Kiwi avant gardist Iain Britton in the UK

Im really happy to say that the wonderful, groundbreaking Kiwi poet Iain Britton, whom Ive had the honour of publishing at 3am, and whose works have graced many of the avant garde presses that have also featured my own, is giving a long overdue reading in London next month. It takes place at Birkbeck college, details here http://www.nzstudies.com/event/poetry-reading-iain-britton-friday-14-march-2014/ He will also read 5 days before at the Albion beatnik in Oxford, with the excellent Nikolai Duffy. Really worth taking the time to see someone doing the important work on the other side of the world, a brother to our endeavours. 
  • The Albion Beatnik Bookstore, 34 Walton St, Oxford, OX2 6AA. Sunday 9 March, 5 PM. With Nikolai Duffy.
  • Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, room MAL 151. Main building, entrance from Torrington Square. 14th March, 6 PM. Poster here.

Maintenant #98 - Volodymyr Bilyk - poetry from the heart of the Maidan & a new Ukraine

At the heart of a new Ukraine, as poetically as politically, the work of Volodymyr Bilyk, and it’s worldwide repute, as is tied to the new possibilities of technology in the 21st century as it is the quality and innovation that defines it. Bilyk is the new face of a nation whose poetic history is as often entrenched as its political, and his groundbreaking visual, minimalist, conceptual, sound and artpoetry has been published across the globe, due in no small part to his willingness to embed himself within internet culture and its potentialities. Moreover, his immediacy as a poet, as evident in his poetics as in his colloquially eloquent, unpretentious mode and manner, reveals itself as the expression of an individual willing to commit utterly to the ideal of democratic freedom in his homeland. This interview is conducted during the unyielding protests, and the resultant government violence and oppression, wracking the Ukraine in late 2013 / early 2014, of which Volodymyr Bilyk, the 98th respondent of the Maintenant series, is a central and formidable part.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-98-volodymyr-bilyk
“Q - As we finish this interview, on February 19th 2014, Europe awakes to the news that yesterday was the bloodiest day in the battle for Ukraine’s democratic future, with 26 dead by latest news estimates. There is the sense now that these protests, lasting months already will not just fizzle out and be swept away, like so many others have in Western Europe and America over the last few years. What is the feeling in Kyiv towards this and the immediate future?
A - I can describe it as “We shall overcome!” and “No pasaran!”. It is “the end of something” and “It's the beginning of a new age”....
At the foot of the interview there are multiple links to Volodymyr’s work online, I recommend you check it out, including this, previously published on 3am magazine http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/volodymyr-bilyk & here is a link to one of Volodymyr’s recent statements on the Maidan protests http://blutkitt.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/volodymyr-bilyk-statement-collaborations.html
& here, published almost exactly 3 years ago, my Maintenant interview, number #53, with another powerful Ukrainian poet, offering his own voice of resistance to the current protests, Yuri Andrukhovych http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-53-yuri-andrukhovych
I would recommend reading Yuri’s recent piece for the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/opinion/love-and-hatred-in-kiev.html?_r=0

Wrogowie: Polish Enemies

"It had all the marks of a successful literary event: originality, variety, contrasts, even controversies..." So said one of the fine Polish poets who graced the rich mix with his poetry this saturday passed. I wasn't there for the last part, but the rest, I witnessed, and happily, considering it was lashing down outside, and in filthy weather, the event all the more of a success as an incubator for good will and really considered collaborations. I don't want to write too much about it, but the legacy of Polish poetry in the 20th is so immense, with such validated gravitas, that often working with the poets of the country brings out the worst in the formal (powerful) v. avant garde (flippant) myth. This wasnt the case saturday, these divisions didnt seem obvious, or present, or necessary, and so I judge the proceedings to be a success. My work with Piotr too was a great pleasure to write and to read. He is a really gentle soul, an erudite man, seemingly as emotionally wise as he is in his writing. Such a benefit to me to create this exchange with him, lifted from found texts in philosophy as well as new writing, all about the lost margins of our possible perception of death and transition. Suitably cheery. 
Amy Cutler & Ula Chowaniec http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6LdC442EKk
Angus Sinclair & Laura Elliott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrH3G34BQ_M
Francesca Listette & Joanna Rzadowska http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZukpdL6Cxk0
Philip Terry & Adam Zdrodowski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHzymaGAgPQ
Marcus Slease & Grzegorz Wroblewski http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yuRzUnOYXk

