A note on : Alban Low portraits

Alban Low - the brilliant artist, performer, editor - and friend to Writers Kingston, and myself, and so so many people in that community, has often drawn portraits of the readers at those events, while they are performing. He then shares these amazing gifts to the poets (some of whom are reading for the first time, and then receive these!) on his site, as he did recently after our Kingston Camarade https://artofjazz.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-kingston-camarade-kingston.html

This led me back to think about how often Alban has done this, and how often he has drawn me performing, and how these portraits have been markers for our work together, and our friendship. Alban is a truly remarkable person, always helping others, generating new projects, giving energy, being present, turning up, delivering. He is someone I deeply admire, fully engaged in his passions, humble in his talent. He’s inspiring to be around. And looking back at the portraits, eight I have found, from over the last number of years, a remarkable set of mementoes. You can also find more on Alban here https://albanlow.wordpress.com/

A note on : co-translating Yoshihiko Hogyoku

Really so happy that two poems by Yoshihiko Hogyoku have been published in English on 3am magazine. They were translated by Miya Hogyoku, Yoshi himself, and myself, over a lovely afternoon in Tokyo earlier this year. Naturally I am not really the translator, not being a Japanese speaker, but rather very honoured to be asked by Yoshi and Miya, who I admire so so much, to lend a few phrasings where I could.

Yoshi is a brilliant poet, and these poems speak to that https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/smart-city-straw-house/

Yoshihiko Hogyoku – Born in Fukushima Prefecture in 1976, surrounded by nature and the philosophy of buddhism, since his family house was a temple, he began writing poetry at the age of 17, deeply influenced by the poet Ryuichi Tamura. In 2011 he was forced to evacuate due to the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, since the area he lived was designated as an evacuation area from the radiation contamination from the accident. In 2017 he was able to return to his home land. During this period he published his first poetry collection “Picnic”(2015). After this experience he found a link between cognitive science, martial arts and poetry, which were all his passion, and he uses these structures in his writing. In 2022 he became a Buddhist monk and is pursuing his writing also with a perspective of Buddhist philosophy.

A note on : Kingston Camarade and performing with some brilliant students

A lovely event as part of this year’s Writers Kingston program, this time a collaborative Camarade featuring only students and staff at the Uni. https://www.writerskingston.com/kucamarade/ Many of the students performing are on my final year module that charts over 20 methodologies in and around innovative poetry. This module has been something running for nearly ten years now, and has been the cornerstone of my work at Kingston and for my teaching in general. It’s very hands on, and demanding, but sometimes, as in this year, it seems to attract a remarkable set of people. It was really then a wonderful experience to design my performance for the night, on the day, very last minute, with many of those students involved, and to see them deliver quite exceptional, and often very risk taking, live works for the night.

A note on : Pits published on Perverse

https://perverse.substack.com/p/perverse-8h brilliant to have a burst from my collection The Parts of the Body That Stink (Hesterglock Press) published with Chrissy Williams’ Perverse.

A note on : Dec 5th, Sound poetry at Poetry Society

Sound Poetry and Sonic Literature at The Poetry Society Cafe
December Thursday 5th 2024 : 7pm - Free Entry
www.writerskingston.com/sound24

22 Betterton Street London, Covent Garden. London WC2H 9BX  
A night celebrating the potential of the human voice and live literature, in the grand tradition of Sound Poetry, Noise Making, Mouth Music and Improvised Vocalisation, all performed as new duets. In the Poetry Society’s home in the UK, in the heart of Covent Garden, this event explores how sound communicates before, and with, words. Featuring some extraordinary poets from across the UK, this celebration of liveness and collaboration will premiere 9 brand new works for the night.
 
Phil Minton and Steven J Fowler
Serena Braida and Vilde Bjerke Torset
Will Rene and Emily Wood
Sylee Gore and Rushika Wick
Patrick Cosgrove and Benedict Taylor
Bob T Bright and Cameron Wade
Paul Hawkins and Julia Rose Lewis 
Michael O’Mahony and Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Mischa Foster Poole and David Spittle

A note on : Small Publishers Fair photographs

Photographs from Julie Mitchell from the recent Small Publisher’s Fair including some pictures of my launch of Frog Circles in Conway Hall library.

A note on : Winter Camarade at Rich Mix

The last European Poetry Festival event of the year, the 15th, and a big one at Rich Mix with loads of new collaborative performances and some really brilliant live work. Worth watching the Singer / Torset, Nour / Herd and many other pieces made for the night. All the videos up here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/winter24

My piece with with Fabian Faltin, an experimental seminar and motivational instructional on how to de bond like an eagle.

