Visual Poetry Books

Volumes of collected visual poetry including asemic writing, handwritten poems, concrete poems, collage, art poetry. These books are an exploration of the art in literature and literature in art. The first five of my art-poetry books are a series entitled Poem Brut. Please click the image or title link to find more about each volume and my full bibliography is here.

Recently Attracted Reality Influencers (22 pages - June 2023) Selected meme and screenshots poems. 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.

The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler : ZimZalla (2nd ed November 2020) Scrawls, doodles, minimalist line-poems and dense maze-texts, with everything in between, pure asemic and pansemic range, biro on white page. A huge selection of poems boiled into a single volume

The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler : ZimZalla (2nd ed November 2020) Scrawls, doodles, minimalist line-poems and dense maze-texts, with everything in between, pure asemic and pansemic range, biro on white page. A huge selection of poems boiled into a single volume

Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire : Hesterglock Press (January 2018) Art-poems, abstract paintings, asemic writing and monster illustrations, all in black indian ink, on pornography and disembodied sexuality.

Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire : Hesterglock Press (January 2018) Art-poems, abstract paintings, asemic writing and monster illustrations, all in black indian ink, on pornography and disembodied sexuality.

Bastard Poems : Steel Incisors Press (100 pages - August 2021) An unprecedented take on collage as poetic medium, combining the found, the handwritten, the abstract, the irreverent and the archival, and the occasional text camouflaged as commentary.

Bastard Poems : Steel Incisors Press (100 pages - August 2021) An unprecedented take on collage as poetic medium, combining the found, the handwritten, the abstract, the irreverent and the archival, and the occasional text camouflaged as commentary.

Crayon Poems : Penteract Press ( 66 pages - July 2020) Entirely crayon-made, deep wax colours and poems becoming illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts.

Crayon Poems : Penteract Press ( 66 pages - July 2020) Entirely crayon-made, deep wax colours and poems becoming illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts.

I fear my best work behind me : Stranger Press (December 2017) Illustrated aberrant texts and child-like brut portraits and paintings, in bright dense colour, on mess, time, skulls, animals, monsters, subconscious outpouring and asides.

I fear my best work behind me : Stranger Press (December 2017) Illustrated aberrant texts and child-like brut portraits and paintings, in bright dense colour, on mess, time, skulls, animals, monsters, subconscious outpouring and asides.

Sticker Poems : Trickhouse Press (110 pages - June 2021) From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of …

Sticker Poems : Trickhouse Press (110 pages - June 2021) From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of human cognition, narrated by idiosyncratic poetics.

Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit : Hesterglock Press (July 2019) Handwritten, hand-drawn fictions, poems, collage, text and images on bone-coloured paper with black rollerball penning, about history, diaries, notation and Spain.

Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit : Hesterglock Press (July 2019) Handwritten, hand-drawn fictions, poems, collage, text and images on bone-coloured paper with black rollerball penning, about history, diaries, notation and Spain.

Calligramms : Penteract Press (January 2019) a 6 page pamphlet of free-hand poetry with animal shaped typographical precision.

Calligramms : Penteract Press (January 2019) a 6 page pamphlet of free-hand poetry with animal shaped typographical precision.

Excerpts from an interview with Tim Gaze at Utsanga

  • How did you get into making things which are completely left of the field of vision of many readers who think they’re into poetry?

Pure chance, no childhood influences, parents who still don’t know what poetry is, working class people who didn’t even read for pleasure, and then in my early adulthood, randomly. This is the greatest gift to me, that I was already a half formed human before considering what poetry is and what it isn’t. And that I am still, 9 years in, plagued by questions unasked by most in the field but still strange and unanswerable to me. For example, surely, to separate poetry from text or conversation or opinion or prose or fiction, a poem needs only be language referent and then to seeking an answer to a self-situated paradoxical question. A poem aims then to be stating or saying the inexpressible. This seems the beginning of the medium to me. Why would just say something in a poem if we can say it anywhere else? Anytime, in any language chunk, any conversation? Advertising does this, speeches – why poem at all if one is going to state or lecture? From this comes many hundreds of natural follow up questions. Why are almost no poems published handwritten? Is there no meaning in the handwritten letter? Only if letters and words are secondary to emotion and opinion. But if this is the case then why poem? I bore myself saying this stuff.

  • Colour is used differently in Aletta Ocean’s Empire, I fear my best work behind me & Selected Scribbling & Scrawling. Also, the works in each book seem to have been made with different materials. Are they delvings into different states of mind?

This was quite definitive to me, but I only realised after the making of each book how much so. I had no understanding of colour. I have no formal artistic training, or creative training of any kind. So I had to think through colour, had to research. And naturally I felt like I was always going to be negotiating my own ignorance and lack of general skill and knowledge. Again on instinct the books took on differing characters, because of what I declared they were about. Aletta being about sex and pornography and I fear being about time and anger, the concept of calming, and scribbles being about memory and consciousness. This then informed my choice of materials, where I made the books, and then how they were edited down from many works, until they had, retrospectively and definitively, a sure cohesion. I’m not sure I had different states of mind, but intention for sure, and the works from different books were not made ever on the same days.