Published: new fiction in the We'll Never Have Paris anthology

A brilliant new anthology edited by Andrew Gallix, from Repeater Books. https://repeaterbooks.com/product/well-never-have-paris/

We’ll Never Have Paris explores this enduring fascination with this myth of a bohemian and literary Paris. Edited by Andrew Gallix, this collection brings together many of the most talented and adventurous writers from the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia and New Zealand to explore this theme through short stories, essays and poetry, in order to build up a captivating portrait of Paris as viewed by English speakers today — A Moveable Feast for the twenty-first century. We’ll Never Have Paris has contributions from seventy-nine authors, including Tom McCarthy, Will Self, Brian Dillon, Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams, Max Porter, Sophie Mackintosh and Lauren Elkin.

And me. And it’s new fiction in the book, not poetry, which is beautiful. It’s a piece I wrote somewhat riffing on the style of patrick modiano, connecting different incidences i may of experienced in paris with other humans through incidental details and without narrative tissue

A note on - visiting the La Voix Liberee exhibition at Palais de Tokyo

Well it’s pretty spiffy to be part of a group show at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Maybe the top institute Ive been involved with exhibition wise, certainly up there with V&A et al. It was cool to be there in person and listen to sound proper sounds and duke about paris like a proper artiste https://www.palaisdetokyo.com/fr/evenement/la-voix-liberee

Fondazione Bonotto presents a new exhibition project in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo. As the result of research lasting over a year, the exhibition has been conceived as a non- exhaustive journey through sound poetry, from the end of the Second World War until contemporary developments. Intentionally trans-historical and international, representing over thirty countries covering all five continents, this project has been conceived as a place to be listened in, a transmitter creating a frequency that passes outside the walls of Palais de Tokyo thanks to an application providing an open, free-of-charge download of the exhibition’s sound programme, as well as a multitude of sites, radio stations or reviews which will extend this experience of sound poetry during the entire spring of 2019. / In the 20th century, phonetic and then sound poetry always stood as an act of emancipation. Sometimes ready to abandon semantics, the avant-garde turned it into a spearhead of a struggle against systems, beliefs and dogmas. What is now left of their heroic combats? Myths and legends. But times have changed. Combats too. Utopias no longer have the same look. / New technologies have now invaded the space of language, for the better or the worst. For the worst, by imposing a digital rationalisation of words and sounds. For the best, by providing language with an infinity of sources and tools. Since the 1950s, technological progress has allowed phonetic poetry to become sound poetry. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/news/1-events/164-la_voix_lib_re_e_-_po_sie_sonore.html

A note on - BatBox Dancing : Battalion anthology launch

This was a charming evening in the Westminster Ref Library just next to Leicester Sq to celebrate the launch of the Battalion anthology from Sidekick Books. It’s a beautiful book and Sidekick are a really original, enthusiastic and purposefully innovative publisher. They should be celebrated more, we would miss them were they not active, Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone.

You can buy the book here http://sidekickbooks.com/booklab/books/battalion/ Do buy it, it’s really beautiful. The bat is a liminal thing, and goes by many cultural identities: aviation expert, clandestine committee member, victim of superstition, delicate contraption, beautiful mishap, miniature aristocrat, occultist, conjuror, ninja.

Battalion is your alternative, unregistered guide to bats – a live, writhy cave colony of findings, fixations and sonic experiments. Add your own inky skitterings to the mix, bring it on your evening flit. Take after its denizens: open your mouth and listen to the sky.

