Published : LINK journal

How I find myself in such places I do not know. LINK is a remarkably beautiful journal out of Barcelona, printed in only 25 copies and exploring “[in-between] spaces, modes of communication, and translations within creative practices. An enquiry into future thinking and cultural shifts.” It is “a collaboration that was initiated between Julia Bertolaso (spatial designer) and Veronica Tran (interaction designer), while we were both in Barcelona. The work we do is at the intersection of many creative disciplines, looking into the role of design - primarily through design literacies and embodied cognition.”

I am in it through my friend and collaborator Thomas Duggan, and it represents his world in a certain way, engaging with architecture, design, conceptual thinking around these and other issues. We have a dialogue in the journal, a discussion, about our concerns and collaborations, about what we are doing and why. https://link-journal.com/

Published : Four poems on the films of Peter Greenaway

Peter Greenaway’s work is hugely important to me - his austerity, his excess, his style, his unapologetic intellectual concerns, his irreverence, his obsession with language (which is poetry at times) and his exploration of writing, calligraphy and asemia. I’ve written poems about his films for the last few years, in a kind of suite or sequence, ranging in methodologies.

In my latest collection - COME AND SEE THE SONGS OF STRANGE DAYS - released in March with Broken Sleep books I have 6 poems dedicated to his works. 3 of them, plus a poem on a documentary made about him by his partner Saskia Boddeke, have been kindly published online by Partisan Hotel, edited by Dominic Jaeckle. They include a long literary poem about THE FALLS, then a hand-written documentary poem about DROWNING BY NUMBERS and an ASEMIC WATER POEM about PROSPERO’S BOOKS https://partisanhotel.co.uk/Fowler-for-Greenaway

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Published : bear poems in SAND magazine anniversary issue

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https://sandjournal.com/product/issue-21/

“To mark a decade of publishing SAND, we are calling 2020 our “year of archaeology” and have filled this issue with a mix of new discoveries and excavated favorites. And in the midst of a pandemic, we’ve gotten to know the pieces even more intimately, seeing them in a surreal light we could not have imagined when we began this issue.”

I am one of those excavations with my suite of poems on bears, called species.

I wrote it in 2011 or 2012, whenever, when I was little, but i remember i was working on the galleries of the british museum, when i was a visitor host or guard, and I think in gallery 33, in India.

Here is the reading i did of these poems for the online launch, with bears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEy4yti0kEs

Published: new artpoems in the latest Gorse issue 8

I've said before that I think Gorse to be one of the finest literary journals in the world. I read their impeccably produced issues cover to cover and feel the journal to be edited as beautifully as it made. To have some of my art brut poems, from my upcoming I fear my best work behind me book with Stranger Press in the latest issue is wonderful, not only to share that work, aberrant as it would be to most publications, but also because I knew how beautifully they would present the works. They look amazing on its pages, I couldnt be happier.

You can pick up issue 8 here http://gorse.ie/book/no-8/

Published: two poems into Hungarian in Szif

Thanks to the brilliant Orsolya Fenyvesi, two of my newer poems, coming from my new book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, have been translated into Hungarian and published in the Szif journal. http://www.szifonline.hu/?cikk_ID=679

Nem támadnak meg a medvék

Ez ólálkodik a sötétben,
a vegetarianizmus
barátságos története.

Livia azt mondja, kenyér van az orrban
és a torokban.

A note on: In Other Words: The Journal for Literary Translators Winter 2016

Very happy to have a short article in the beautiful and vital In Other Words journal, which is published by Writer's Centre Norwich and the translation centre. Do go get a subscription, it's a brilliant journal http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/about-us/wcn-publications/

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My article gives an account of how I happened to be in Serbia as the UK's exit from Europe happened, and the inevitable disquiet around that experience. I was helped by editor Sam Schnee in putting it together, she did a wonderful job with me and with the whole issue, which features Gabriel Josipovici, Chris Gribble, Jen Calleja and many other talents.

Published: poems in Enchanting Verses (India) issue XXIII 2016

Very pleased to be in this journal based in India, in a special issue edited by Harry Man. My poems http://www.theenchantingverses.org/sj-fowler.html

and the full issue http://www.theenchantingverses.org/issue-xxiii-august-2016.html featuring
ob Beagrie, Ana Brnardić, Les Wicks, Cia Rinne, Eley Williams, Ella Chappell, Hannah Lowe, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Jon Stone, Holly Corfield Carr, Julia Rose Lewis, Abigail Parry, Matt Bryden, Selina Nwulu, Stephan Delbos, Sarah Hesketh, Rishi Dastidar, Simon Pomery and Sanjeev Sethi

Published: Prism in Gorse: No.5

One of the very best literary magazines in Europe, if not, without hyperbole, the world. The extraordinary Gorse, genuinely cutting new ground in 21st literature has been kind enough to take some of the very first poems from my new sequence about Edward Snowden and GCHQ, entitled Prism. So lovely to be in the journal alongside some wonderful writers and with such production quality. A thanks to Susan Tomaselli and Christodoulos Makris.

