A lovely legacy of the South West Poetry Tour this past summer the excellent Clearing magazine are putting out a series of the new works the tour instigated. My contribution is my work with the brilliant John Hall. An honour to be alongside him in e-print. The work is entitled The 7th Poet.
A note on: A performance for Jerome Rothenberg
What an immense pleasure this was. To have the chance to celebrate Jerome Rothenberg, his influence on me, and on so many people, it was a beautiful night all told.
The event was held at Birkbeck College, London, hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc) on October 17th 2016. Organised by the centre's director, Dr. Steve Willey.
For my performance I carefully selected poems taken from Rothenberg's 1974 collection Poland/1931 and 1978 collection Seneca Journal and after much deliberation, I interspersed them with my own poems that responded / related to these works as influences. In the live performance, the poems were glued to paper to form two long poems, and then illustrated. Then for the last few minutes, wonderfully, Jerome joined me in the painting.
I had the pleasure to then spend a day with Jerome and his wife Diane in London and really feel inspired and humbled by their extraordinary lifetime of travelling, writing and following a path any of us would be lucky to follow.
A note on: The Robin Hood Estate, a poem in POETRY
The magazine needs little introduction, POETRY has been publishing for over one hundred years, inarguably the most coveted place to publish a poem in the English language. Pretty lovely to have my first poem with them published in the October 2016 edition of the magazine, in print and online. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/90671
The Robin Hood Estate is taken from my series The Estates which explores the ambiguous connection between the utopian projects of post-war British architecture and its turn, more recently, into demolition, after what is generally seen as a failed social experiment. As is often the case, with these poems, I'm trying to tie this concern into the material and history of the English language itself, and it's connection to wider trends in British history, like the Empire and its death.
A lovely thing to be in the magazine with relatively complex work (though as ever I think it's playful and easy to read) do visit and follow POETRY magazine if you're not already. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sj-fowler
A note on: performing with Phil Minton
An amazing privilege to perform an improvised sound poetry piece with the legendary Phil Minton on October Friday 7th 2016 at Kings Place, London.
For over fifty years Phil Minton has been performing, singing, vocalising around the world. He absolutely has shaped, even defined, free vocalisation and improvised sound poetry since WWII. To get to work with him for the first time, with no prior preparation, no conversation about what we'd do before the performance even, was such an honour, and beautiful / terrifying in equal measure. So important for me to feel I'm crossing over with the greats of previous generations. This was a real landmark for me. There's more pictures like this beautiful pair below by Ed Prosser on www.stevenjfowler.com/soundings
A great night overall too, closing out the Hubbub residency in a sense, with some fine work from James Wilkes, Emma Bennett, Phaedra ensemble and others making it a varied and intense evening of performance.
A note on: Dhaka Lit Fest
It's an amazing privilege to be attending the Dhaka Lit Fest this year in Bangladesh. I'm so excited to discover the Bangladeshi authors present and to enjoy the hospitality of the organisers, who are a remarkable group of people. http://dhakalitfest.com/
Here you can find an article from the directors discussing why the festival is so important http://www.dhakatribune.com/magazine/2016/10/15/dhaka-lit-fest-2016-note-directors/ "At the same time, we are also very grateful to Bangladeshi writers, publishers, activists who fight daily, at times with grave risk, to keep open the space for free thought and discourse. We also thank the authorities who provide the high degree of security that has now become de rigueur for events of its kind. DLF is the upshot of many souls from home and abroad, who come together only for three days, but thanks to months of preparation. As always, we embrace diversity and pluralism, actively engaging in other cultures and literatures, as well as celebrating our own."