For my performance for this night I decided to continue a new series of live works using a Black Box Speaker and some Dancing. I first emerged from behind book shelves and read, hooded, to bat squeaks. I didnt realise how dark this seemed, it was meant to be funny. But luckily I had the song Echolocation in my bag and made a bat fool of myself. / It was good to see some other brilliant performers too, Andre Bagoo, Yvonne Litschel, James Coghill et al also

A note on: continuing my film collaboration with Tereza Stehlikova

A fixture of my summer, all the way to 2015 now, to spend time with my friend and long-term collaborator Tereza Stehlikova, shooting footage for our film Worm Wood, about the private and disappearing wonder of corners of west london, its unique and unpretentious character, from out across kensal green cemetery to wormwood scrubs and the grand union canal. Our plan is to have no plan, to keep shooting in sections, with poetry and text responding, in many different cinematic aesthetics and compiling, as years go by, and the film grows, into an artwork but also a document, as its made through our friendship and the joy of its being made. The work has been really rewarding, offering insight into where I once called home as an active, absorbing, inspiring space and Tereza is really an artist whose mode I admire.

The film has been screened across London in chapters, and our previous iterations of this long term work has taken in readings, pamphlets, walks, exhibitions from the Garden Museum to Crypts full of the dead. We are working towards a screening of the film in a new over 60 minute version this autumn or winter, in London. http://terezast.com/ / www.stevenjfowler.com/wormwood

A note on : Greenwich Book Festival June 15th

I’ll be doing two events at the Greenwich Book Festival this June 15th. The first will be a panel on writing and teaching creative writing, and university environments, and the second will be a special edition of the marvelous English PEN modern literature events I’ve been doing for many years now. It’ll have a half dozen authors presenting new works in celebration of a Writer at Risk supported by English PEN. Both these eventsare down to the wonderful Sam Jordison www.theenemiesproject.com/englishpen

Visit up on https://greenwichbookfest.com/ and here is the performance I did for Sentsov this January

Published : Nature Nano - a piece on science & poetry with Thomas Duggan

It’s a special thing to be in Nature, one of the world’s most important journals, given I’m a blurt. But I have been working around an interest in neuroaesthetics the last five years or so, with the Hubbub wellcome residency, the Salzburg global fellowship and perhaps most importantly, my focus here, my collaborations with Thomas Duggan. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41565-019-0450-x

Thomas and I wrote a piece about our years of work together and how we night negotiate the obvious knowledge hierarchies when science and art interact. This has been a big interest of mine too, how people pretend they are equally useful, or that scientific and artistic ‘knowledge’ are the same etc… Or being asked to essentially translate complex scientific ideas into simple artworks for the public to consume etc complex issue complex issue… https://www.nature.com/nnano/

Published : The Hope Slayer, Alcohol - despising the drunk on Versopolis Review

Way more personal than I normally like to do but it’s a topic that I felt compelled to be blunt about, and the editor pushed me. https://www.versopolis.com/times/essay/771/the-hope-slayer-alcohol

“What I was not prepared for, and remains profoundly and bizarrely understated in English discourse, was the level of violence perpetrated, and accepted, in every pub and club I worked within. I had had no experience of the kind of aggressive drinking that felt emotional, psychological, confrontational. People in their hundreds and thousands drinking as much as they could as fast as was possible. People screaming, at the top of their lungs, for no reason, weeping, pissing their pants, fighting over nothing. 

I once saw a man try to gouge a stranger’s eyes into his head. I saw another kick a stranger’s head like a football. I saw a woman wrap her handbag around the neck of a stranger and try to strangle them to death. I was punched, kicked, tackled, bitten and even, though not seriously, stabbed, by humans who couldn’t stand up straight. And within this adrenalin-soaked arena, I remained, unlike my colleagues, completely dry. Not on shift, or off shift, would I touch alcohol. And so, so my peers told me, remained without the tiny speck of empathy which often held their hands. I have calculated, in writing this, that I did a minimum of 200 shifts, probably far more, and while some at student unions and small pubs were quiet, most, in gaudy nightclubs and city centre pubs involved multiple physical confrontations a night. Conservatively I have tangled with over 500 drunk humans. Some easy wrestling. Some life-threatening fights. 

