Appearing on BBC Radio 4's The Verb

Really uplifting to be asked back to appear on the Verb after a few years since I last popped on. I’ve been treated so well by the show over the years, first on promoting the electronic voice phenomena tour in 2013 and then doing a couple of new commissions for them in the years to come. One of the best things I’ve ever written, in my opinion, was for the Verb (the Worm in it’s Core). This time I had the chance to discuss my festival, how I curate it, and read a poem I had written with Krisjanis Zelgis for the fest, with Ian McMillan. Quite the privilege to read with Ian. It was all really relaxed and fun and I was proper happy they left a few of my jokes in. It can be listened to here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002f6pf

A note on : Overly Verbal Ape by Julia Rose Lewis and Wil Franklin

Really something this has just come out

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Overly-Verbal-Ape-Studies-Fowler/dp/1916590160

Overly Verbal Ape: Studies in the Work of SJ Fowler

Fowler has emerged as a force in the world of experimental poetry and his work deserves serious critical engagement; therefore, The authors utilize The Great Apes as an entry into his larger body of work. He is so prolific because his work as an artist, collaborator, organizer, teacher, and writer provide fuel for his other practices….

It’s definitely the biggest published critical engagement with my work, which is wonderful. The copy mentions there hasn’t been a lot of critical engagement with my work, which doesn’t feel true to me anyway with Richard Marshall’s book length essays, Robert Sheppard’s extensive writing on my work and collaborations, David MacLagan on my asemic writing, Eric Jett’s writing on I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) etc. But all the same, I suppose this is relative because I’m not in or interested in the academic critical field.

Finished - European Poetry Festival 2025

www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2025 All videos and photos at this lunk.

One of the best EPF’s there has been. 11 events, near enough 1000 people attending and 100s of poets too. I’m happy with it, it was fun. It’s hard to describe the experience, prepping it for six months, welcoming so many people travelling in, old friends, new poets, going from night to night in this few weeks, venue to venue, performance to performance. Watching over 100 performances in a few weeks. It’s intense, and enthusiastic. The stress is minimal, physical. This year, as ever, but more than any year before, I felt the culture and mission of the festival was understood by almost everyone involved. That it is a space for play, risk, experiment. People are free. And that it is supposed to be as communal, friendly, funny, welcoming as possible in experience, so the work can be as weird and strange as possible. That it doesn’t matter if the performances or poems are perfect, but that there is a culmination through each event of people building friendships through collaboration and innovation. This was consistent throughout each night in 2025.

I could write an essay about each night, the 125 people at the first Cypriot event, the weirdly perfect synchronicity of the Flanders event, the communality of the Estonian event, the ritualism of the Lithuanian event, the wildness of the Norwegian event, the wit of the Austrian event, the wryness of the Latvian event, they were all really good. Wonderful to get to Norwich, Kingston, Liverpool, to engage the communities I’ve got to know around those places. It’s best to just let the videos and photos speak for the thing. There is extensive documentation of everything at the links below, please do click on them and have a watch of some of the performances.

For my performances I collaborated with Krisjanis Zelgis (a pro wrestling match), Vanessa Onwuemezi (a sound poetry improvised duet), Katarina Krupickova, twice (two dance poetry pieces, the first a contemporary dance with abstracted actions, the second a spinning talking performance), Maria Barnas (an anti-comedy talking performance) and Tom Jenks (a new batch of our Proverb poems). Some were perfect, some faltered, all good in the spirit of the thing. I look forward to next year and want to say thank you to the people who dug in to support me in 2025 - Eleanor Wilders, Danica Ignacio, Matt Sokulsky, Cameron Wade, Katerina Koulouri, Caitlin Nugent, David Spittle, Julia Rose Lewis, and who were there, helping almost every night and with the documentation. 100s more too, so many friends amplified, and it worked.