A note on : European Poetry Festival at Writers Kingston

https://www.writerskingston.com/epfwinter/ a weird and wonderful EPF event down at Writers Kingston with two book launches and a half dozen other experimental collaborative performances

A note on : Richard Marshall article on myself, Cosgrove, Torset

Richard Marshall is a unique enthusiasm. One of the best performers I’ve seen, he is also the foremost interview of philosophers from around the world, in the UK. Also a great editor - we met working at 3am magazine - and a poet, novelist, educator and visual artist. He has tremendous energy, and balances his remarkable intelligence with chaoticness. He has recently written an intense article on myself and two friend-compatriots, Patrick Cosgrove and Vilde Bjerke Torset. Please read the full article at the link below to read more on the excellence of Cosgrove and Torset.

Because Richard is a master of the theoretical ebullient I experience his writing about my writing as his own magic fiction collaboration response. This is ideal. I therefore present excerpts from his piece below as my own kind of collaboration, or, in a real sense, these are the bits I partially understood.

https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/brief-note-on-fowler-cosgrove-and-torset

 ‘… attempt to tie down the dithering generalizations of Romanticism and turn them into equations worthy of deliberation.’ (Graham Robb). 

“So here’s a short aside on three contemporary poets through the prism of Robb’s insight made when reflecting on Mallarmé’s statements about poetic language. The three poets are working to link the high flown to the ground using bits and pieces – words sure, but also stuff and performance and lacerations of constrained postulates. They might be humorously characterized as boisterous pre and ante textual presences. All are within the invisible high pressure atmosphere of Poem Brut, a London based but international poetry movement inaugurated by SJ Fowler…..

…. The bed of poetry your conventional expectation seeks is absent and intimations of mortality eclipse any sense of sunrise. The perfect rigid frame of those old habits are left staggering around as symbols of death and emptiness. It’s a new form of the sublime and is how art can focus on what’s cancelled. This is difficult and complicated art. The poets hover eccentrically around ordinarily solid figures of speech and behaviour. They perform an image of writing that probes whilst remaining spirals of periphrastic and obscure transparencies. They confront a hostile world by posing the book in the book, the poem in the poem, the object in the object, the form in the form, the life in the life and on and on like everything they do are versions of burial grounds where, nevertheless, something hopeful is about to happen. 

… Their dramas all break down any provisional artistic optimism and so there’s a helplessness expressed directly in counter-images, lurking convictions that transcendent values are lost or that discourse about a discourse that can’t exist is just a nasty infectious malaise. The sheer naked engagement with this as the basal ground of poetry makes them consummate and necessary and urgent for these dark times. 

Why don’t they offer anything more than just the possibility, that notion of ‘I can’t go on, I go on,’ so familiar and almost a cliché in Beckett? Well, they all place limits (in very different ways) on poetry. All they can do is present the starting point of the activity. They provide oblique literal and allegorical structures so attempts are suggested but not directly described, whilst what we are given seem like rehearsals of those terrible, obscure initial conditions. So there are mysteries but never directly expressed. We’re forced into a condition of enjoyable exasperation like we’ve been seduced, refused and offered no consolation and all we do is scream and agonise over what might have been alone. It’s a heady, unmissable show. 

SJ Fowler  - His material is placed in a symbolic relation to the subject of literature, maybe poetry even. It is not symbolism as such but more a kind of analogy to transcendent value. There’s little more than the hope that a synthesis will be achieved, or at least, approached. What happens is the satisfaction of perceiving a thin allegorical drama advanced as aura. What is depicted then? Not the thing itself so much as the effect. His figures and shapes and physical complications and exaggerations are strange ranges of recognition done outside the need to communicate. He has a single way that doubles words. Sometimes erases them. Most of the things are peculiar to him, but at times there are conventional things to drawn on. But there are always structures and so we can read, listen, see these as a weird anthropological and psycholinguistic twisting.

Well now, what gets reactivated are the mysterious aspects. These lie even in decorations of fancy prose. That makes sure we notice that language here is organic with its own internal logic as distinctive from meanings and sharing. This is play understood as that cognition that’s neither trapped nor freed but held in an unsustainable equilibrium. Everything is constant. He couldn’t care what you make of it in terms of exchange. If these are symbols there is no indication of a single reference. Images are abstract patterns he finds in the objective universe. Whew….

Concrete dimensions. This is a principle delight for Fowler. Increasingly so it seems. What he makes are those strange visual coincidences that suggest the vista of visual mementos. But often the visual and the aural find their similarities and he has contrasting devices using sounds drawn to the eye.