I watched them enter, sober, watched them order luminescent chemical candy drinks by the doze. I watched them drain these liquids like water and begin to slowly hunch, slur, drool and scowl until, inevitably, they attached themselves to a fellow inebriate, and my job, under the abuse of other customers, was to interrupt these conflicts and eject the parties. Their apparent faultlessness, their stinking of alcohol, their altered speech, their desperate attempts to harm me remain in my memory, and have altered my opinions of humanity, and ethics, permanently. What stays with me too is what I did to them, as sober as anyone has ever been, unfairly advantaged against them, vindictive, frightened, excited and swaying in the palm of liquor.” cont;d…

A note on: The black music box performance for Franz Baermann Steiner

At 2pm on May 2nd, knowing i had to perform something to celebrate Franz Baermann Steiner that evening, for the Illuminations VI event at the Austrian Cultural Forum, i realised the poem I had written for him wouldn’t do it. Such was his unbelievable range of interests and abilities, and such was his intelligence, and influence on friends like Elias Canetti and Iris Murdoch, and generations of students, and British anthropology in general, that I realised the poem would be lame and curt and not enough. Seriously, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Baermann_Steiner

So I thought why not throw the babay out with the bath water and do an oblique performance instead. The music playing was recorded in 1909, the year of Steiner’s birth. The Yiddish songs are from over 100 years ago. This is maybe my first pseudo dance? Han Smith was a star to help me. To let me sleep on her feet, and when is a hug not a good idea? When does it not pay tribute to a loss, a lost, an intelligence so immense it cannot be worded back into history? I have only one regret, that there wasn’t someone on the street I could’ve coaxed up to the event when I went outside, entirely improvised, mid saunter. I could’ve told them about Steiner, and kept it, as I wanted it, between me and them.

All the vids from the night are http://www.theenemiesproject.com/illuminations

A note on: Greatist Hits II with Harry Man and the Torriano Camarade on July 14th

A lot of people think Harry Man hates me, and he does. But what I say to people is this, you can’t take it personal. This is just how Harry operates. It’s what is in his heart. It’s not necessarily about me (despite what he says). Basically, if you have to work with Harry, because of a blood debt, which I’m not going to go into details about, then you have to make the best of it. And that means preparing yourself for someone constantly trying to wind you up, releasing fireworks into your pockets, touching your face ( a lot) and shouting at random points in conversation. I am proud of myself that I’ve managed to stick with it and produce a book with Monsieur Man.

It is entitled GREATIST HITS II and it is the selected collaborations of Harry and I. Harry and I have made this book from the dozen or so works we have made this book from, from performances and publications stretching back at least 3 years. It is to be published by Kingston University Press and released July 14th 2019.

Here is a sample work from the book https://www.wazogate.com/nemesia-3-man-finds/

It will be launched at a special Torriano Camarade, which will be part of the very long running Sunday night Torriano Meeting House reading series and feature new works in pairs from poets who have collaborated for the night. So far folk like Russell Bennetts, Callie Michail, Astra Papachristodoulou, Maria Sledmere are confirmed, with many more to be added. Come along, it will be at 7pm in Kentish town http://www.theenemiesproject.com/torriano

A note on : Illuminations VI - celebrating the unfairly unknown

A resonant, intimate, unexpectedly reverent night at the Austrian Cultural Forum this past May 2nd. This was the sixth event in the series I’ve been lucky to do with the ACF, asking contemporary writers and artists to respond to a major figure of 20th century Austrian letters. This event was different as it aimed to illuminate seven Austrians, bound together by the fact they lived in the UK during the 20th, often fleeing Austria because of the Nazis, and all of whom are absolutely remarkable humans whose work is not known here as it should be. This sense of the artists being advocates for the forgotten permeating through the evening, powerfully so. It was impossible not to feel that the vagaries of history and thought and literature are random and strange throughout the works witnessed, as each of the authors celebrated seemed obviously important in their thinking and output. / All the performances are now available here http://www.theenemiesproject.com/illuminations

The event owes itself entirely to my dear friend, Stephen Watts. His knowledge stems from decades reading, attending readings, developing friendships with authors from around the world who have populated London. I had come across some of the authors we celebrated but Stella Rotenberg, Franz Baermann Steiner, Theodor Kramer and Alfred Marnau were new to me.