Buy the journal here http://gorse.ie/

In the new Lighthouse magazine

Really pleased to feature in the special collaboration issue of Lighthouse magazine, thanks to Meirion Jordan, Angus Sinclair & co. My Estates of Westeros collaboration with the artist Ben Morris remains one of my very favourite works and in typical fashion, Lighthouse did an amazing job of rendering the visually complex work. A great magazine, one of the best in this country, supporting new writers as a mission, so pleased to be included

Buy it here : http://www.gatehousepress.com/
shop/anthologies/
lighthouse-issue-8/

Visual Verse: August issue: Sink

Great to be part of Visual Verse, a really innovative writing project in online journal form where authors are asked to respond, in the course of one hour, to an original artwork, an image, across a range of mediums, be it poetry or art etc. You have a size limit, between 50 and 500 words, and that one hour. 

My poem, Sink, is in Volume one of Chapter 10, and I join an amazing list of writers who have taken part in the Visual Verse experience. Check out the poem (it's unusually concise, for me) 

http://visualverse.org/submissions/sink/

Cordite: a feature on collaboration for the Australian Journal

Cordite is one big publication out of Oz, and I was delighted to be asked to put something wide together for a special issue on collaboration. I adapted some words on collaboration itself, as it is as part of my practise and tied this into five excerpts from brand new, never before seen collaborations. They are all works I'm really excited to share, all part of a continuation of my work with others since the publication of Enemies. I'll be blogposting excerpts from these works one by one, but for now.

Here's the full issue: http://cordite.org.au/content/poetry/collaboration/

Here's the link to my article: http://cordite.org.au/guncotton/in-collaboration/

& from that "These five collaborations are no more or less representative of my overall collaborative output than any other five I could’ve chosen. Rather, I choose them, as I do my collaborators, because of a sense of who these people are and the creative and social energy they have exchanged with me. I write this in fact on a tour of the Scottish islands, writing new collaborations every day, to be read in the evenings, to small audiences on Orkney and Shetland. The collaborative process is ever in flux for me now, and so these five works also seem new to me, as though they were written this morning too.

Yet the work with Tom Jenks, ‘1000 proverbs’, was built over a year period or more – and readied by rapidly batted back and forth email – for publication as a separate book with Knives Forks and Spoons Press. Too, ‘40 feet’, is a poem where David Berridge and I tried to embrace the failure of encapsulation, writing 40 poems that were about themselves, over a 40 day period. ‘Samurai’, with Andrew Spragg, is new … begun this year and currently growing poem by poem as we both research a randomly chosen topic and warp it through our shared poetics. ‘La dominate’ was written and rendered artistically by Ariadne Radi Cor in Venice – both of us part of a collaborative project with a university there – as part of a project called Crossing Voices, one expertly curated by Alessandro Mistrorigo and James Wilkes. And ‘Oil’, with William Letford, was written for reading, for this current tour, and read in Aberdeen, Scotland on 15 July, 2014, after an exchange of stanzas lasting a few weeks. Our processes produce the content, and that’s where the joy is, in making sure a process is the thing of it all.
To date I’ve engaged in over 100 collaborations..."

four poems from Iraq in Colony

http://www.colony.ie/#!sjfowler/c1p49 the wonderful Irish journal Colony has published my four translations from the Iraqi poets I worked with for the Reel Iraq project a few months ago. A huge honour to have had the time with them. 