A full list of authors, including VS Naipaul, can be found here http://www.dhakatribune.com/magazine/arts-letters/2016/10/15/a-glimpse-at-the-authors-appearing-in-dlf-2016/
A note on: The Long White Thread - poems for John Berger
Delighted to have a new poem, dedicated to the man himself, in this new anthology released for John Berger's 90th birthday by Smokestack Books. http://smokestack-books.co.uk/book.php?book=124
"Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic – John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time. Since the 1950s he has been challenging the way we see the world and how we think about it in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag, A Seventh Man, Pages of the Wound and From A to X. In 1972 he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize for his novel G. In 2009 he was awarded the Golden PEN award by London PEN for a lifetime’s contribution to literature. His Collected Poems was published in 2014. The Long White Thread of Words is a celebration of John Berger’s ninetieth birthday by poets from all over the world. Edited by Amarjit Chandan, Gareth Evans and Yasmin Gunarat nam, it features poets from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cuba, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Italy, Kenya, Macedonia, Nigeria, Palestine, Spain, Turkey, the USA and the UK"
The bear stands upon its hind legs - SJ Fowler
Metaphor is needed. Metaphor is temporary. It does not replace theory.
John Berger A Seventh Man
Doubt is the product of a book.
At this point in the film, not believing he’d done it, the interviewer asks the executive whether the project will harm people? Everything in the wrong dose will harm people is the reply....
A note on: Kakania in Berlin at Lettretage
A brilliant night of performances from contemporary European poets and artists, radically recreating and responding to figure of Habsburg Vienna, around one century past, at Lettretage in Berlin, supported by the brilliant Osterreiches Kulturforum http://www.theenemiesproject.com/kakaniaberlin
I had a blast putting this one together, it ended up being so easy to work with everyone from start to finish and the event was welcoming and dynamic in good measure. The performances ranged from playful poetic texts to tech savvy sound performances, and some conceptual performance too. I admire the work, and the generous personalities, of Lea Schneider, Rike Scheffler, Kinga Toth, Norbert Lange and Fabian Faltin, and they made it something special.
A note on: Rest and Its Discontents exhibition at the Mile End Arts Pavilion
A beautiful job has been done, the exhibition runs until October 31st and is really well worth a visit. Some wonderful and works and installations by some brilliant artists and thinkers. http://hubbubresearch.org/event/rest-discontents/
DATE & TIME 30 September – 30 October 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
VENUE: The Mile End Art Pavilion Mile End Park, Clinton Road London, E3 4QY United Kingdom
A note on: Lunalia: a lunar sound project with Maja Jantar
One of the most comprehensive sound collaborations I've ever undertaken. One month of recordings, an entire lunar cycle, Maja Jantar and I exchanged sonic responses to the moon over the summer, including poem, songs, found recordings, mixed for publication. I was the 11th collaborator in Maja’s remarkable series. This was a brilliant, often intense process, another lovely moment in a series of works I’ve had the pleasure to collaborate on with Maja. And as before, I learned an extraordinary amount working with her, with her in my mind as I tried to keep up to the daily recording schedule. I’m proud of the result, it’s extensive, a real record of a time in my life.
All 30 files with adjoining blogs are available http://www.stevenjfowler.com/lunalia
Week One
August 18th: Worm-moon Wormwood Scrubs is a place most in London would associate with its adjacent prison. Outside of London it’s hardly known. It’s where I go to exercise, often at night, especially in the summer. It’s totally dark, surrounded by a belt of light, and the industrial trains entering and exiting Willesden Junction. From the middle of the scrubs I can see the moon, first 2/3 blood moon, and by the end of my exercise, the full red moon. I took the recorder to the middle of the open expanse of grass, empty of people aside from the odd dog walker emerging from the darkness and let my exhausted breathing ebb as I watched up. By complete chance, a genuine coincidence, earlier in the day, someone had said to me that I should watch for the super moon that night, that the celts called it the Dispute Moon, others the Hunger Moon, Corn Moon and Wolf Moon....