Published : Levels of Care with Krisjanis Zelgis

Six years in the making this booklet is a record of a friendship, full of collaborative poetry and photos documenting the performances that instigated the poems. It’s come out so well, such high quality work from Alban at Sampson Low, as ever before. https://sampsonlow.co/2025/06/17/levels-of-care-krisjanis-zelgis-sj-fowler/

“Expanding the stomach, with water, in a bookshop. Hairdressing while on piggy back, in a university. Olympic wrestling, in the German embassy. Baby carries and leg drags in an arts centre. Human sculptures and gymnastic lifts in the Poetry Society. These are the things of poetry, naturally, if you are Krišjānis Zeļģis and SJ Fowler. In a Latvian-British collaborative duo that has gained it’s own strange kind of fame, through five performances in six years, a collaborative form has been generated, pioneered, that blends, uniquely, laconic, elegiac, dialogic literary poetry with physical, uncanny, generous conceptual performances. This book is then a inversion of the liveness that has made these collaborations whole, it is a return to the written word, an emphasis of that, and evidence all the same, of friendship, and of the potential of collaboration in literature.

LEVELS OF CARE : KRIŠJĀNIS ZEĻĢIS & SJ FOWLER
Published June 2025. ISBN 978-1-915505-52-1 / A5 Size
32 printed pages. Colour. Cimera Series #7. Print run of 200
Price – £4.99 BUY LEVELS OF CARE (£4.99 + £2.20 P & P)

This book was launched at the opening event of the European Poetry Festival 2025.

A note on : Concrete poem in Aswirl

Really happy to have a concrete poem in the summer edition of Robin Boothroyd’s Aswirl publication. The poem is taken from my Frog Circles series, using enso circles based on real inks I did in Japan, with poetry I wrote there too. Aswirl is unique, a really elegant, fold in celebration of the minimal and visual. There isn’t enough things celebrating this kind of poetry in the UK and Robin is doing a grand job.

This is issue 10 and is £4, though you subscribe too https://www.aswirlzine.com/product-page/issue-ten-summer

European Poetry Festival program completed! Final events added, please come!

Poet Peasant : July 11th - August 5th, a new exhibition at Bouda Gallery

https://www.stevenjfowler.com/poetpeasant

Poet Peasant : an exhibition by SJ Fowler
The Bouda Gallery – July 11th to August 5th 2025

An exhibition of poetry as curios, discovered text and found literary sculptures drawn from previously unseen works, selected asemic writing and the poetic props of performances across the globe. Drawing from fifteen years of rabid activity, this exhibition evidences the breadth of visual and conceptual poetry from one of the definitive experimentalists of the British 21st century literary scene. On the site of the former Notting Hill Books, a formative space for many, including Fowler, this exhibition emphasises the potential of the marginal, peculiar, detritus-as-poetry mode so removed from the medium’s stereotypical obsession with neatness, craft and clarity. From bear suits to homemade skeletons, handwritten novels to concrete poems, Poet Peasant represents some of the core aesthetic concerns of SJ Fowler - playful, eclectic and anti-singular, it is a deliberate mess of fun and weird visual literature that stretches the bounds of what poetry is.  www.stevenjfowler.com/poetpeasant

A new novella, Barabus, coming this winter

Excited to share this news https://tenementpress.com/BARABUS

“PREORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE  Following the 2022 Tenement publication of Fowler’s MUEUM,
shortlisted for the 2022/23 Republic of Consciousness Prize
for Small Presses, a second novella in his percolating trilogy of
fictions on the lore and estrangements of work and violence.

I have seen the world.
Voltaire, Candide

What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke                                         16:3

A medic roams an English city, going from call to call. As our protagonist roves from station to station they encounter accident, amusement, injury and error—minor ailment and major catastrophe alike—as they mis/adventure in the functionary detachment of applied temporary medicine. Whilst one tragedy seeds, another never materialises; whilst fear germinates and unease blooms, the plod and pace of a more pedestrian iteration of life prevails.

In a thread of instances laced with blood and banality, gore and gratuity—horrors both benign and ballooning—the medic is Fowler’s working witness to the body’s frailties. In their encounters, they see the structures and strictures and hierarchies of lived experience. How life can be boiled down to the ‘job,’ how a crisis can be crystallised in a single conversation, how calamity can overwhelm the senses, how hope hides in small rooms.
In riverine prose cooked down to concrete, this is a book about long, hard and strange work. The weird of exhaustion, the colour of tarmac, and the breadline of spirit. About the people that attend to the possibility of our continuity. About moral honesty, and what it costs to live in service of the needs of others. BARABUS is a novella about pragmatism in practice and the principled contradiction compounded in the idea of assistance and help. In our witness, we’ve the inversion of a god complex. A take on the idea of salvation lampooned in the function of a worker ‘on call,’ and the prospect of salvation sitting just a phone call away.

