Video of Emigrating Landscape panel talk on Migration

20 June / Polish eMigrants

Debate on contemporary Europeans, new ideas about borders and “Being Elsewhere – Migrating Stories” 

Maria Jastrzębska and Marek Kazmierski in dialogue with SJ Fowler
The event focused on Maria’s latest collection of poems At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013). It also featured the official launch of Marek’s new book Damn the Source (OFF_PRESS, 2013)
Link to video here

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Fjender

Without doubt one of the best events I've put on, the best of 2014 so far, Fjender at the Rich mix was an intense and across the board brilliant evening of contemporary European innovative poetry. I was continually blown away by the quality of the original work and the performances of the poets I'd asked to contribute and the atmosphere of the evening was really generous and open, as it always should be. It was an epic two hour, twenty poet + event. I was really gratified to show the visiting Danes, all of whom I've admired and whose work I have been trumpeting for years, the quality of the poetry scene in London. 
Cia Rinne & Chrissy Williams https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JwIWWX5ezk
Peter Jaeger & Martin Glaz Serup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osVyEpJ0jHI

 It was really a joy to read with Morten too, though difficult at times to maintain the prosaic difficulties of organising and introducing such a complex array of events along with reading, but once the event was in full flow it really felt like everyone was in on it together, and it was easy to relax into it. 
And those dozen who've been kind enough to attend my Maintenant course at the poetry school gave a really beautiful reading of an immense collaborative, constraint heavy text, which just added to my feeling that the synthesis of organising / reading / writing / teaching can be fluid and organic if attended to openly. 

Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq

Really happy to say for this year’s Niniti literature festival in Erbil, Kurdistan, I'll be reading, doing some workshops and some mutual translation projects with Iraqi poets over a week spent in Iraq, thanks to Reel Arts and the British Council. I'll be keeping a blog of my time there, to be found here of course, when I travel out there in mid April.http://www.reelfestivals.org/reel-arts-returns-to-erbil 

 What is perhaps more amazing than just the opportunity to go to one of the most rarely traveled countries in the world, all covered, to chat to poets and artists, for a week, is the fact that also heading out there are friends in Ryan Van Winkle, Nia Davies and Dan Gorman. Not only will I be immersed in an unforgettable experience of poetry and culture, but Ill be doing so with good peoples all round. Now I just have to find out if Erbil has a zoo..

Translation Games at the Poetry Library

From the moment I came into contact with Translation Games, through the unusually considered and energetic work of Ricarda Vidal and Jenny Chamarette, I knew it was the kind of project I wanted to be involved in. The kinship it has with what Im trying to do with the Enemies project goes beyond the similar contextual concerns into the very culture of the project, it's openness, it's direction, it's appreciation of complexity. translationgames.net
ALL IS CIRCULAR, LIKE THE SUN. AND ALL BURNS US, EVENTUALLY.
I came into Translation Games at the beginning of it's second phase, as Ricarda and Jenny were expanding the scope of the program and working towards an event, which happened just a few days ago, at the Poetry Library, as part of their special edition series. The process involved 3 artists translating a selection of concrete poems from Antonio Claudio Carvalho's amazing POW series, into their own mediums. They had just a week to do so, and the results were unveiled at the event, with a general presentation of the project and its aims, as I sat in the dark, at the back of audience, live translating the translations and the general goings on.
THE NEEDLE THAT BOWS THE MUSCLES BEFORE IT PIERCES.
There was a Q&A after the works were presented too, where I got to share the stage with Ricarda, and with two of the artists involved, the film maker Anna Cady and the artist Sam Treadaway. Both their work really was a joy to witness, and being so familiar with the POW series, I felt I had an inside track to the roots of their process. Anna's ethereal filmwork highlighted the potential of realising certain paradoxes about death and expiry which cannot be attained in formal language, and Sam's transforming of Simon Barraclough's sun poetry into scent was breathtaking. Sam handed tiny discs to the audience, which were miniaturised renditions of the poem and were infused with the scent of leather, oranges, cedarwood...it was remarkable. You can, and should, read more about it on the translation games website.
7 MINUTES OF LENGTH
IS LOOPED
CUT
LIKE FILM
So much came out of the discussion and the work, but perhaps pivotally for me, I was really forced to consider the lines between translating and collaborating, and how intention defines the difference between these ambiguous concepts when they are deployed as I deploy them, which is, hopefully, a test to traditional boundaries. The live writing was a pleasure, because the event was a pleasure, and I tried to inculcate a meta-dialogue (humorous, I hope) alongside actual expressionistic poetic response. The words, as I was spilling them out, appeared on a screen so the audience could read as the event unfolded. The entire live writing text has been published online and if you liked the excerpts here, you can read it allll http://translationgames.net/?page_id=295