Poet as a Boxer - my reading & talk

The worst possible conditions to hold a poetry event might be during a city wide tube strike and a torrential rainpour. The poet as a boxer event was sold out weeks in advance, 100 plus people, and then disaster struck. But it really didn't matter in the end, such was the positivity of those who did come, the commitment they showed to the idea and the concept really shone through. I had some of the most gratifying conversations afterward that Id ever had following a reading, actually made friends with people, connections that will last I think. Its because those who came seemed to inhabit the same space as I do, they are not academics, not journalists, not boxers, and yet they really think on the sport, and are in love with it. They are afficionados, but not the boxing sweats, not the old school, but perhaps a wee bit more reflexive and interrogative about the sport. Anyway, I had a wonderful time after initial worries, and Gabriele Tinti, who curated the event, was brilliant, sharing his work (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OkbNh-Agdw), and the work of others, and the dramatic readings of his poems with leading actors from America (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_dNumsOkhs). I spoke briefly about my concerns with boxing and then read from my book fights, video below:

Launching "Vikings: the Whale Hunt" a new publication with Annexe

Really pleased to be publishing some new work, a lovely illustrated pamphlet, another in my Vikings series (which will continue to be released segment by section) with the amazing Annexe and its fine editor Nick Murray. I really respect the energy, the quality and the breadth of the work Annexe puts out, and really happy to be under its umbrella. More so that the publication will be launched alongside a new work by Tom Chivers, a close friend and a really good poet. www.annexemagazine.com
The first Annexe event of the year is an exciting one as we launch new pamphlets from two exceptional writers. 

Tom Chivers & SJ Fowler - Double Launch - Candid Arts Trust 
Wednesday 26th February - 7pm (reading commencing at 7.30) = FREE
_
Whale Hunt  - SJ Fowler 

"Time began with a bear then it became a Viking

family tree over grandfather to all of us (that matter)
the polite, the gentle born of the power to display force
but choosing not to do so in company resounds its glow"

Poet and vangardist, SJ Fowler, strives to encounter and confront all disciplines in the poetic tradition. His latest work starts from a root of Norse mythology and carves a path through contemporary poetics and language construction. 

Whale Hunt, part of the Introducing series, is a curated section of Fowler's Vikings work and is published as an illustrated pamphlet.

Mount London & Penned in the Margins in 2014

http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/
2014/02/announcing-the-springsummer-2014-programme/ Very excited to be part of the 2014 Penned in the Margins program through an exciting anthology of new writing, a collection exploring the experimental essay form, about the hills of London. From Tom Chivers "Our publishing programme kicks off in May with Mount London, an anthology of essays that collectively attempts to ascend an imaginary mountain above the streets of the capital." My contribution is about Hampstead Heath and is a long awaited chance for me to further explore the ideas of consciousness and exhaustion in the written word. It's really about hill sprints, and the physiological meeting the phenomenological, and about conditioning, rather than exercise, as a lifestyle. Or something like that that isn't that. More to come on this project, and I sincerely recommend you get a copy of the Penned program to see the other great stuff they are producing with Caroline Bergvall, Chris McCabe and many brilliant others.

Vikings are here! POW published my poetry poster art

One of the publications I am most proud of, without a doubt. Finally Ive managed to produce something, outside of collaboration, which is as satisfying visually as it is textually, to me at least. These are six poems rendered in the shape of the first six magical letters of the Elder runic alphabet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark The Futhark, left behind by the norsemen as a incantational representation of something I am bonded to, as an urge, but am happy to misunderstand and rerender as a plate for my own warping language. This is but the first of many interactions my poetry will have with Vikings in the next few years, a subject in my blood, and the first poetry I was exposed to by my dad, the Sagas. 

 "The invention of the script has been ascribed to a single person[9] or a group of people who had come into contact with Roman culture, maybe as mercenaries in the Roman army, or as merchants. The script was clearly designed for epigraphic purposes, but opinions differ in stressing either magical, practical or simply playful (graffiti) aspects. Bæksted 1952, p. 134 concludes that in its earliest stage, the runic script was an "artificial, playful, not really needed imitation of the Roman script", much like the Germanic bracteates were directly influenced by Roman currency, a view that is accepted by Odenstedt 1990, p. 171 in the light of the very primitive nature of the earliest (2nd to 4th century) inscription corpus."

