Geoffrey Winston reviews A Joyful Summit of Old Savages at Londonjazz

http://londonjazz.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/review-poets-at-horse-hospital.html

Tom Raworth, Gunnar Harding, Anselm Hollo
The Horse Hospital, London, April 2012
Drawing by Geoffrey Winston. © 2012. All Rights Reserved
A Summit Of Joyful Old Savages - poets Anselm Hollo, Gunnar Harding, Tom Raworth and Andrei Codrescu (The Horse Hospital, 18th April 2012; review and drawing by Geoff Winston)

'We can't sing, that's why we write!' Anselm Hollo's humorous, self-deprecating aside, on behalf of this esteemed quartet of poets, encapsulated the spirit of this unique, intimate and joyful occasion.

Masterminded by poet and publisher Steven (SJ) Fowler, this was a gathering of four of the most significant poets of their generation, who made their initial mark in the early 60s, and continue to exert a profound influence on subsequent generations.

Gunnar Harding, originally an artist and jazz drummer, takes much of the credit for diverting the paths of Swedish and northern European poetry away from their historical preoccupations with nature. Anselm Hollo, Finnish born, resident in the USA after spending a few years in England, was introduced as 'the greatest translator of the twentieth century', whereupon he recounted ....  

Mercy interview - EVP conversations: Steven Fowler on AUDIENCE

http://www.mercyonline.co.uk/who-we-are/what-we-are-up-to/article/steven-fowler-on-audience

EVP conversations: Steven Fowler on AUDIENCE( 1 

EVP conversations: Steven Fowler on AUDIENCE

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13/04/12 Live
by Nathan Jones
I interviewed Steven Fowler ahead of our EVP event on 31st May really interesting response >> "Fundamentally I do indeed not consider the audience at all."
We try to build up a little discourse around the shared and contrasting approaches between the artists we work with on the Mercy programme.  Previously we have published items with Anat Ben David, Mark Greenwood, Mark Leahy and Maria Minerva  Today, I chat with vangarde poet Steven Fowlerabout the audience and performance moment, ahead of our EVP event on 31st May, with reference to a previous interview with Ross Sutherland about his Backup to Tape project. 
NATHAN JONES:
In this interview Ross says a few things about audience which I think are really revealing and interesting about his work, and reflect in a way on yours. Just to sample a few illustrative comments:
"I've been trying to let the audience into the writing process."
"By imposing so many restrictions on my writing, I hoped I would l bypass the conscious mind and write from the subconscious instead. Then, when the audience heard the piece live, they would be nudged down a similar path of intuition."
These are insights into Ross's work for sure, and you can really feel this generous appeal to the audience in his performances.
The thing is though, however many ways you and Ross are similar - the level of interrogation and experimentalism in your work, the interaction with curating and producing, a commitment to liveness, prolific output, a significant fondness and recognition from your respective peers - I keep thinking about something you said when we spoke before your thrilling performance on 11/11/11 last year. I was asking you about violence in your performance, and specifically the aggressive, masculine voice - whether this mode, really can have a negative impact on the audience, pushing them out.  Your reply, paraphrasing, is that I shouldn't worry too much about the audience, that integrally you don't really think about what the audience think. Basically you put the emphasis back onto the strength of the work.
This got me thinking about the difference in atmosphere between avant garde and 'performance' events, and the environments you and Ross have respectively developed your work in.
You might say that with Ross, he's more 'there' in the moment, because of the level of ad-lib content and informal setting for the poetry - willing them along, cajoling them, and interacting with them up continually throughout the performance as a kind of collaborative effort [epitomised by this work]. In contrast, it seems like you are more authoritative, but almost inhuman, an automaton of performance that really sucks in attention, demands it, rather than bartering for it (so, is it never at risk?)
What complicates it is that when we 'sprung' you and Ben Morris on the audience at Liverpool Music Week the audience totally lapped it up. And really the result is one that is liberating as an audience member in a different way to the liberty to influence the flow of the work - perhaps more 'absorbing', rather than 'engaging', but I'm finding my language dry up here...
Firstly then, would you stand by the statement that you don't really think about the audience?
Then, would you expand on your experience of a relationship with the audience as you're performing - and perhaps refer specifically to this work we've been developing for EVP...
STEVEN J FOWLER:
I think the first thing I'd need to reiterate is that if my position on this notion of an audience and there experience is one that begins in suspicion, and then may transverse into dislike or rejection, that that suspicion begins with myself and my own work. I don't mean this in a faux critical manner, like I don't believe in the work I am doing, just that my life has been marked by own instinct to almost always be instinctually declarative, and I really dislike this as a trait of mine, and others. I really do my best now to advocate a palpable sense that my opinion will most likely change as time goes by and that I feel the deeper I get into anything (this comes from studying philosophy since I was 19, academically and autodidactically, I think) the more I realise I know next to nothing. This is relevant because it means with performance I try to not overstate my thoughts to myself or to others, as I know I could probably do so for many hours and then get caught in my own declarations, and also because whatever I say now, well I might feel this way next month, let alone in ten years.
Fundamentally I do indeed not consider the audience at all. There are so many reasons for this its hard to cover them properly. Certainly part of it is because I believe anything one wants to do well, even to benefit others, must maintain a sure sense of personal gratification, otherwise disappointment looms. This extends from my performances all the way to my role as an event organiser. If I don't value it personally then I will end up saying people didn't appreciate it. This leads to me not really caring what people think. Another part of it is the belief that pure focus on the work itself, as if I was alone on stage, will benefit the work and what I see as valuable within it. If I consider others thoughts, I will not wholly commit to the idea which spawned the work, and as you said, often this means people do become isolated and perhaps repulsed by the experience. Its a banal thing to say, but it is true that that is an extremely valid response aesthetically, perhaps more valid than gentle agreement, though I wouldn't overstate that.
Another part of it is far more organic. I have competed in martial arts and wrestling and boxing since i was a tiny boy. Whenever I feel a performance coming on i cannot help but associate the feelings with that kind of competition. It gives me an adrenaline dump and I get angry. So the experience of the audience being there is often affords me a subconscious sense of resentment, and so I ignore them all the more. I don't want to sound ever more negative or solipsistic, but I would say I am unsure of anyone who really thinks too much about the audience and what people want. Perhaps I see that as a sign of weakness? Or commercialism? Really who cares what people think, the work is the work.
During performances I used to make eye contact with people, and try and read their responses, as if that would feed my understanding as I perform. Now I tend to block myself off from them. It is the audience who defines their own experience, I am just presenting something to them. I think the notion of interactivity is somewhat overstated. Ben and I are covering some ground for the 31st that might make the performance both physically, as well as aurally, palpable to those attending. We might perhaps be able to use kineticism to match sonic expression, and if not that, then definitely a sense of linguistic destruction in form. In the most immediate way I hope that those attending will be captivated by that, that they feel like they are trapped within the experience, but whether i think they will be or should is a thought that leads me to make the comment above, that interactivity is overstated. Each individual will experience things differently. Some will be entranced ( i hope), otherwise repulsed. Others still will be thinking of their shopping lists.