If a body is our ‘soft machine,’ as William S. Burroughs would put it, BARABUS is a book keen to picture the hard-edged horizon line of morbidity. A midnight-dark comedy with the bite and temerity of Chris Morris, the acerbity of Peter Weiss, Fowler’s second novella is a paean to the disarming directness of such authors as Yoram Kaniuk and, with the crunch of Anthony Burgess, is a book about our unnamed maladies and all our efforts to overlook them, override them, and correct them.” 

Final National Gallery commission of 2025 with Dan Abnett et al

https://www.stevenjfowler.com/nationalgallery/ Event IX - May 23rd 2025, With Dan Abnett, Danica Ignacio, Harper Stringer and Eleanor Wilders, the final event of 2025 and a superb walking tour poetry event led by art historian Fiona Alderton and curated by Joseph Kendra. I’ve admired Dan’s work for years so it was brilliant to see his fantastic readings. I’m a proper fan of his so it was grand to get to know him. I was very proud of three of my graduating students too, they did so well. Thanks so to all the kind folk who came along despite Trafalgar sq being thronged with Sunderland football fans.

Improvising with Benedict Taylor at ImproVox

Curated by Brian Webb and Stuart Wilding, ImproVox held it's 9th event at Bridewell Bar in the city of London on May 19th 2025. As part of a wider lineup, Benedict Taylor and I performed an entirely improvised duo. I was cold fogged so a bit much, but it did go well as it came out and the event was so welcoming and interesting and a venue in a part of London with huge significance for me. Benedict is a superb dance partner too

Shaldon Zoo residency : 2025 Reading

https://www.stevenjfowler.com/shaldonzoo Poetry at Shaldon Zoo 2025 : May Saturday 17th

A brilliant afternoon event, poets from across Devon and the UK presented brand new poems, each dedicated to an animal in Shaldon Wildlife Trust, reading to those animals and a human audience on a walking tour. This was such a lovely time. you can watch all the performances, in the order they were given, in this playlist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1nQSbgCtVU&list=PL-JiSo03F53oq_QZeK6jAIyaOPmnKac4v&pp=gAQB

European Poetry Festival 2025 : program announced

EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2025
June 18th - July 6th
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2025

The EPF returns for it’s 8th year, with nearly a dozen events celebrating collaboration, literary liveness and cross-linguistic inventiveness. A continuation of one of the grandest celebrations of European poetry ever to take place in Britain, over 100 poets, many visiting from across Europe, will present new works at a series of ‘Camarade’ events. Celebrating the poetry of Latvia, Flanders, Lithuania, Cyprus, Austria, Estonia, Switzerland and more, these communal, playful, energetic events are free to attend. See below for the events confirmed so far, with more to be announced soon, and many more poets to be announced at the various lineups too.

A note on : May 23rd at the National Gallery with Dan Abnett

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/friday-lates-tour-and-poetry-readings-sj-fowler-and-guests-23-05-2025 So pleased to have the final event commission for the National Gallery in 2025 happen soon, alongside three of my graduating students - Danica Ignacio, Harper Stringer and Eleanor Wilders - as well as Dan Abnett as the guest writer. Dan is someone I really admire, having read his work for the Black Library pretty comprehensively for a decade plus, and we’re really fortunate to have him involved. It’s free, starting at 7pm in Room 8 and always worth attending, these events are special

A small tour of Japan 2025

Nearly three weeks in Japan across April, performing, collaborating, exploring, my third time there in three years and an extraordinary experience. https://www.stevenjfowler.com/japan25

At this link there is videos and photos of the various events in Tokyo and Kyoto, from Camarade collaborative poetry to improvisations with Japanese musicians, as well as a travelogue and more information on the wider project.

