A conversation between Angie Butler and I, that was live streamed, and attended by more people than i wouldve thought, during, and about our Printed Poetry Project www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp
Angie’s hospitality was so good and we got on so well the conversation was really worthwhile i think.
A new page dedicated to the PPP www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp
Aiming to create overlaps between poetry and letterpress, as well as publishing and book arts, I’m lucky to be the poet at the centre of this project so far, thanks to Angie Butler and Sarah Bodman. Evolving organically over many months of correspondence, the PPP is creating a generous, generative space for real collaboration between those with the expertise to realise printed matter and those who might write the poems within.
Supported by the Centre for Fine Print Research at UWE, Bristol, the current form of the project is really the brainchild of Angie Butler and has taken in, so far, a short residency at The Whittington press working with Pat Randle of Nomad Letterpress in May 2021.
This will be followed with a limited edition publication, entitled 25 poems, which was written during, and about, the project, before being collaboratively typeset and printed by Angie and Pat. This will be followed by an ambitious symposium in October 2021 and more happenings into the future.
A full diary of my time in Bristol is a available too, www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp, an excerpt here “The process then was a whirl. The evenings in my airbnb, doing long runs through Bristolian suburbs, the sharing of ideas with Sarah Bodman and the the postgraduate students at UWE, and the conversations with Angie, both for an online event and in her motorcar - these all fed into the poems I wrote, that were to be finished in this week so they could be printed there and then! We found an old cast in the press that said ‘25 poems’, next to an image of a cock and bull, and i leapt on this as the title. So 25 poems. A perfect chance for me to exorcise a desire to write one word poems I thought, following Aram Saroyan and 16 were created, for the opening and closes pages. Then notes, fragments, overheard conversations, things I thought when I was not thinking, these began coming together for the remaining 9 poems - with a sense always of the vernacular of letterpress and printing, of the terminology, the vocabulary, the intense sense of workable knowledge.
very cool to be a part of this project celebrating photo poetry, something ive been working away at the last half decade, teaching, sharing publishing https://www.photopoetrysurfaces.com/
my work with Norwegian poet Bard Torgersen - CROWFINGER - will be part of the exhibition online and I’ll be appearing at the online event on June 17th. www.bristolphotofestival.org/photopoetry
As part of the Bristol Photo Festival 2021, the Photo Poetry SURFACES (photo-visual-poetics) activities (curated by David Solo, Astra Papachristodoulou and Paul Hawkins) will be exploring and presenting a range of works. The programs will include mapping out the range of combinations (and sometimes going outside the lines), exhibiting a selection of current examples and presenting mixed media presentations of the work. We’re also hosting conversations about the nature of such collaborations, how such material may be “read” and looking at ways to assess or evaluate it.
Angie Butler at work
I am very lucky indeed to have been working on a project with Angie Butler and Sarah Bodman at UWE in Bristol over the last number of months, since the summer of 2020 really, that will come to fruition in multiple instances throughout this year 2021. The Printed Poetry Project will see some collaborations, teaching, publications, conversation, conferences and the like, and it begins with my going to Bristol next week and working with Angie at the Whittington Press in Cheltenham https://whittingtonpressshop.com. What we create is ahead of us, but it’s the kind of project I really love, where i get to learn and work collectively and drain other people’s experience to open up new avenues in my own work. As part of my time in Bristol, I’ll be chatting with Angie in this online talk, which anyone can watch!
Print in Conversation: The Printed Poetry Project with Steven J Fowler: poet, writer and artist (13 May 2021)
https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/the-printed-poetry-project-with-steven-j-fowler/
Thursday 13 May 12.30pm – 1.15pm A free, open session for anyone to join. Part of the Art of the Maker event series : An informal lunchtime public engagement session, talking candidly with poet, writer and artist, Steven J Fowler about his collaborative research project-in-progress with the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR), UWE, Bristol. We will discuss Steven’s experience so far, in terms of the development of our project ideas and how the work has developed during the course of the week. We will explain how we are using the craft of type-setting and the process of letterpress printing in relation to the haptic production of the printed word within contemporary publishing activities. They’ll be time for Q&A, too!