"A product of the remarkable Reel Iraq project in April 2014, where four British and four Iraqi poets spent a week together in the Safeen mountains of Kurdistan, I had the pleasure to spend time meeting and transliterating the work of Ahmad Abdel Hussein, Miriam Al Attar, Ali Wajeh and Zhawen Shally. These works appear without their Arabic originals to emphasise that in the process of their being reconstructed into English, I have transliterated, rather than translated the original poems, and while I was as loyal as I found myself able to be (feeling deeply responsible to the poets, if not the poems, I have actually been very careful to maintain the original texts, by my own mangling standards), they now exist somewhere between myself and the original authors, in a no man’s land of sorts, possessed by neither, and better for that. They are four complete failures. – SJ Fowler

in the name of god (lower case)
transliterated from the Arabic of Ahmed Abdel Hussein

you are the well of thirst
you are the black prize in the mouth of the wolf

leave off your endless light of miracles
which lights up the name of Iraq
raise up your blindfold
which has been gently knotted upon the eyes of Baghdad
gather the decorations of war from the thresholds of home
turn the guns of battle
to brooms, so that they might not kill
snuff out that light which propagates the darkness of the mothernight
and don’t leave my lover to course in dread
from her home to the halls, and from the halls to her home
but print on her heart instead, the furthest stars
until she knows while she’s tightening her hijab
that you are the rictus grin that proceeds death

4 poems from {Enthusiasm} published by Frankmatter

http://frankmattermag.com/ Really happy to more poems from a future work leaking out into the world in some fine journals and publishing enterprises. Frankmatter, based in the US, is a tri-annual online journal, and really has set some fine standards for itself. Im pretty chuffed to be in this issue alongside a new translation of Le Clezio for example. The poems are about Ealing, Healing, the FSB and IEDs. http://frankmattermag.com/2014/02/02/four-poems-by-sj-fowler/

Healing as a planet
-
I saw to it, Ealing as a planet earth
going to its slow growth
a place begging vegetable
sombre, health seeking, much a taste acquired
in time, application & practise
for health in wisdom
big ball of blue veined envy & ambition
missing the high st. when on holidays
you have a home, sad puppet lurch of our heart suburb
red road bezerker
full of family

Gorse magazine introduces me

http://gorse.ie/introducing-sj-fowler/ a far too generous portrait from the remarkable people at Gorse magazine, one of the publications I'm most looking forward to in 2014, coming soon, in the inaugural issue, six of my poems from a future collection {Enthusiasm}

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Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.
SJ Fowler has been exploring the boundaries of European poetry in his Maintenant series, a project that takes its name from pugilist, poet, hoaxer and nephew of Oscar WildeArthur Cravan. It’s an astonishing project, one that has profiled the work of almost 100 contemporary poets, placing the likes of Frédéric ForteTadeusz Różewicz and George Szirtesalongside Ann CottenLuna MiguelHolly Pester and Ragnhildur Jóhanns. Says Fowler,
“For years I was completely isolated in my reading too…and as such I was in a bubble, didn’t have the chance to develop any sense of prejudice against poetry in translation, or avant garde work, as somehow otherly. That’s perhaps why I read this kind of work alongside poetry that might be better known in this country in equal measure.”
Steven delivered a series of lectures at the Southbank’s Rest is Noise festival late last year, released a collaborative multi-disciplinary collection Enemies, and performed ‘Electric Dada’ as part of Electronic Voice Phenomena.
‘I think there’s a territorial, self-defeating dualism that seems to permeate through people’s perception of the experimental, that it requires a philosophical or political praxis to be part of their writing. That it is against something, more than it is for something. This isn’t true, fundamentally. Experimentation is about finding the authentic way to express a very certain content.’
He is one of the most exciting young poets at work today and we delighted to include poems from his new collection,{Enthusiasm}. From ‘Burn museum’
the gypsy wound
fighting man of a fighting family
bitterly pain full is a broken jaw, a bruised
kidney
it’ll make you think twice, modern Paul
it doesn’t just hurt, it’s worse
it drifts its bookish suitcase
like a river of shirt toward work

Imminent Rattle issue 4

http://rattlejournal.org.uk/issue-four/ Edited by Jon K. Shaw and Tom Robinson, anyone who follows journals of repute in London will know the quality of the publication. It has the unusual feature of being scrupulously edited and sustainable through sales and distribution. I have had the privilege to feature in issue 2, and in issue 3, collaborating with the photographers Lone Eriksen and Edith Bergfors. Well now in issue four the amazing magazine is letting me userp space with David Kelly to show out the Rasenna collaboration we did early in the year for an exhibition held in Farringdon. This is the papered premiere of a work that will be central to our Mystics collected collaborations book next year and a fine moment between David and I. Issue four will also be available to buy at the launch event on Wednesday 3rd July, to be held downstairs at the Glasshouse Stores pub, Soho (London W1F 9UL) from 19.00. The editors and many of the contributors past and present will be in attendance for an evening of drink and conversation at the convergence of art and writing. All are most welcome.Full details, including a map, here. Here is me reading the poems on a sweltering night in Farringdon, on an evening full of balls, where people were whooping and clapping and got drunk and I nearly beat someone up.