A note on : Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit – coming this summer from Hesterglock Press

I’m chuffed to have my next Poem Brut visual literature book arriving this summer, in July, with the remarkable Hesterglock press. It is entitled Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and has actually been gestating and growing and shrinking and morphing for many years, going through many shapes and titles.

The book is about environment affecting writing. The book is about Spain, contextually.

The book is about writing affecting environment. The book is about notation, the notebook as practise, drafting, sketching and illustration, contentually. It draws from literary quotes, book covers, figurative artworks, Chinese supermarket collage and other strange sources.

To get a flavour, a few poems from the book have been published online at https://partisanhotel.co.uk/S-J-Fowler as well in Perverse magazine and soon with Tentacular.

The book will have two releases, the first at the next Poem Brut at Rich Mix event on July 13th, and the second, a proper launch will take place on July 25th at the May Day Rooms. This event will celebrate the wider list of Hesterglock. http://www.hesterglock.net/

The work Paul Hawkins and Sarer Scotthorne have done over the last number of years is really a source of encouragement, validation and hope for many poets writing around the edges of the Now (in the UK) because they are looking for the future. It is hard work, as it must often feel like digging a trench that fills with water, but their enthusiasm, sincerity and selflessness gives fuel to those like me, mining a weird and committed seam. I’m lucky to count them as friends, collaborators and supporters, as are brilliant folk like Thomas Havlik, James Caley, Arturo Desimone, Matti Spence and others.

Published : On Optioning Cannibalism – a poetry article on Versopolis Review

Another in my series of poetic essays / essayistic poems / surreal narrative articles has been published by the Versopolis Review, spreading its tentacles across the European webways. This one is about eating, well the monthly theme set by head editor Ana Schnabl, is about Food. So I wrote about the temptation of cannibalism, both literally and otherwise.

https://www.versopolis.com/times/essay/756/on-optioning-cannibalism

You are what is eaten. The food before you, where did it disappear to? Once fresh, now packaged, possibly tinned. Possibly eternal. Now within, lost inside of you. Allowing to move, to crawl, to cry. Never to be seen again. Can you eat choice? What are the boundaries of selectiveness? How the gluten intolerant must have once suffered, throughout all of human history.….

A note on : The European Poetry Festival Sampson Low Publication Series, and working on Orbiting the Yellow Ball

A little lost in the immense shuffle of the European Poetry Festival was the project’s debut publications, released in limited edition, in partnership with Sampson Low Ltd. and Kingston University. This series of four new books, half original works of visual literature and half new translations from the Norwegian, presents four of Norway’s most considerable contemporary poets. For more info visit https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/sampsonlow

I had the personal pleasure of editing these books, working closely with the poets, and in the case of Jon Stale Ritland’s Orbiting the Yellow Ball, working very deeply with the translation process. I don’t have usable Norwegian so my role was to reform crib translations, which I’ve been asked to do many many times but rarely have said yes to, as that process is inherent fraught. This case different because Jon Stale’s English, as with most Norwegians, is better than mine. So it was much closer to a collaboration, and Jon Stale generously made me feel a part of the final poems were connected to my own often oblique poetics. I’m proud of the book, and that I had a role in it

Moreover working with the remarkable Alban Low, as I’ve had the opportunity to do often over the last few years, was a joy. He is as selfless as publishers come, working extremely hard to make the publications something special, a gift, for the poets. You can buy the whole series here https://sampsonlow.co/wck-pamphlets/european-poetry-festival-books/

A note on : Poem Brut returns on July 13th at Rich Mix

July Saturday 13th - 7.30pm - Free : in the Mix, at Rich Mix, London https://www.poembrut.com/events

The 11th event in the Poem Brut series returns this summer with another night of performances. As ever before, the Brut series aims to transpose what the series is exploring on the page (the possibilities of written language itself, as a material, and how it is formed, inscribed, messed, understood) to the live space. Something perhaps profoundly underdone in poetry. These events have been beautiful occasions and this will be too, undoubtedly, as the line up is already powerhouse.