Part of a brilliant online summer festival organised by UWE’s Centre for Fine Print Research and Arnolfini, I was asked to talk about Asemic Poetry for a bit https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/book-and-print-summer-festival-2020/
Never easy to do it from the top of your head but that’s how I prefer to teach, obviously leaping from idea to idea but hopefully being more immediate / engaged for that leaping. Asemic work is important to me and the feedback I’ve had suggests this has bled through.
Paul Hawkins is one of the most interesting poets working in the UK and really a fundamental part of the Poem Brut project www.poembrut.com For the new year of poem brut I wanted to offer some commissions with those who had become deeply involved in the work - exploring method and mess, the mind and brain - but to make the nature of those commissions completely as open as the content of them. Paul, characteristically, used his to create a new set of workshops with Bristol based mental health organisation Second Step. It makes me proud that this is part of poem brut, and has happened just because it should, and not with some overt gesture. Paul is authentic is he is anything, and that’s why I admire him.
You can find out more about these workshops and second step here https://www.second-step.co.uk/wellbeing-college-blogs-poems-without-words-celebrating-vibrancy-scribbling-scrawling/ and attached is a work made by one of the people, Allison, who attended Paul’s sessions.
Another grand launch, the third of four, at the world renowned gallery Arnolfini in Bristol. I read alongside friends and peers Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Matti Spence and John Hall, who is a great influence on my work, and Phil Owen, who is a curator as well as a writer, and was immensely hospitable to us. Shearsman Books and Tony Frazer, the editor, were on site too, being local, and it was a inviting, intellectually agile, open evening with some really fine readings. The weather in Bristol was beautiful, people sat along the dock before the Arnolfini and I had time during the day to really take it in, enjoy my book as an excuse to see friends, leave London and spend time busied with good things
In the lead up to my book launch at the remarkable Arnolfini in Bristol the acclaimed gallery has published a poem from The Guide to Being Bear Aware on it's website. Pap.
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/blog/sj-fowler-poetry
It's a poem about being old.
http://www.vasw.org.uk/events/the-guide-to-being-bear-aware-a-poetry-collection-by-sj-fowler.php
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, BS1 4QA / 0117 917 2300 boxoffice@arnolfini.org.uk
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/the-guide-to-being-bear-aware-a-poetry-collection-by-sj-fowler
Thursday 06 April 2017 19:00 - 20:00 Opening Hours: 11:00 - 18:00 Booking recommended
The launch of SJ Fowler’s latest poetry collection The Guide to Being Bear Aware from Bristol-based Shearsman Books, featuring performances and readings from Fowler and guest readers John Hall, Holly Corfield Carr, Paul Hawkins, Phil Owen & more to be announced.
"The Guide to Being Bear Aware offers advice for living in a world gone awry. Wry, violent, contemplative, political, intimate and raucous by turns, these are poems that laze on your lap only to get their claws in... Morphing into unfamiliar shapes beneath the watching eye, these refreshing, quizzical, well-traveled poems forge a world entirely their own: they won’t let you go of you easily.” Sarah Howe http://www.stevenjfowler.com/bearaware
Second time up in Morphrog, edited by Jeremy Page, this time they have kindly published my third collaboration with Patrick Coyle, entitled Bristol, which was commissioned as part of the Arnolfini led Enemies of the South event, which was thanks to Jamie Eastman. This rounds off my trilogy of found text work with Mr Coyle. Good to see it on the web page http://morphrog.com/ 
I can't help but be grateful for the opportunity to put together an event like this one, that happened last Saturday at the Arnolfini in Bristol. To travel outside of London, to make a highly memorable day out of such a thing as poetry jaffing, in such an amazing institution like the Arnolfini who could've not been more supportive or gracious toward our collective enterprise, from commissioning to execution.
the latest in Bristol's Arnolfini was about Bristol Bristol Birstol. I've learned so much from the practise of mr Coyle it was a privilege again to work and read with him. An immensely warm, witty, erudite and lovely human being, as much as he is intimidating as an artist. We first did in 2011, then again in 2012, and now in 2013. We had a profound series of moments preperformance discussing what we are trying to do in general with our work and how it is changing, and undoubtedly we shall work again in the future, moving further into the world of improvised raw pain pain.