Celebrating Bill Griffiths

Without doubt, Bill Griffiths is one of the most powerful, impactful and deeply underappreciated poets of the post war era in England. It was an honour to put together the reading that celebrated the second volume of his collected poems, edited by Alan Halsey and published by Reality street. The turnout was lovely, and the readings excellent, some coming from living legends of the avant garde, the friends and peers of Bill, like Alan, Geraldine Monk, Allen Fisher and Harry Gilonis. It's extremely important to me to try and connect the lineage of my writing, and the culture of 21st century British vanguard poetry, to those figures of the recent past and present who have already walked that path that I am somehow, often accidentally, blindly stumbling down. Clearly the prolific and dynamic use of language, and the subject led, innately innovative poetry that Bill Griffiths produced is something I am often aping, and hoping to come close to achieving. He died just before I came onto the scene, in fact the launch of the 1st volume of his collected poems was the first reading i attended in London. Read more 

a new review of Enemies by Sarah Gonnet

Nice to still be getting reviews for Enemies nearly six months after it came out, a testament to the book, or to the publisher perhaps. Either way, lovely to read this write up from Sarah Gonnet, she goes into a few areas others haven't, most specifically the humour of the book, as quoted below http://imaseriousjournalistyouknow.wordpress.com/2014/03/03/enemies-the-selected-collaborations-of-s-j-fowler/  
"Although it sounds like ‘Enemies’ is so overcrowded that it couldn’t possibly have any space left for a sense of humour; the collection is actually incredibly funny in parts. Overall it certainly empahsises an absurdist perspective on modern life and art. Questions and statements are often made and asked that unsettle the mind in a humorously absurdist way. For example: “Why should I be proud of reading many books from which I have derived little learning but much distress of mind?” and “It is a buffoon who calls Walt Whitman rubbish because he made some of it up”.
Many of the pieces have their own linguistic logic. Some also have blog-like spelling mistakes and some are delivered in a raw stream of coinciouness. These bouts of spontaneous expression can become uncensored rambling; but mostly they have a purpose. The pieces either highlight the degeneration of language due to technology, or examine abstract expression with words (as opposed to paint).
Several of my favourite lines from the collection are in the poem “1000 Proverbs” (written in collaboration with Tom Jenks). This list of nonsensical proverbs includes lines such as: “A cat in a warehouse is worth two in a call centre”; “We are all as individual as individual fruit pies” and “People who live with pandas should not build with bamboo.” As the collection draws to a close it begins to rely more and more on fast paced humour such as this."

Ahsan Akbar talks 21st century British poetry in the Dhaka tribune

I had to pleasure or corresponding with Ahsan Akbar recently over an article he was penning for the Dhaka Tribune about contemporary British poetry and the trends, or lack of, that define this moment in poetry when Im about and abounding. It's a really fine article, and Ahsan was kind enough to use a little fragment of my Recipes book taken from the Dear world anthology edited by Nathan Hamilton. 

In the collection, the poets who rang my bell were SJ Fowler, Rachael Allen, Sandeep Parmar, Sam Riviere and Joe Crot. From Fowler’s ‘Recipes,’ we get lines that take you far from gastronomy, such as
(from a recipe for Caeser Salad)
a weak wrist, nobel peace prize for two Liberian women
a suckling fix, cutting it out of the stomach to determine its gender
a limp salad marriage;
You can read the article here http://dhakatribune.com/arts-amp-culture/2014/mar/02/letter-london & the whole issue http://www.dhakatribune.com/sites/default/files/issue/2014/03/Arts_&_Letters_2_3.pdf.pdf

Performing the Whale Hunt: Viking poems for Annexe magazine launch

This was such a joy to do. Not only because it was with Nick Murray's amazing Annexe press that I was launching out a new booklet, nor because it was beside Tom Chivers, my friend, whose work I get to see live far far too infrequently. But because I got to show slow motion footage of killer whale revenge, while playing norse drone music, while hand painting runes onto wall mounted poems that I was reading from, occasionally spitting into the paint palette to keep it wet and punching the wall or stomping the wall when it was called for.
The pamphlet Nick has produced, the 2nd of my vikings series, it a beautiful thing, Im very proud of it and to be in the Annexe family. Tom's reading was far better than mine, it was actually brilliant, blending music with a slide show of his residency in Hull, tracing the flots of a river. He had a wonderful cadence and direction to his reading, one of the best Ive seen him do. My performance I don't know how it went. Maybe I was just laying performativity on top of a reading to avoid being boring. Does all of it work? I don't know. I committed to the idea and people seemed to value it, but they could have been lying. All good, there is something there, something authentic beneath the puff.