A note on: Reading with Jerome Rothenberg in London at Birkbeck College
The Technicians of the Sacred to Barbaric Vast & Wild: celebrating the work of Jerome Rothenberg
Monday 17th October, Birkbeck College : Room B34, Malet St Campus, London WC1E 7HX
Free Entrance : 7:30pm
A great privilege to be reading alongside one of the greats of world poetry, Jerome Rothenberg. An enormous influence on countless poets, his impact on how we conceive of poetry since WWII is unbridled. During this reading Rothenberg will present a series of poems termed 'variations' and 'auto-variations' demonstrating the connections between his work as an anthologist and a poet, while I will read from his works and those of my own which his have influenced.
The event is hosted by Steve Willey of the Contemporary Research Poetics Centre, Birkbeck College, and for further details email s.willey@bbk.ac.uk or visit the event facebook page.
Prior to the reading, from 6pm - 7.20pm there will be a seminar presentation and discussion in the same location. Jerome Rothenberg will present a review of his work as an anthologist from Technicians of the Sacred (1968) to his most recent anthology Barbaric Vast & Wild: Poems for the Millennium Volume Five (2015). This will be followed by an open discussion centred around ethnopoetics and what Rothenberg calls 'omnipoetics' with a particular focus on questions of translation. A rare opportunity in London, also free to attend.
Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally celebrated poet, translator, anthologist, and performer with over ninety books of poetry and twelve assemblages of traditional and avant-garde poetry such as Technicians of the Sacred, Shaking the Pumpkin (traditional American Indian poetry), Exiled in the Word (a.k.a. A Big Jewish Book), and, with Pierre Joris and Jeffrey Robinson, Poems for the Millennium, volumes 1-3. He was a founding figure of ethnopoetics as a combination of poetic practice and theory, and he has been a longtime practitioner and theorist of poetry performance. His most recent big books are Eye of Witness: A Jerome Rothenberg Reader (2013) and Barbaric Vast & Wild: Outside & Subterranean Poetry from Origins to Preset (volume 5 of Poems for the Millennium, 2015). A new book of poems, A Field on Mars: Poems 2000-2015, has just appeared in separate English and French editions. http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.co.uk/
A note on: New poets published on 3am magazine this summer
The submissions for 3am magazine have opened once again, from September 1st until January 1st, and the work coming has been the best I've ever seen in my five plus years in the magazine. Completely anecdotal, probably representative of nothing in the wider scope of literary trends, but finally a huge portion of the work, maybe 25% is innovative, interesting, original and a pleasure to read. I've decided to go with this and take more poets on than before, really try and build the magazine's poetry into something dynamic and energetic over the summer and in the coming months too. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/index/poetry/
Some exciting work published recently:
Maren Nygard http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/marennygard/
Jerome Rothenberg http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/jeromerothenberg/
Paul Leyden http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/paulleyden/
Sarah James http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sarahjames/
Freya Harwood Bond http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/freyaharwoodbond/
Charlie Baylis http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/charliebaylis/
Pam Brown http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/pambrown/
Kathryn Maris http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/kathrynmaris/
Erik Kennedy http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/erikkennedy/
Alex Houen http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/letter-to-a-neighbour-other-poems/
Mischa Foster Poole http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/unboxing-teardown-other-poems/
Plenty more to come and here's every poet I’ve published as poetry editor http://www.stevenjfowler.com/3ammagazine
A note on: Shifting Ground with J&L Gibbons at Dalston Curve
30 Year Anniversary Event and launching Shifting Ground, a publication - September 22nd 2016: A really wonderful night at Dalston Curve with all the friends, colleagues and members of J&L Gibbons, celebrating three decades of remarkable, innovative, mindful work in shaping the environment of London and beyond. Lovely to work towards this night, where I gave a small contribution with this collective, multivocal reading, through the Shifting Ground publication. A beautiful object, it combines articles, reflections, dialogues, celebrates the past through future work and enterprise, and fortunately for me, contains a suite of my poems.