 All the better that this work should be with Antonio Claudio Carvalho's remarkable POW series. These are poetry poster artworks, far too underappreciated, emanating out of Brazil via Edinburgh, and taking in 26 authors in their finality, now, with my Vikings being the 25th, and Hansjorg Mayer the 26th! Incredible, and with Chris McCabe, Peter Finch, Augusto de Campos and so many great others coming before, I am privileged to be in such company. I owe Antonio such a debt for the commission, it really challenged me to grow as a poet who is also an artist in aspiration. Thanks too to Anatol Knotek, ever aiding in my technical ambitions. 
So exciting these posters will be launched and available soon, and part of the upcoming Translation Games project, with the special edition poetry library event on march 5th. Check out Ricarda Vidal's great post on the series, with more examples, here http://ricardavidal.com/test/translation-games/pow/

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

Philip Terry & Tom Jenks on otoliths

Proper pure Enemies! http://the-otolith.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/philip-terry-and-tom-jenks.html

Footprints
     For J. H. Prynne, in The Pyrenees

1. 
Days are a proposition laid by desolate gorges, the body a repulsive looking landlord. Into muscle blood-red capas. The dark clouds and chasms, ancient summit Alps; valleys of a richer southern sunlight. Smell of a Frenchman and orange-peel saturated within the first three-fifths, muted interchange in the iridescence of the descriptions of energy. The usual perfunctory fasces at the scanty distant mountains. Memories of the lonely roads walk by a doughty Colonel. Open terrace twice girdled in soft banditti. Nothing which the Pyrenees, a skyline untrodden by Americans. In our City of the Great Czar chemistry is livid heat reduced to coigns of vantage. Bid on a Biscayan beach, her sweet making ready. Condition of bright awnings, the palest green verandas. Single spark of its sober, unornamental, business government. 

talking boxing on BBC radio 3 free thinking program

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03t0d93 Im in after about 32 minutes. Not much on there, but pha.

Boxing in Art

The Grudge Match
Boxer Handsome by Anna Whitwham is available in hardback and e-book now.

S J Fowler will be reading some of his poetry at The Poet is a Boxerat the Poetry Library in the Southbank Centre, on Wednesday 5 February.

The Grudge Match (pictured) is in cinemas nationwide now, certificate 12A.

Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth show will be at dates across the UK in March. 

the Launch of Bill Griffiths collected poems 2 at Goodenough college

Announcing launch of Bill Griffiths' Collected Poems  (Vol 2)
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Launch of Bill Griffiths Collected Poems Vol 2


Reality Street published Bill Griffiths’ Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80) in 2010. Extending the account through the following decade, a new volume, Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91), once again edited by Alan Halsey, collects poems and sequences from a prolific period in Bill's life that originally appeared in very small editions. The 426-page volume, publication of which was enabled by subscriptions from 120 supporters, also includes a section of uncollected or previously unpublished poems. The editor provides bibliographical and textual notes.
The book will be launched on Saturday 1st March at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N 2AB. Selections from Bill's work will be read by poets Ken Edwards, Allen Fisher, Harry Gilonis, Alan Halsey, Mendoza, Geraldine Monk and Robert Sheppard. Copies of both Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91) and Collected Earlier Poems (1966-80) will be on sale at a reduced price. The event starts at 7.00pm, readings at 7.30.

If you would like to come to the launch please reply to this message or email info@realitystreet.co.uk. The event is free, but you need to book your place in advance.

If you would like to review the new book, please use the same email address to request a review copy, or call 01424 431271.

For fuller information about the book, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Thanks are due to Steven Fowler and the Enemies project for supporting the launch.

Collected Poems & Sequences (1981-91)
2014, 978-1-874400-65-3,  426pp, price £19 £15 at launch

 

Bill Griffiths
Bill Griffiths was a poet, Anglo-Saxon scholar, book designer, small press publisher, biker, pianist, archivist and social historian. 

His poetry came to prominence in the early 1970s, when he was associated with the small press poetry movement in London.

Later in his career he moved from London to North East England where he reinvigorated the study of the region’s dialect. He died in 2007 at the age of 59.

photo: Robert Cassel

landscape architecture residency is going to be amazing

http://www.jlg-london.com/ So proud my residency at the continually inspiring J&L Gibbons landscape archiectects is really growing and taking shape. The work they are doing, and are about to do, is as cutting edge and important and dynamic as I couldve imagined, and Im really privileged to be involved. Do check out their website. 
"Welcome to a group of inspired, energetic and committed landscape architects. For over twenty five years, we have been working with local authorities, developers and community groups to vision and realise beautifully designed “green infrastructure”. We’d like to introduce you to some of our award winning work, and announce that throughout 2014 we will be collaborating with Steven J Fowler, poet in residence at J & L Gibbons."

