Minimum Security Prison Poetry

Minimum security prison poetry

minimumsecurityprisonpoetry

Contemporary British poets read original poetry on the subject of incarceration & imprisonment.

Tim Atkins / Richard Barrett / Julia Calver / Tom Chivers / Matthew Gregory /Stephen Emmerson / Jeff Hilson / Colin Herd / Holly Hopkins / Kirsty Irving / Antony John / Mendoza / Tamarin Norwood / Chris Page / Holly Pester / Sam Riviere / Jon K Shaw / Marcus Slease / Andy Spragg / Steve Willey / SJ Fowler, launching the collection Minimum Security Prison Dentistry published by Anything Anymore Anywhere press.

Minimum Security Prison Poetry,
The Horse Hospital
Wednesday November 23rd 2011 @ 7pm
Entrance free

Praise for SJ Fowler’s Minimum Security Prison Dentistry:

If you think poetry is some sedate pursuit carried out in an ivory tower then you obviously ain’t read Steven Fowler. He makes Bukowski look like Billy Childish and Billy Childish look like William MacGonagall!
- Stewart Home

Punchy, lyrical, and incandescently inventive, by turns surreal and disarmingly direct, these kaleidoscopic poems enter the house of prison language via the back door and take no hostages. If Captain Beefheart had done St. Quentin, the result might have sounded something like this
- Philip Terry

This could be the worst book you will read this year, the discussion is violence, but really it’s a punch from a cup cake, using narrative and expressionist syntax. His celebration of where is, has a clipped disgust
- Allen Fisher

Imagine a Boys Own Paper landscape with True Crime architecture. Laurence Harvey dodges from building to country trying to evade CCTV whose sound footage runs through Babelfish. The smells are Jack London, the light is Genet and the memories are Edgar Lee Masters. Equally in words is Steven Johannes Fowler’s Minimum Security Prison Dentistry: elegant, coldly funny, at times emotional, textured with occasional accidental/intentional solecisms; but getting the work done. Nowadays most pages labelled “poetry” are unreadable and uninteresting: these give hope. Anyone who can name-check Joe Arpaio and Jacky le Mat, and reference the cover-texture of an Anselm Hollo book from the sixties rides my particular range
- Tom Raworth

For Mercy, this Friday in Liverpool, with Ben Morris

http://www.mercyonline.co.uk/who-we-are/what-we-are-up-to/article/last-2011-overlap-commission-steven-fowler-and-chora-do-liverpool-music-week


Steven Fowler( 2 )
  • Steven Fowler
  • Infinite Love

Last 2011 Overlap Commission: Steven Fowler and Chora do Liverpool Music Week

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03/11/11 Live
by Nathan Jones

We're teaming up with Samizdat and La Racaille again on brilliant new music/language/art event, this time exploring trance, mantra and the loop at Liverpool Music Week. Featuring a new commission with Steven Fowler and an amazing new setting of Dustin Wong's seminal Infinite Love album set for guitar orchestra by wizz-kid Jon Davies...... read on by clicking the link

Maintenant #78 - Damir Sodan


Though his work is utterly modern and could only be of the now, Damir Šodan, as a man, recalls a different age. Cosmopolitan, engaged, political, satirically adept and poetically versatile, he is a poet who defines and embodies one of Europe’s great, surging contemporary traditions, that is Croatia since the turn of the millennium. One of the most active and veracious translators and editors on the continent, he has won international awards for his plays and finds employment at the Hague, as a translator for the United Nations War Tribunal. This is beside his reputation as a poet, which is considerable and deservingly ever growing. His work is striking for its elasticity, its precision and its ability to retain power amidst a wit rarely found in modern letters. In a typically generous and eloquent interview, discussing everything from war crimes tribunals to the Croatian poetic tradition, we present a locus of modern European poetry, Damir Šodan.


I'm very pleased to say we have published ten of Damir's poems in English alongside the interview


Recipes published in Otoliths


a new issue of Otoliths for spring 2011. As ever it's one of the most considered and wide ranging poetic publications online. Features a mass of poets including excellent standouts Márton Koppány, J. D. Nelson, Felino A. Soriano, Grzegorz Wróblewski and sean burn.

I think this is my fifth or sixth time in Otoliths. These poems are from Minimum Security Prison Dentistry, the collection launched this month.

the Other room - my experience & an interview with its founders

I've just returned from reading at the Other room in the old abbey inn in central Manchester, it was the 29th edition of the series and one of the highlights of my year in terms of poetry.