Less Than Three poetry reading- March 18th

Very pleased to be introducing this event, to be involved at all, on March 18th. It's an admirable beginning for a new reading series which has it's roots in a collaborative venture between many worthy endeavours / poets. 3AM press is the really admirable publishing foray that has shot out of the magazine whose poetry I am happy to wrangle, pioneered by Christiana Spens, a great novelist in her own right, and Susan Tomaselli, who is responsible for Gorse amongst other things. The Quietus, hugely established in terms of musicology, has shot out into contemporary poetry under Karl Thomas Smith, with a gentle crush, kindly publishing some of my work recently. And Alex MacDonald and Francine Elena are both poets peers whose work I actively follow and have had the pleasure of hosting at events and in 3am magazine past and present. Both extraordinary nice people too. Which does make a difference in the world. Come along, it's 2 quid.

Hidden Door Camarade in Edinburgh

Last year I had the chance to curate travelling Camarade events in Bristol and Manchester, at the Arnolfini and the Cornerhouse, and it was apparent of all the poetry event formats I've tried, this is the one that seems to work almost anywhere. The normal structure is 12 to 20 poets, in pairs, writing original works of around 5 to 10 minutes. Well now, this year, I have the chance to put a Camarade on in Edinburgh, my favourite city outside of London in the UK. There are so many amazing poets in Edinburgh, genuinely original and innovative in their stance, and welcoming too, I had such a good time doing Caesura last year. Moreover, Ryan Van Winkle, Colin Herd, nick-e melville, Ross Sutherland, Billy Letford and I got funding from Creative Scotland this year to do the Auld Enemies tour, which is a like a mini rolling tour camarade, so all these things have flowed together.

http://hiddendoorblog.org/2014/02/24/s-j-fowler/ The Hidden Door festival will host the event, on March 29th, and their program is a really exciting and ambitious list of art installations in the unused vaults of Edinburgh town centre, alongside music and performance. And us. Here is the final list of the 18 poets Ive roped in to do the Hidden Door:

Ross Sutherland & nick-e melville
Samantha Walton & Jow Lindsay
Daisy Grove Lafarge & Anne Laure Coxam
Kirsten MacGillivray & JL Williams
Tom Jenks & SJ Fowler
Lila Matsumoto & Greg Thomas
Ryan Van Winkle & Sarah Kelly
Colin Herd & Iain Morrison
Graeme Smith & Anthony Autumn

& here, a sneak peek from Colin & Iain, setting the tone heavy hard to follow

Archive interview at British Library / Seminar interview at St Martins college

Two ephemeral and pleasurable things I've done in the last week, intertwined with two powerful powerful friends / peers. First I stopped off at the British library to speak at length with Hannah Silva, who is working with the BL archives to conduct research into performance in 21st British poetry and other such things. Though it's uncomfortable at times, putting into words my own approaches to work, so much of which is deliberately kept expressionistic and instinctual, for lack of time, and for a desire to keep rooting things in their experience of being made, rather than their result (believing the latter will emerge from the former, if done right, without too much of a heavy editorial hand), the process is undoubtedly good for me. If only to realise where I am heading, and why that is happening. We also chatted more widely about performance poetry, and my dislike of it. Hannah is such a remarkable performer, and she has such possession of her ideas, it makes working with her in any capacity a beneficial experience. The interview will be in the library's records until the end of the world apparently.

 Then later in the week I was part of a seminar series for undegrads at St Martins, taught by Diane Silverthorne, whose amazing work Ive got to know over the last few years and who has become a friend and great influence on my reading and dwarfish erudition. We chatted through my root into poetry, and then art performance in front of around 40 students, most of whom were impeccably dressed (St Martins is like a fashion show, so beyond being a trendy enclave, its become something bizarrely retrograde in its futurism. It is often like walking through a successful genetic experiment, some benign social engineering program, where only beautiful and attractive young beings mope about concrete stairwells) and possibly interested, though it was hard to tell until I spoke to them. I talked about audience participation, nearly forced them to participate, then showed some vids of my boxing performances. It was again a funny experience, one where I learned something by being forced to waffle about what I do and am trying to do. The people were lovely, very gentle with me. And it always feels a privilege to be inside an institution like this, if only for a day, to watch multitudes try and inculcate creativity. It also doesn't hurt to realise how old I have become.