Leaves: an echapbook published by Verysmallkitchen


VerySmallKitchen



http://issuu.com/verysmallkitchen/docs/sj_fowler_leaves_

http://verysmallkitchen.com/2012/04/21/vsk-chapbook-leaves-by-sj-fowler/


The latest VSK Chapbook is LEAVES by SJ Fowler. It is available for online consumption and PDF download here. It begins:
were it not for the spines
would it rather not be fish backwards
is it remarkable how
much pain
the bodies can endures?
the spiny po
               cket puffer grenade
the oligarch, raping his maid
spread, like the kit
they call a test
that happens afterwards a fall
 LEAVES was written for and first performed at Evergreen, X Marks the Bökship, London on March 30th 2012, part of an evening of readings, performances and soup around the theme of leaves, curated by VerySmallKitchen for the London visit of Márton Koppány.

a joyful summit of old savages


There is a sense that poetry, or poets as a community (whatever that may mean), is unusually guilty of not appreciating those from previous generations who have the bad grace to remain alive beyond the first stay of their influence. Obscure in life is often followed by cult status in death, as though the poet’s inability to question interpretations of their work somehow qualifies such interpretations to take place. I would suggest this is hardly any more true of poetry than it is of almost everything in life – once gone, soon forgotten, until expiry somehow enshrines memory and allows an individual to focus comfortably on what is now static. Perhaps this is a beautiful thing – the maintenance of a resolute sense of change, with or without our permission. Poets however, do leave something which does not allow for such vagaries, and that is their poems, as concrete a record of their life as there is, which will often live long beyond them. But before that comes to pass, there is the opportunity some might view as a responsibility, for those who belong to a new generation of poetry, who are still being shaped, by their forebears as much as anything else, to reach out and connect with those who have come before, if not to learn from their practise and their experience, then just to sit back and watch how it is supposed to be done.