There is of course a sense of gigantic alarm: what is it when we confront these synthetic acts except us left clutching at straws? Coherence is there but ready to be replaced by this equation: as vivid as they are obscure. This is unsettling to the ‘reader’/’audience’ used to meaning and being served. Fowler asks us to do two things: recognize what’s been undermined and then relish it….

In Fowler’s most zany and fragmentary mode there’s a gesture towards memories of older rhymes and allusions towards mysteries of a lost past or rather a hidden present. In this sense he’s offering souvenirs. He harks back and harkens. There are earlier words that are not words. Poetry is a kind of sheep dip. There’s not a label of anything, but maybe just labels. He references things that go back to a previous dispensation, an earlier word. If it seems random then Fowler isn’t too worried about the integrity of an author per se. Maybe its inevitable and necessary……

Perhaps one way to think about Fowler is in terms of topography. There is space rather than time, so a sense of expansion over something stuck fast. The pieces work like the wriggling trapped animal. The swan in ice. The suffocating sheet. Why put it like that? To find a way of distancing him from the Romantic notions of flight and flying away and time. Romantics are young. Fowler is of course young but in these terms a heretic. He’s also melodramatic and an extreme case. We’re never in the best seat to watch and listen or read. In this everything he does is a parody of performance because he doesn’t care that we miss. But this isn’t the same as not caring about there being something worth while to miss. Anyone who has watched his performances and the way he herds his fellow Poem Brutists knows this is someone intensifying the connections between performance and audience with a knowledge that many others frankly don't understand. 

He is skillful and combines his knowledge with the strict rules of tense humour, parodic abstraction and vertiginous slap-stick. He knows what the difficult task is of facing each one of his poems. He draws attention to this by doing what he does. It’s a kind foregrounding that reminds us of what is forgotten and erases what is always remembered. Sometimes what flies is uglier and messier than what was there before, but at least its now flying….”

European Poetry Festival: Winter Camarade
November Saturday 16th 2024. Rich Mix, London 7.30pm Free
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/winter24

In The Mix space, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London. E1 6LA. 
Closing our the EPF’s program for 2024, poets in pairs from countries across the continent present brand new collaborations of literary performance, made especially for the night. Held at Rich Mix, London with new performances and commissions by
 
Endre Ruset and Harry Man
Lavinia Singer and Vilde Bjerke Torset
Serena Braida and James Knight
Fabian Faltin and SJ Fowler
Colin Herd and Golnoosh Nour 
Nick Murray and Valerie Pavliuk 
Michael Sutton and Michael 'O’Mahony 
Julia Rose Lewis and James Byrne
Cameron Wade and Hannah Kaip 
Nadira Wallace and Xinyi-Estella Wang

Plus two nights before Writers Kingston presents The European Camarade on November Thursday 14th 2024 - 7pm : Free Entry at Kingston University Town House Courtyard Space www.writerskingston.com/epfwinter/ 

A note on : Small Publishers Fair 2024

My third time having a table at the SPF, after many years of visiting. I had an amazing team of friends helping me shift my 30 plus publications I had on display - Simon Tyrrell, Cameron Wade, Danica Ignacio, Eleanor Wilders, Sinnead Singson, Lisa Blackwell, Patrick Cosgrove, Jules Sprake, Bob Bright, David Spittle and more - and this was a massive part of my experience. I felt part of a community, and that extended to so many of the brilliant publishers poets artists who attended. It was two days of generative conversation, intensely so. Once again brilliantly curated by Helen Mitchell.

On day two I had a reading in the library, hosted by my friend Angie Butler, and I read from my two launched books at the fair. The paperback edition of the Parts of the Body that Stink from Hesterglock press and Frog Circles from Paper view books (whose editor Sal Nunchakov attended the fair from Portugal allowing me to meet him for the first time!)

Published : The Popogrou Anthology

A new publication I am very proud to be a part of, available to buy here https://tyrrellknot.bigcartel.com/product/popogrou-anthology

Poetry from the Popogrou Collective
edited by Simon Tyrrell
with an introduction by SJ Fowler

Kingston University Press, 2024
A5, 148 pages, perfect bound, softcover

This anthology showcases innovative poetry practice at the growing edge of contemporary literature. It gathers language art, textual and visual poetry from nineteen active members of Popogrou – a worldwide collective emerging from writer and artist SJ Fowler’s online Potential Poetries workshop programme, established during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

Generous, inclusive, unconventional and celebratory, it is a volume that honours the fellowship of a distinctively creative and productive collective of writers and artists, whose encouragement, support and insight continues to contribute to the evolution of everyone’s personal and collaborative practice.

The anthology had a second launch at Open Ealing too, on October 18th https://www.poembrut.com/popogrou

A note on : Writers Kingston - Popogrou anthology event

https://www.writerskingston.com/kup/ The first writers kingston event of the year, and a great one, celebrating the launch of the Popogrou anthology from Kingston University press.