Published: an artpoem in Oxford Poetry
Grand to have this art poem, on the left page, in the latest issue of Oxford Poetry. Thanks to Lavinia Singer and the editorial team at OP, which has been publishing since 1910. The work will be featured in my debut art book, published by Stranger Press in 2017, called I fear my best work behind me. This is what I wrote to contextualise the poem...
"The poem on the page is first a series of markings made upon a surface. Obvious, but it seems to me a great source of often profoundly underexplored potential for the poet. That is the continued realisation of this fact - of black on white, of colour, material, front, handwriting, of dead and living space, of a computer screen or piece of sliced tree - all that is happening aside from semantic content, and the relation of these things in changing, fluctuating, the semantic meaning and content the poet should worry over.
This work draws from the influence post-war central European avant garde pioneers like Henri Michaux, Christian Dotremont and Constant Nieuwenhuys have had on my work, all of them poets in the purest sense, all too erroneously and conveniently labelled artists. It draws on asemic writing, experimental logograms and illustration but it also a poem in the clearest, anthropomorphic sense"
And from the editorial ... "Encrusted in paper word impasto, this issue of Oxford Poetry celebrates the relationship between the verbal and the visual. Some poets respond ekphrastically to works of art (Richie McCaffery, Jeremy Valentine Freeman Ganem, Pascale Petit, Nancy Posey). Others paint worlds through bold metaphor and surreal imagery (John Burnside, Rebecca Perry, Mark Waldron, Astrid Alben, Martha Kapos) or evoke the subtleties of consciousness, memory and perception (Dominic Hand, Fiona Sampson, Denise Saul). Others step into the realm of visual poetry (SJ Fowler) to shape their words on the page (Chris Kerr, Elaine Feeney)." http://oxfordpoetry.co.uk/
A note on: The Singing Bridge in the Guardian
A review of Claudia Molitor's brilliant project, which includes fragments of some commissioned poems about Waterloo Bridge
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/22/claudia-molitor-singing-bridge-cd-review-nmc-thames
A note on: article for Literaturhaus Europa on CROWD bus tour
The Elit article series runs very regularly from Literaturhaus Europa's base in Austria and always has some fascinating insights into the wider European literature scene from writers, organisers and journalists. I've written for them a few times before, and they asked me to pen a short piece on the CROWD Literature bus tour which I partially participated in this summer. I wrote about my experience of being at the Krokodil fest in Serbia during Britain's exit from the EU. http://www.literaturhauseuropa.eu/de/observatorium/blog/crowd-literature2019s-omnibus-project
A note on: Jerwood Open Forest with David Rickard - Part #1
Over the last few months I've had the opportunity and pleasure to work with the artist David Rickard, in quite an inspiring context. David, whose remarkable career as artist has been marked by a particularly complex and deft relationship to space, object, architecture and process, has been shortlisted for the Jerwood Open Forest scheme.
After being shortlisted for his idea David, very generously, began a conversation about how poetry might find a place in his idea. His proposal was to engage with Fielder Forest in Northumberland and create a trail throughout unmarked woods. The rail would be made of a reclaimed house or building, stripped and dissembled into the very rawest wood of a structure, bare planks, and on each of these planks, following a carefully selected route, would be inscribed one word. This trail would then be read as it is followed, neither a narrative, or a poem, or a story, but all of these. And then, vitally, the trail and its posts would rot, become once again the forest, and so my words would be edited by the very forest itself.
From the Jerwood Open Forest blog, David wrote: "Returnings: 29 Jul 2016 - So far my search for a forest has been headed simultaneously in two very different directions. Firstly, for a growing, photosynthesising cluster of trees, a forest in the current tense and secondly for a building with timber bones, a forest in the past sense. Eventually these two will come together, but for now they are poles apart. The living forest will be a plantation, established and grown for the eventual yield of its timber and Kielder Forest has been identified as the prime candidate – an expanse of 600 square kilometres of forest stretching across the northern half of Northumberland.