On Wednesday April 18th at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, London, a privileged few were on hand to witness a rare occurrence that contradicted the often maudlin passing of the older generation. Four great poets who came to prominence in the 1960’s and have all maintained a relentless, brilliant and imperative writing practise in the fifty years or so since, read together, in reunion, with great humour, dignity, intelligence and generosity. Their mastery of poetry and their affability of manner provided the many in attendance, poets and readers of poetry what alike, an example of what might be the fruit of a lifetime spent as a poet – honest to conviction, ever humble in the service of is new, and what is exciting, about writing and reading poetry.

Without cynicism or fatigue, all four poets displayed an authority and a contentedness that represented the ubiquitous and almost taken for granted width of their influence. Not a single member of the quartet began writing to show those in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s what was possible in poetry, what could be achieved, what could re-understood, re-heard, reborn, and yet all the more for their sense of it being just about the poetry itself, they have continued to impact those lucky enough to witness, read and follow their work.

As Anselm Hollo read William Carlos Williams, poems written just ten years before his birth, as Gunnar Harding recounted his time in the Swedish mounted cavalry, as Tom Raworth casually, and gently, evidenced again why he is the greatest living British poet, and as Andrei Codescu lamented the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in kind with the end of secrets in the modern age, one could not help but get a sense of the inability to perceive just what they had collectively achieved, across hundreds of collections, thousands of readings and more than a dozen nations.

If it was true, as was said and probably is the case, that these four men will never again share a stage, then all the more do we benefit from taking a moment in their collective presence to consider what it is all for – the practise of being a poet, reading poetry, attending readings, living with a pen in our hands. It is just about the poem, and being honest to that poem, amidst the same responsibility as everybody else, to be a decent person, one who will help those coming after them with a selflessness and a generosity that belies any notion of the poet as some pretentious conduit for some pseudo-muse in a lofty tower of god given talent. It is precisely this harmful notion that these four men have done so much to destroy, to prove that poetry comes from a lived life, from wide reading, from being a person as well, if not before, being a poet. And should any poets from my generation achieve half of what these four have in their lifetime, they will indeed be counted among the very few.

Electronic Voice Phenomena at Cafe Oto - May 31st

http://www.cafeoto.co.uk/electronic-voice-phenomena.shtm

SJ FOWLER & BEN MORRIS

Experimental poet and performer. Steven is arguably the most prolific and influential writer within contemporary avant garde poetics. He is a PhD student at the contemporary centre for poetic research at Birkbeck college, poetry editor of 3am Magazine and curator of the Maintenant performance series. Renowned in performance circles for the unparalleled vituosity and intensity of his readings, Steven is working with Ben Morris of experimental music act Chora, presenting a new work taking Jewish kabalah as its starting point for an exploration of linguistic violence and trace.

SJ Fowler and Ben Morris - A Spy Vanderung Inem Vildness from Mercy on Vimeo.

Leaves

David Berridge, http://verysmallkitchen.com/ another remarkable individual on the London poetry and art scene (for his activities as a organiser and art activist are as excellent as his own work and performances) was kind enough to invite me to cointribute to a night celebrating the work of Marton Koppany at the x marks the bokship http://bokship.org/ in Bethnal green. The theme of the evening was Leaves, and I was joined by Nick-e Melville, Claire Potter, Lisa Jeschke amongst others. I wrote 18 poems specifically for the event

Adventures in form



Exactly the kind of work that needs to be done is being done by Tom Chivers. Neither declarative nor factional, his work with Penned in the Margins has always struck me as thoroughly well considered and admirable. This anthology is an embodiment of that, a publication that genuinely adds to the litany of anthologies and offers the reader a remarkable width, depth and range of work. I was happy to have a poem included, and to read at the launch.


The poem i read was about Giorgio Petrosyan, probably my favourite kickboxer ever, if i had to choose one.



Calvert 22 with Offpress

The work of Marek Kazmierski and Offpress is the kind of work Id like to be doing with Maintenant, its genuinely valuable and completely relentless. He was kind enough to invite me to chat about translation, and to allow me to invite others to do the same as well, when an event was staged at the Calvert 22 gallery in Shoreditch for the end of an exhibition on translated Polish poetry, which is what Offpress does. It is remarkable how much more fun it is to read someone else's work, and I am slowly becoming more acclimatised to reading in a gallery space rather than a boardroom / pub. The night rather belonged to Tim Atkins in my opinion though.