Wrogowie - Feb sat 8th at the Rich Mix, London

Wrogowie: February Sat 8th at the Rich Mix Arts Centre:
7pm doors. Free entry.
Marcus Slease & Grzegorz Wróblewski
Joanna Rzadowska & Francesca Lisette
Ula Chowaniec & Amy Cutler
Piotr Gwiazda & SJ Fowler
Adam Zdrodowski & Philip Terry
+ Laura Elliott & Angus Sinclair

This saturday evening, the Enemies project presents Wrogowie: 5 pairs of poets from Poland & the UK premiering original collaborations, and beginning a year long engagement between contemporary Polish poets & their British peers in collaboration & translation. Featuring Polish poets travelling from America, Denmark and of course, Poland, this should be an exciting beginning to our focus on European poetry during the second year of Enemies. Wrogowie is co-curated by Marcus Slease and generously supported by the Polish Cultural Institute http://www.polishculture.org.uk/ & UCL SSEES http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees

& on the afternoon preceding, Friday Feb 7th at 5pm, another extraordinary event will take place to celebrate Wrogowie as part of the Emigrating Landscape program, curated by Ula Chowaniec. http://emigratinglandscapes.org/events/grzegorz_wroblewski
The event will feature a poetry reading and discussion with Grzegorz Wróblewski, about Kopenhaga, the first comprehensive collection of prose poetry by Grzegorz, one of Poland’s leading contemporary avant garde writers, and his translators, Piotr Gwiazda and Adam Zdrodowski, in the 4th floor Masaryk Senior Common Room, UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW. Not to be missed.

Володимир Білик (Volodymyr Bilyk) - a statement & collaborations

Very proud to call Volodymyr Bilyk a collaborator. Undoubtedly a pioneer in avant garde Ukrainian poetry, one of the finest visual and minimalist poets working in the world right now, I published some of his work on 3am, www.3ammagazine.com/3am/volodymyr-bilyk and since then we've been exchanging collaborative works, lo-fi jpeg poems. I've included two of our exchanges below. Recently, in the midst of the injustice violently overtaking the Ukraine, which he and his people refuse to stand for, he released this statement, recently translated into English. 
"At the present moment our language is on the long and winding road to simplification, abbreviation and restriction of itself. Language itself is turning away from expressing the things to bare notification of the objects. Instead of sense-concentration we got informal hollow. We got everything but the essence. Ain't that a shame? Not exactly, but you can hear Screaming Trees for Vengeance and the horde of the blots giving birth to the blobs.

Short and simple messages are not bad at all. It can be understood in the matter of seconds and almost without an effort. But it works only in terms of communication. When you're exploring something - there's no way to be short and simple - you have to exhaust the thing.

But what's wrong with expression today? Nothing, it's ok. Nobody believes it. It's too dangerous and unpredictable. It can be provoked but can't be fully controlled. And we're making safe and stable unnatural world where any stroke of nature is marginalized for its own good - mostly as a possible threat. But we have to realize that the only thing left for us in this Brave New World - is swinging the chain. I don't think we have to agree with that.

Conceptual writing and concrete poetry can bring some fun. But are we here to have some fun for ourselves or are we here to bring some horror to the eyes and ears and hearts of the beholders? Matter of choice, question of time. Let's quote Mr.Pop and The Stooges - "No Fun" and let us quote Mr.Lydon and Sex Pistols - "No Future".  Or let us use other quotes from them - "We Will Fall" and "We don't care". And don't forget to sing-along "Ball of confusion - that's what the world of today!". 

Simonides of Ceos once said "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." - so we're up to let the beast out of the cage and to keep the nerve. We must remember that "Music helps to ease the pain" - to quote Mr.Waters and Pink Floyd. We must remember that "Anger is Holy". If not - we're lost.

Key to joy is disobedience. So why do we disobey all those common rules and guidelines? In order to be seen and read and heard? But why we fill it with greed and cowardice and shame? Is that what we're fighting for with all these orthodoxes and new-born-again conservatives? Or fight because we want to make difference? 
Power to Imagination."

Gorse issue #1 arrives


This is an extraordinary journal, the production value is breathtaking, removing it from the package it really strikes one as a wholly considered and serious arrival on the avant garde literature scene. It has the feel of something that might be remembered as a moment. Great credit goes to Susan Tomaselli and the team in Dublin, the contributors are all remarkable, but especially nice to be the only poetry in the magazine alongside Colin Herd. 

TŘYIE

Olga Peková - Zuzana Husárová - SJ Bearface
Very happy to announce the formation of the TŘYIE collective, an enterprise of electronic / performative / avant garde poetry across Europe, a stretch from London to Prague to Bratislava. It's an opportunity to root myself in a wholly new aesthetic, both formally, because of the expertise of Zuzana and Olga, and the brilliance of their practise, but also aesthetically - the dynamic of gender, of language, of approach in general should completely revitalise much of what I fall back upon when performing, which is endemically masculine I suppose. There should be a measure of trickiness, of wryness that comes through, and if anyone has watched the performances of Zuzana and Olga, then their ability to drag from the past the best of European avant garde history while being wholly considered in the most contemporary of ways, is the quality that is unmissable, and that I hope to leach from. Our performances this year, probably:

Prague Microfest on May 13th - London, Rich mix theatre October - Bratislava, Ars Poetics October

some brilliant new poets up on 3am magazine