In parallel there have been conversations with demolition contractors, with names like Titan and Redhammer, and the hunt is on to establish how we can find a suitable building that will form the fabric of the installation. It will be a timber structure that has come to the end of its functional life and is ready for a return trip to its place of origin.
Carved into the surfaces of the beams and boards will be words. One word on each piece, which together form an expansive poem with no beginning or ending; a meandering narrative that flows through the circuitous journey that the timber has taken. The voice of these words will be S J Fowler, a contemporary English poet that has agreed to collaborate on the creation of ‘Returnings’. Now there are fragments; a forest, a hunt for a building and words. There’s still a lot to do before these fragments combine to form a work."
Published: Peter Pan by Prudence Chamberlain & I in Wazo, Spain
The Spanish magazine and cultural powerhouse Wazo continues to be a very generous supporter of my work, here publishing one of the near dozen collaborations by Prudence Chamberlain which makes up our House of Mouse collaborative poetry collection, published this year. http://www.wazogate.com/peter-pan
Published: Puebla Songs in Boto-Cor-De-Rosa Livros, Brazil
Sarah Rebecca Kersley, a British poet, quite remarkably, has started a bookshop and cafe in Bahia in Brazil with a focus on the contemporary and curation by Brazilian contemporary literature professor and critic Milena Britto, and adjoining the shop, has a beautiful online journal that publishes work in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and fortunately for me, the journal has now published one of my poems - Puebla Songs, part of a series I've written about violence and south america, written from a position of ignorance, but while I was travelling in the region.
Visit the poem here http://www.livrariabotocorderosa.com/index.php/2016/09/15/puebla-songs-sj-fowler/ and submit to the magazine too.
A note on: The Anatomy of Rest with Claudia Hammond on BBC Radio 4
Pleased to contribute to the first of three programmes by Claudia Hammond, entitled Anatomy of Rest, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 this week past. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v07p0
Claudia visited me during a training session, boxing and we discussed the notion that relationship of rest to its inverse state - exhaustion. This has been a major preoccupation of mine, pragmatically, my entire life, being someone who is high energy / agitated and having always found great solace, relief and control in more intensive forms of exercise. It has been a fundamental way of mediating my creative energy too, and meeting Arne Dietrich in Salzburg in 2015, where he talked of down regulation of the pre frontal cortex during exercise, I have spent the last year or two, reading more deeply into the subject. I am also reminded of Sam Harris' comments about weight training, that if we didn't choose to do so, the pain of such conditioning would be akin to torture.
Pleasingly, post programme, where I sounded a bit weird because my hearing had altered a bit, genuinely tired from training and unable to hear myself speak (a mercy), an article has been written by Alex SoojungKim Pang, referring to my remarks and the concept in general. Visit http://www.deliberate.rest/?p=1068
Published: Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore anthology from Sidekick Books
I'm very pleased to have two poems (on the razorbill and the snow bunting) in the latest Birdbook from Sidekick Books, entitled Saltwater and Shore, edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone (£12.00 + postage, September 2016, 140pp)
http://www.sidekickbooks.com/birdbookiv.php
Saltwater and Shore is the final volume of Sidekick’s wildly ambitious Birdbook series – a collaborative alternative ornothopedia where every species gets equal billing. This time we find ourselves flung beyond the limits of the island, before being gathered in again at its outcrops, outposts, briny mouths and sandy fringes, where well-established stars like the puffin jostle with the lesser-known knot, scaup and razorbill, the whimbrel, spoonbill and turnstone. It’s a bustling, polyphonic cliffside colony of a book, a multitude of individual voices and dynamic images poised to spill into the air and take flight in the willing imagination.
Featuring poems by friends including Annabel Banks, Vahni Capildeo, Holly Corfield Carr, Rishi Dastadar, Sasha Dugdale, Harry Giles, Kirsten Irving, Jon Stone, David Tait, Kate Wakeling