The invitation had a special significance for me. Firstly, the Other room is a project I have followed as closely as any other - the web presence being a vital resource for British poetry, plus the readings are always meticulously recorded, both with performances and interviews and I've been able to follow some of my favourite poets partaking - Tim Atkins, Jeff Hilson, Philip Terry, Holly Pester etc... Secondly, those who organise the series, and seem to represent succinctly the surge of amazing innovative poetry emerging from the contemporary North West scene, have been instrumental in my writing (Tom Jenks gave me my first magazine publication in the sorely missed Parameter, Scott Thurston was one of the first to offer me invaluable critique and support, and Alec Newman published my first collection.) Thirdly, and finally, I have come to see the series as an inspiration for the events I organise and the spirit in which poetry is fostered and supported. The Other room is never dictatorial, never knowing, exclusive or smug - it is open, collective, earnest and centred entirely around the poetry itself. The excellence of work is matched by the atmosphere in which the readings take place and are organised.

The hospitality afforded me was remarkable, those in attendance were welcoming and receptive and the discussions in and around the event were as enjoyable to me as the reading itself. It is a remarkable project and one whose increasing legacy reflects correctly, and brilliantly, on its instigators.

Here is an interview with those who run the series, James Davies, Scott Thurston and Tom Jenks, a resource I am sure will be important in the future:

Patrick Coyle & SJ Fowler at You Call Him Doctor Jones!

This was really fun.



Patrick Coyle and SJ Fowler read their collaboration "RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK' Screenplay. REVISED REVISED THIRD DRAFT, AUGUST 1979" for the Penned in the Margins curated homage to the Indiana Jones franchise 'You Call Him Doctor Jones!', featuring music, performance, comedy and poetry. Which is kind of what this is.

Blue Touch Paper scheme with the London Sinfonietta

Following an open, national call the London Sinfonietta has selected a group of composers and multidisciplinary artists to participate in the Blue Touch Paper programme. The three composer-collaborator partnerships, who have all been awarded a Jerwood Blue Touch Paper bursary, are:

- Steve Potter (composer) & Kélina Gotman (Writer/Dramaturg)

- Elspeth Brooke (composer), Seonaid Goody (Puppeteer) & Anna G Jones (Director)

- Philip Venables (composer) & Steven J Fowler (Poet)

The three exciting ideas for new multidisciplinary pieces from these partnerships will be presented at a work-in-progress preview event in May 2012. The projects are:

- a music-theatre piece which explores the reality of dreams through staging political, utopian and everyday examples such as Martin Luther King’s rally against the Vietnam War.

- a re-imagining of the Greek myth of Persephone, experimenting how effects from early animated film could transfer to the art of puppetry, integrated with live musical performance

- a piece exploring the violence, sanctioned by society, that is boxing, through music and poetry

Maintenant Camarade - the collaborations




"On October 15th 2011, 3:AM Magazine’s Maintenant series hosted it’s largest event so far at the Rich Mix centre near Brick Lane in London. Poets from Russia, Macedonia and Latvia joined nine pairs of British poets in a memorable evening of performance and poetry. The British poets were paired as part of the first Maintenant Camarade project, with their efforts published in a chapbook by the Red Ceilings press. The videos below are shown in the order of the readings given on the evening, an event which showed the depth of talent, inventiveness and wit in contemporary European poetry."


Thanks to everyone who came, it was by far our best event, both in attendance and quality. Thanks to Literature across frontiers and Arc publications, and of course to all of the 23 readers, who read remarkably. It was a special evening and I'm happy to say the next Camarade project has commenced, and the reading will take place next February at the Rich mix centre.

Other room preview

SJ Fowler – a preview

14/10/2011 at 8:00 am · Filed under Events and tagged: ,

SJ Fowler will be reading at the next Other Room on Wednesday 26th October at The Old Abbey Inn on Manchester Science Park. You can read some of his work a the Voiceworks site and much more at hisown site. Or watch a film of him reading at the launch of his collection Fights on Veer Publications.

Preview of Colin Herd to follow soon. Click here to read a preview of Jennifer Cooke.

Camarade publication available to buy


Now available to buy at www.theredceilingspress.co.uk, I edited the booklet and it features an introduction before the incredible poetry of Tom Jenks & Chris McCabe, Holly Pester & Patrick Coyle, James Wilkes & Ghazal Mosadeq, Tom Chivers & Simon Barraclough, James Byrne & Sandeep Parmar, Sam Riviere & Jack Underwood, Emily Critchley & Tamarin Norwood, Marcus Slease & Tim Atkins, Sean Bonney & Jeff Hilson. It's only 5 pounds and its without doubt the best work I've ever edited, the poets have really excelled in showing the potentiality of collaboration and the quality of work being produced in contemporary circles.