It will feature Lisa Kiew, Patrick Cosgrove, Mischa Foster Poole, Harry Man, Vilde Valerie Vilde Torset, Paul Hawkins, Simon Tyrrell, Michael O'Mahony, SJ Fowler, Rushika Rush, Maria Sledmere and more poet-artists to be announced soon.

I have now also consolidated every single former Poem Brut event at Rich Mix into one page of glory www.poembrut.com/richmix

This event will also be the first chance for me to share two brand new publications, though it is an official launch for neither. On the night my new visual literature book, the sixth in the poembrut series I’m doing, will be available from hesterglock press, entitled ‘Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit’, alongside my next collaborative publication, Greatist Hits II - The selected collaborations of Harry Man and I. Harry and I will be doing something dark together, like dancing or crying or frogging.

Published : Maintenant #101 with Maja Jantar

The Maintenant series was an enormously important stage in my autodidactic education in poetry. It not only opened up to me the extraordinary potential of contemporary European poetry in the 21st century, it gave me the chance to learn through direct contact with the poets I approached. Many became close friends, and still to this day educate me on the possibilities of my own work.

The first series of Maintenant run for 98 issues on 3am magazine. I left 99 and 100 free and empty in homage to two poets who were completing interviews at the time of their death, Anselm Hollo and Tomaz Salamun.

I have started the series up again, though it will run quietly and infrequently, on Versopolis - the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture, and have begun the new century with the incomparable Maja Jantar.

https://www.versopolis.com/people/conversation/763/i-ve-always-believed-in-a-very-open-meaning-of-the-word-poetic

f we are to be able to create a discourse about European cultural and artistic traditions, practices we can speculate upon, historicise, and draw inspiration from, while avoiding nationalism, we eventually have to settle on something concrete to not lose ourselves to amorphousness. We need to think regionally, or perhaps equally banal though it might be, continentally. We have more reason to do this in 2019, being in Europe. What then, with poetry, might we consider European? Again in a reductive way, we might speak of a poet who speaks numerous languages but often performs in none, or all, depending on one’s perspective. We might speak of a poet who has lived in a dozen European nations, who crosses borders with her work as much as her person. We might speak of the best of European tradition being the ability to be critically minded but generous in action, being able to incorporate all that is decidedly not poetry (be that mark or fragment or gesture or other artforms, music, theatre, performance and visual art most distinctly, in this case) in order to make works more poetic than most can conceive. We are left with a poet like Maja Jantar, who for the past generation, has been performing, singing, fashioning and building her poetries across the continent, constantly shifting, reforming, transforming and collaborating, to the point where she now stands for a 21stcentury poetic tradition. One that is sensitive to the real material of poetry, a poetry that knows its past to be future facing. In the first interview of the Maintenant series second act, conversation #101, we present Maja Jantar. https://www.versopolis.com/people/conversation/763/i-ve-always-believed-in-a-very-open-meaning-of-the-word-poetic

Published : an an interview on Utsanga with Tim Gaze

https://www.utsanga.it/flower-intervista-a-tim-gaze/ They once called me Flower, which is beaut, but for now, this interview is a really generous act by Tim Gaze, a brilliant visual poet pioneer in his own right, as it allows me to consolidate and consider much of thinking and output around my Poem Brut publications

1 considering the variety of styles in Selected Scribbling and Scrawling, do you create in waves of similar work? Do you deliberately try not to repeat yourself?