One of the highlights was Lori Wike, my friend and one of the best constraint poets in the world, came all the way from Salt Lake City for the event! For my performance, I channeled buster keaton and went in for a bit of physical comedy

A note on : Sampson Low Student Pamphlet scheme and Danica Ignacio

One of the best things I do at Kingston Uni, helping students publish their first work in pamphlet form, working with Sampson Low editor Alban Low. Danica Ignacio is the 22nd young person I’ve worked in this scheme, and she is one of the most naturally talented poets I’ve ever met. Her book can be bought here https://sampsonlow.co/2024/10/17/moral-cavity-danica-ignacio/

and more on the scheme here https://www.writerskingston.com/sampsonlow

The Parts of the Body that Stinks and Hesterglock Press

The primary publication I am launching at the Small Publishers Fair this year is The Parts of the Body That Stink, from Hesterglock Press. The book was first released in an extended edition earlier in 2024, in a hardback, and now is released in paperback, in its final form. Five long poems, each about a part of the human anatomy. A book reflecting on the smell of ourselves as a reminder of our creatureliness and mortality, in a time where people seem to want to escape that, or are forced to, through daily technology usage. It’s a kind of sequel, in form anyway, to The Great Apes, my attempt to create something semi-original in tone and timbre for the long poem.

What I’d like to mention is the nature of working with the press, Hesterglock. Paul Hawkins has published two of my previous books and our relationship over the years has been the ideal for a publisher editor as collaborator and encourager. Hesterglock’s work has been important, offering books that are genuinely unpredictable and exciting, and from poets all over the world, as well as many making their debuts. I would say, such is the specific culture Hesterglock has built – such is the distinct taste of the list, in all its wideness – that it is doing something truly different, and that wouldn’t exist without it. Perhaps this is most obviously felt in it’s embrace of poem brut poetry – that is work that is handmade, physical, messy, that harks back to the post-war brutalist, cobra and the like, but actually comes from a different place. It comes from a particular kind of weird, playful, aggravated English experience. Something that touches on class, sometimes, and social alienation, sometimes, but in a particularly English way, turns this into an eccentricity that verges on volatility, but stays in play. It’s immediate, colourful, complex, energised. It is this that has made Hesterglock a place I feel at home, and Paul has been instrumental in helping me shape the www.poembrut.com movement (others have called it that, not me), along with Julia Rose Lewis and many others.

I believe it’s a moment where Paul and Hesterglock are taking a little time to wind back but remain, to recharge and lie fallow, but in that there is a moment for the many many poets who have benefitted from the press’ selfless championing to celebrate what has been done, and what will be done. I’m glad my time in British poetry has coincided with Hesterglock.https://hesterglockpress.weebly.com/

The Parts of the Body That Stink is available on amazon here https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1739556607/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1FJW2E0ACJD58

A note on : Small Publishers Fair 2024

Very happy to have a table at the SPF for the second year, after having the exhibition in 2022.

The full list of participants in Small Publishers Fair 2024 is now online. https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/publishers-2024/

The Fair takes place on Friday 25 and Saturday 26 October and is open daily from 11am to 7pm. It's an affirmation and a coming together of a vibrant creative community.”

I’ll be launching two new books at the fair - the paperback version of my latest collection The Parts of the Body That Stink (Hesterglock Press) and my concrete poetry book in an envelope Frog Circles (Paper View Books). I’ll have another few dozen of my books out too.

I’ll be reading at 1pm on the saturday also, The Library Saturday 26 October https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/readings-2024/

1.00pm—Steven J Fowler and Writers Kingston
Launches for The Parts of the Body that Stink (paperback) Hesterglock Press and frog circles paper view books. Short readings from students and alumni Danica Ignacio and Cameron Wade.

A note on : Kirikuju exhibition opening

Pictures from the opening of my new exhibition, with Mathura, in Estonia www.stevenjfowler.com/kirikuju

A note on : Penteract Podcasts on youtube

The brilliant Penteract Podcast has now been taken down from Buzzsprout and associated streaming services with all episodes instead to be found on Anthony Etherin’s YouTube channel. I featured on the 2nd and 10th episodes, the first discussing my background and experimental poetry in the UK, and the second on my 2020 visual poetry book Crayon Poems.

In addition I released one of my favourite things of 2024 with Penteract, Crocodile Tear Waterfalls - selected uncollected visual poems https://penteractpress.com/store/crocodile-tear-waterfalls-sj-fowler which will be available and being actively shared at the Small Publishers Fair this October 25th and 26th https://smallpublishersfair.co.uk/