Fjender

I'm very proud to announce Fjender: a Danish Enemies project. Taking place over an entire month, Fjender will feature 3 events, 1 exhibition and over 30 poets. At the heart of Fjender is the visit to London of 3 of Europe's most brilliant innovative poets; Morten Søndergaard, Cia Rinne & Martin Glaz Serup. I’ve been trying to get them to the UK for sometime, and thanks to the Kulturstyrelsen (the Danish Agency for Culture), they are coming, for Fjender, to share their work.

Fjender - March Saturday 15th at the Rich Mix Arts Centre
Venue 2 – 7pm doors – free entry
http://www.richmix.org.uk/whats-on/event/fjender-the-enemies-project-danish-poetry

The flagship event of the Fjender project, featuring new collaborations from Martin Glaz Serup & Peter Jaeger, Cia Rinne & Chrissy Williams and Morten Søndergaard & I. The Danes will also share their own work, and there will be a series of brand new commissions from UK based poets, in response to the concepts and themes of Morten’s amazing http://www.wordpharmacy.com

New work by James Davies, Prudence Chamberlain, Philip Terry, Claire Trevien, Fabian MacPherson and Stephen Emmerson, who will present his Neurolinguasulphate.

This packed evening of avant garde poetry will also feature a collaborative group reading from 13 students from my Poetry School course Maintenant. http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/maintenant.php

Wordpharmacy at the Hardy Tree gallery
March 15th -31st www.wordpharmacy.com / www.hardytreegallery.com

For the first time ever in London, the remarkable Wordpharmacy will be exhibited for the Fjender project. The Hardy Tree gallery will be turned into a fully functioning poetic chemist’s, a pharmacy for the avant garde poet, replete with stocked shelves, white-coated pharmacist and a near endless supply of word-drugs. Situated just behind Kings Cross St Pancras, the exhibition will look something like this ...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE1rBI06szI

Wordpharmacy reading / special view
March Thursday 20th, 7.30pm, at the Hardy Tree gallery. Free entry

To celebrate the Wordpharmacy exhibition a half dozen British based poets have been commissioned to write, or conceive of, original works that respond to the ideas and concepts of the project. On this evening brand new work from Alison Gibb, David Berridge, Claire Trevien, Andy Spragg, Prudence Chamberlain, Fabian MacPherson & of course, Morten Søndergaard himself will be shared.

Fjender in Copenhagen
April 7th at Ark books. 7.30pm. Free entry.  http://www.arkbooks.dk/

Sharing the work of Peter Jaeger and I, as well as the original collaborations between myself and Morten Søndergaard, and Peter Jaeger and Martin Glaz Serup, a reading will take place in the Danish capital, featuring local poets and accompanied by a short run exhibition of the Enemies project. More TBA. Made possible by Arts Council England International Development fund.

I’m very excited to present this month of events, and for more information on the poets, you can read my Maintenant interviews with Cia, Morten and Martin here: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-52-cia-rinne/
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-48-morten-s%C3%B8ndergaard/
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-30-martin-glaz-serup/

or visit these web pages http://mortensondergaard.net / http://www.lesfigues.com/author/martin-glaz-serup/ / http://www.afsnitp.dk/galleri/archiveszaroum/

Without the support of the Royal Danish Embassy in London, Fjender wouldn’t exist, so special thanks to Kirsten Hansen, and thanks too to the generosity of Kulturstyrelsen (the Danish Agency for Culture) as well Arts Council England, the Rich mix and the Hardy tree gallery.

"The bleached is not a white" a poem in Well Versed: poetry in the Morning Star

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-c7e1-SJ-Fowler-The-bleached-is-not-a-white#.Uwfjo-N_ua9 Very proud to have a work published in the 80 year old socialist paper that has a wonderful history supporting left wing politics and trade unions. Well versed, the poetry section of the paper is edited by Jody Porter, who I believe inherited the mantle from the great John Rety. You can read about the paper here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Star_(British_newspaper)
The bleached is not a white
for Robert Hitzeman
SJ Fowler

the bleached is not a white whale while I remember
it is more of a yellow, a security tag for the lion gates
as it perishes it’s heart bursting in attack, the salt
water damming its arteries, the whale turns eyes down

 I've been reading about the great archival work the folk musician and folklorist AL Lloyd recently, and I remembered reading somewhere he was a pivotal part of the Morning Star. I asked Jody this and she managed to dig up this fascinating biography for me http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=355:a-l-bert-lloyd-&catid=12:l&Itemid=113