footage with a home reading, hopefully reveals some of the pace and energy of the book. It was broadcast on April 30th 2022
chimp by Diamanda Dramm May 7, 2022
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 : The Great Apes, designed by University of Art and Design of Lausanne (ECAL) April 13, 2022
as part of my work with ever growing and really exciting TYPOETRY project - which will see 30 poems be put up as posters and public art around the borough of newham https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/typoetry - ive had the chance to work with some of the amazing staff and students at the University of Art and Design of Lausanne (ECAL). Generously, they have been putting their attention to some of my work, and excerpts especially from my new book, out this week, The Great Apes, available here https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-the-great-apes many of these soon to appear on online journals
Orangutan excerpts in the Lincoln Review May 7, 2022
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) for perusal https://lincolnreview.org/sjfowler
excerpts from the article
“Elaborate Biological Filigrees”
by Wilfred Franklin & Julia Rose Lewis
It can be read in full https://hvtn.substack.com/p/elaborate-biological-filigrees?sd=pf
It is not birth, marriageSJ Fowler is inquiring what chimpanzees have to say about our blindness to our life history? It is a mirror not a miracle. Haeckel’s Law states that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Ontogeny refers to the unfolding of the body of the organism in time otherwise known as embryology and developmental biology. Without it, we synthesize again and again and soon we are lost. Haeckel writes: ‘we do not really understand [the facts of embryology] until we trace them to their true phylogenetic causes, and see that each of these apparently simple processes is the recapitulation of a long series of historical changes.’ [2] Phylogeny refers to the unrolling of species in time otherwise known as descent with modification and evolutionary biology.
The origin of recapitulation means gone through heading by heading, chapter repeating, again diminutive of head. Let us go through the series of readings. Fowler created a film reading of The Great Apes for the Broken Sleep Books Extravaganza on 14th April 2022.[3] [4] The event took place after the face-to-face launch of The Great Apes and before the online launch.[5] [6]
The reading unfolds a life history of violence, sex, and loneliness. To read is to masquerade. To read is to filter and reveal oneself through the selection of a mask. Before the chimpanzee, he wore a mask to make his half-face into a skull. He is illustrating the skill of living in the divide between birth and the inevitable unfolding toward death; his eyes are alive and his mouth is only bone. It is important to note the similarities between our reading and Fowler’s collaboration with with Icelandic poet Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir in a performance at the Rich Mix Arts Centre for the European Poetry Night 2017. [7] The performance begins in awkwardness and ends with explicitly defying social conventions well beyond the poetry reading. Their collaboration explores consumption, death, motherhood, and respect. The development, the unfolding of an experimental poet’s body of work recapitulates the evolution of literary forms. Haeckel’s Law obtains with respect to experimental poetry.
Phylogeny unfolds the self. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould writes ‘phylogeny unfolds historically as the sequence of ontogenies for all organisms making up a lineage.’ [8] Fowler is looking through the eyes of a chimpanzee mask, because it is one of the organisms that makes up his lineage. He is illustrating his own phylogeny in The Great Apes. He is looking into the ways in which his own life history extends before birth and after grief. There is violence, sex, and loneliness unfolding before the chimp face that he has placed facing the audience. These ironies he reveals are given to the reader to revel in themselves.
Ontogeny unrolls the self. Fowler is unrolling line after line of the chimpanzee poem. He repeats the phrase, it’s a fight, twice in the reading and its echoing creates a stillness in sound and meaning following itself. It’s a fight that’s so still to refrigerator, where the fight is a long unresolved conflict, where the fight is decay slowed to the point of stillness as a refrigerator slows the growth of bacteria and mold. Is he saying refrigerator or refrigerate her, where refrigerate means to hold her body before burial, the reader finds themselves in the middle of grief. Is the fight consuming her or foreshadowing ‘Mary mother of glitter’ in the next line? [9] In the supermarket, it is a fight with consumerism and modernity. Here refrigerate comes from back cold becoming; it is the exposure of the private time in the public. So the supermarket is recalling the human missing the chimp part of himself. There is primate echoing private. Chimps have thick hair down their backs that helps them maintain body temperature in cold and rain and it is missing from humans. Ontogeny unrolls; it is the vase found before the outlines of birth and grief.
Fowler is illustrating the literature of phylogeny by unfolding himself. There is glitter in his eyes. It is the refection of the reflection is shining inside him and outside. The mask castes his eyes into shadow and hides the rest of his face making his expression different to read. The genetic code is also glittering inside the offspring. David Spittle illuminates the relationship between a life history and glitter. He writes:
‘we glitter. gravel. grave. as brains. abrade. unmade.’ [10]
We are glitter brains, we litter our grey matter all over the planet, we describe our brains as bright not unlike glitter, he catches a glimmer of himself in the glitter and flickering light of the monitor. Gravel abrades, it slows, it sloughs off larger rocks or boulders, it is greater than glitter, it is used in construction especially landscapes, it is something small that humans form. Graves are the unmaking of humans, the place where decomposition takes place. Graves are possibly where the gravestone will turn to gravel. Glitter causes cancer and cancer is what grows into gravel, abrading our bodies, it is killing and filling out graves. We are made as we are unmade in evolutionary-developmental biology.
Developmental biology is the vase found before the outlines of birth and grief. So to write, as Fowler does, that one is “alone and crying folds into ropes” is to say that when ejaculating by oneself, the sperm does not lead to the development of an embryo. [11] These ropes are a metaphor for the deoxyribonucleic acid contained in sperm. The ropes echoing hopes opposite being along and crying. What is orgasm a metaphor for? To fold is the necessary opposite of unfolding and developmental biology. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny is given to mean that between fertilization and birth the animal embryo passes through the adult life stages of the adult evolutionary stages of animals.