I think I’m trying to consider the method of scribbling or the mode of scrawling, the hand-line, as an entire form, or creative universe. Something that is not an adjunct of poetry or text art but a way of making poems that one might spend a lifetime refining. I’d like to teach a course on scribbling. It would be more therapeutic than one about writing poems. So the selections for the book are from different periods of time, where differing concepts were prominent in my writing and so absolutely your question is well considered, these are bursts re-ordered, re-considered post facto. My favourite works are the intricate scribs, done usually on trains in London, with an hour journey given to each line, and then reworked over weeks. But others were done walking in Gdansk, upright with my eyes closed, for example.

2 how did you get into making things which are completely left of the field of vision of many readers who think they’re into poetry?

Pure chance, no childhood influences, parents who still don’t know what poetry is, working class people who didn’t even read for pleasure, and then in my early adulthood, randomly. This is the greatest gift to me, that I was already a half formed human before considering what poetry is and what it isn’t. And that I am still, 9 years in, plagued by questions unasked by most in the field but still strange and unanswerable to me. For example, surely, to separate poetry from text or conversation or opinion or prose or fiction, a poem needs only be language referent and then to seeking an answer to a self-situated paradoxical question. A poem aims then to be stating or saying the inexpressible. This seems the beginning of the medium to me. Why would just say something in a poem if we can say it anywhere else? Anytime, in any language chunk, any conversation? Advertising does this, speeches – why poem at all if one is going to state or lecture? From this comes many hundreds of natural follow up questions. Why are almost no poems published handwritten? Is there no meaning in the handwritten letter? Only if letters and words are secondary to emotion and opinion. But if this is the case then why poem? I bore myself saying this stuff.

3 is there an ideal reader who really “gets” what you’re doing, or is any response a good response?

Definitely the latter. I hope for negative aesthetics and so negative reactions, as we need to allow for that in what we’re doing, and I wouldn’t ever presume to know the endless strange idiosyncratic contents of another mind and therefore what they might think of the irrelevant doodles I throw out. That they respond at all is all.

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Published : EUROPOE - an anthology of European poetry

EUROPOE Groundbreaking poetry by sixty of Europe’s most original poets, translated into English, brought together for one remarkable anthology.
Kingston University Press (May 2019) Available to buy here enemiesproject.bigcartel.com/product/europoe 143 pages. Paperback.

This was a labour of love. Perhaps the word labour might flash red here. It has been designed to be connected to the European poetry festival I run and to be fundamentally ephemeral, as I’m not really into being an anthologist, as I believe it’s a vocation, a real commitment (see Jerome Rothenberg) and I don’t have that in me at all. In this case I choose the poets from my own tastes and contacts, so they are (obviously not, but in a deeper way) not representative of anything but that and I asked each poet to negotiate their own choice of poems / translations / translators / languages / methods / appearances with me. I hope the book proves exciting to those who read it, that’s all I’m after. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/europoe

“Celebrating the grand resurgence in literary and avant-garde poetry that has marked the 21st century in Europe, poets from over forty nations present works developing the lyric, sonic, visual, abstract and conceptual traditions. A volume that seeks not to offer a taxonomy but a brief glimpse of the brilliance of so many poets working at the forefront of the language arts, this is a book unified by a fidelity to that which is truly contemporary, amorphously continental and generously innovative.