Southbank

A few weeks ago the Maintenant reading series I curate debuted at the Southbank centre. Certainly in terms of venue and repute, it was a milestone for the series. If I'm honest I have never viewed my activities in organising poetry events through the lens of ambition, despite their frequency, I am always tinged with some reluctance around their doing, and as such I tend to just view each one as a separate entity. I have asked myself the question often enough of why I do organise events at all, and I think this sense of doubt is healthy. I am all but completely sure I do so for the right reasons now, to bring people together for enjoyable exchanges, to cultivate an atmosphere that I personally benefit from... None the less, I do believe once an event series stops running, it stops existing and if I were aiming to build a legacy or anything else, I would be a fool. This evening was an unusually intense one, with visa problems and last minute changes aplenty. None the less, it was considered a success and certainly it represented and width I always seek to advocate. Here is my intro to the night's proceedings.

Maintenant event videos / Equus press UK tour


Thanks to everyone who made our event last Saturday evening at the Rich mix, it was an excellent evening. Over 15 poets performed some remarkable sound poetry and sonic art, while over 70 poets provided original visual poetry for the free artfair. It was our best attended event ever and completes an especially busy month for Maintenant as we close in on the 100th edition of the interview series and an event at the Southbank centre among other things.


Taking place in just over one week's time, the remarkable Equus press, based in Prague, is commencing a UK tour that will take in two London dates, as well as two more in Manchester, with a night at the Rich mix arts centre, near Brick lane, on April Friday 13th, beginning at 7pm http://www.richmix.org.uk/. Authors Louis Armand and Thor Garcia will be launching their new novels, and this is a rare opportunity to see truly innovative and interesting contemporary English language European fiction read in London. See the poster attached and the website of the press - www.equuspress.com

Blue Touch Paper event on may 16th

Blue Touch Paper Preview Event
Wednesday 16 May, 7.30pm, Village Underground, London

The London Sinfonietta and Jerwood Charitable Foundation are delighted to present an event showcasing three works currently in development on the Blue Touch Paper programme.

Steve Potter and Kélina Gotman's music-theatre piece stages the urgency and ambivalence of dreaming other possible worlds. Philip Venables and Steven J Fowler explore boxing, a form of violence sanctioned by society, through the use of music and poetry. Meanwhile, Elspeth Brooke, Seonaid Goody and Anna G Jones use the arts of puppetry, live music and electronics to re-imagine the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter.

This exclusive preview event is not open to the public, however a limited number of tickets will be available to the London Sinfonietta Pioneers. Join today for your opportunity to attend. See making new music happen below for more details.

Maintenant #87 - Eugene Ostashevsky


An irrepressible poet and thinker, the work of Eugene Ostashevsky has been a dynamic presence in the New York poetry scene for some years. Born in Leningrad and emigrating while still a child, like so many who have left their homeland, alongside the ebullience and humour of his own poetry, Ostashevsky has been a tireless translator and advocate of Russian poetry, most specifically the OBERIU group, whose radical experimentation was led by the near mythological Daniil Kharms. Teaching at New York University, the energy and vibrancy, and intellectually buoyancy, of Ostashevsky places him as an invaluable link to both the Russian past, and future, in poetics. He reads in London for the first time on March 8th 2012 at Pushkin house, and celebrating that event we are pleased to welcome him as the 87th respondent of the Maintenant series.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-87-eugene-ostashevsky/

Accompanying the interview is an excerpt from the The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, a work-in-progress about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-pirate-who-does-not-know-the-value-of-pi/

As mentioned Eugene is reading for in London this upcoming Thursday, at Pushkin house. He will be speaking specifically about the OBERIU group and it should be a unique event, not to be missed. (Thanks to Alistair Noon)

http://www.pushkinhouse.org/en/events/the-oberiu

Chatting with Sam Riviere

Listen back to Austerities

Carmel Doohan, writing in Exeunt, gave our packed event Austerities a magnificent five stars:

“Sam Riviere is trying to find a way of being authentic about this inauthenticity. At Toynbee Studios, he recites a poem that reads like a shipping forecast of literary criticism. Comprised of a tutor’s one line comment on each poem – good, okay, we’ve heard this idea before, nice rhythm - it reveals the work lurking behind the myth of inspiration. Poetry is shown as calculated word-smithery; like everything else, poems are made to create a certain response.”

★★★★★ Exeunt Magazine

Listen back to Sam Riviere reading from 81 Austerities and in discussion with SJ Fowler.