Royal College of Art : talking performance on books

Grateful to have a chance to give a keynote talk at the RCA for a symposium entitled the materiality of the book, and to be encouraged by Tom Sowden and co-curatorial partners, to turn that into a talking performance. It was really well attended, and everyone was very hospitable and curious. This was all about tone, getting the right level of play, satire and sincere opinion, as well as balancing the conceptual performative elements with improvisation. I was happy with the result afterward, though I felt messy during it, because of people’s feedback. A day of really considerable presentations and work too, that spawned a lot of great conversations and ideas and hopefully future collaborations. A brilliant day that was thanks to the vision of Tom, Jonathan Boyd and Richard Nash

A note on : a talking poem for Beats at the Boogaloo

An interesting night in North London, my first time performing at the Boogaloo, kindly invited by Nick Roth to read Lawrence Ferlinghetti and do an improv talking poem amidst a well curated evening celebrating Beat poetry. It was a very unique vibe, very communal, interactive and I got a lot of positive feedback for the improvised nature of the work I provided in this context. This article came out afterwards too https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/25059391.adrian-dunbar-leads-poetry-night-boogaloo-highgate/

National Gallery poetry event VIII with Stewart Lee and friends

These events have built a real following now, they have a unique way about them, a kind of music hall playful feel, as myself and colleagues go from painting to painting in the National Gallery on a Friday night. This time joined by my students Zara Auckbaraullee and Lily Ferret, and Stewart Lee, who was generous to do the event and throw himself into it. We had a big crowd, and everyone seemed to have fun. I read poems on Turner’s Ulysses deriding Polyphemus and Stubbs’ Whistlejacket, two well known works, and again felt very instinctually these events lead me to a specific kind of poetry - something more humorous, direct, satirical than most of my writing. I was grateful too to see so many friends old and new in the crowd, and the families of my students, making the evening feel personal and intimate amidst the crowds. A really memorable one, and documented brilliantly with Alexander Kell’s photographs and Alban Low’s art portraits below.

Japan gigs this April in Tokyo and Kyoto

Very special for me to be returning to Japan for the third year running. The friendships I’ve made there have been really inspiring, and Colin Herd and I (my co-curator on the initial Japanese UK Poetry Exchange project) have been treated so well, and with such enthusiasm, for our return. As such we’ve been lucky to get funding again to return for gigs in Tokyo and Kyoto, working with poets new to us, alongside co-curators like Fukuda Pero, Silje Ree, Corey Wakeling and Miya.

April Thursday 17th - The Tokyo Camarade
Aoyama Gakuin University: 6pm https://www.theenemiesproject.com/tokyo
14 poets in 7 pairs presenting new collaborations. I’m working with the brilliant Satomi Tanaka.

April Sunday 20th - The Kyoto Camarade
Uradera Gokurakuji Buddhist temple : 2pm https://www.theenemiesproject.com/kyoto
8 pairs, and in the temple once again! A return too to a collab with Fukuda Pero.

April Thursday 24th - Tokyo Poetry Journal reading
at Ryozan Park Lounge: 7pm https://dojo.ryozanpark.com/access/ryozan-park-lounge/
Partnering with the TOPOJO for solo readings and performances

April Saturday 26th - Improvisation, Music and Poetry
at Gekkasha Jinbocho: 7pm https://gekkasha.jugem.jp/?eid=957360
A unique collaborative improv event with multiple musicians.

A note on : Writers Kingston, a special end of term event

One of the most special Writers Kingston events. The last of this term. A palpable feeling that many years of teaching and mentoring and curating has led to a very special time at Kingston Uni for me over the past academic year, and this night was a high point. I’m proud of the work we’ve done with Writers Kingston - the sense of community. The picture below speaks to that. Lots of students I’ve worked with very intensively, in my final year module, and those I’ve only shared one or two seminars with. Everyone took risks and gave a lot, and a really big audience came out to support. All the performances are here https://www.writerskingston.com/showcase25/

The night was a student showcase, and some brilliant students from undergrad and postgrad presented new works of solo and collaboration performances, readings, audio pieces, sound poems. Some super intense work, playful and unflinching. My performance, which was mostly improvised, was an attempt at being literally communal.