Featuring poems by Pierre Alferi, Tomica Bajsić Aase Berg, Volodymyr Bilyk, Cecilie Bjørgås Jordheim, Ida Börjel, Serena Braida, Kristian Carlsson, Sophie Carolin-Wagner, Theodoros Chiotis, Iris Colomb, Efe Duyan, Federico Federici, Orsolya Fenyvesi, Mária Ferenčuhová, Frédéric Forte, Lies Van Gasse, Pavlo Grazhdanskij, Ana Gorria, João Luís Barreto Guimarães, Max Höfler, Niillas Holmberg, Zuzana Husarova, Maja Jantar, Ragnhildur Jóhanns, Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Frank Keizer, Anatol Knotek, Amadej Kraljevič, Gabrielė Labanauskaitė, Morten Langeland, Luljeta Lleshanaku, Léonce W. Lupette, Christodoulos Makris, Maria Malinskovskaya, Ricardo Marques, Immanuel Mifsud, Simona Nastac, Bruno Neiva, Eugene Ostashevsky, Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, Daniele Pantano, Astra Papachristodoulou, Cosmin Perţa, Jörg Piringer, Inga Pizane, Tomáš Přidal, Monika Rinck, Cia Rinne, Jon Ståle Ritland, Ekaterina Samigulina, Martin Glaz Serup, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, Muanis Sinanović, Morten Søndergaard, Esther Strauß, Kinga Toth, Nadia de Vries, Krišjānis Zeļģis.

EUROPOE, edited by British poet SJ Fowler and presented by European Poetry Festival in the UK, showcases those who are often on the margins of their own nations literary culture, precisely because their work is forward-looking and challenging, alongside some of the most renowned names in Europe. EUROPOE is an anthology as a unique document of poetry, marking a moment in time for a modern, and thoroughly European, means of experiencing literature.”

A note on : working with Robert Reid Allan w/ the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group

Over the last few months I’ve had the pleasure to work with composer Robert Reid Allan for a new piece he is making with the BCMG, entitled Physical Education, as part of their apprentice composer in residence programme. The final piece he is making is performed in June:

https://www.bcmg.org.uk/Event/physical-education  A new work by BCMG Apprentice Composer-in-Residence Robert Reid Allan - Friday 21 June 2019, 7.30pm - CBSO Centre, Birmingham

Physical Education is a new work by BCMG Apprentice Composer in Residence 2018-19 Robert Reid Allan, in collaboration with filmmaker Sasha Balmazi-Owen and actor/dancer Richard Court.

My role is beautifully amorphous, and I hope all the more useful for that fact (certainly it is for me, I’ve learned considerably from Robert and the process, building on contemporary music work I’ve done with Philip Venables, Diamanda Dramm, et al). What Robert has been doing extends beyond his considerable work in composition and into text, poetry, language arts, and their fusion, with music, to themes of violence, cruelty, the adolescent body and institutional aftershocks (school in this case), and this is something I’ve been thinking / writing about for years. So it’s been a serious exploration between us, often about concepts and ideas, and pivotally, also about methodologies, about what music and poetry actually do, together and alone. I’ll have the chance to visit Birmingham for the performance and watch the final version of something I’ve had the privilege to watch gestate throughout 2019. http://www.robertallanmusic.com/

A note on : Recent Poem Brut publications on 3am magazine

I’m very proud to be the poetry editor of 3am magazine still (which was started in 2000) after many years in the role, and I’ve turned the doom inbox of open subs into a joyous time with the constraint of making all incoming work Poem Brut suitable. Some of the poems that come in are inspiring, and so encouraging it is to know so many folk all over the world are exploring the material, the liminal, the handmade as a vital and necessary means of their poetics. I was not the only one confused at the absence of handwriting, colour, motleyness and so on. Here are some of the most recent works I’ve had the pleasure to publish, where we’ve been on a tear as of late https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/index/poetry/

poem brut #64 – a f briony published 27/04/2019 by Oliver Tong
poem brut #63 – an alphabet published 21/04/2019 by Susan Connolly
poem brut #62 – tape samples published 19/04/2019 by Jeff Bagato
poem brut #61 – estate published 03/04/2019 by Tony Rickaby
poem brut #60 – static gifs for broken musicianspublished 31/03/2019 by Nick Potter
poem brut #59 – forever now published 30/03/2019 by Kathryn Hummel
poem brut #58 – a house a silhouette a coco nutpublished 10/03/2019 by Suze de lee
poem brut #57 – coach house / belong published 08/03/2019 by Paul Hawkins
poem brut #56 – archive of disquiet published 03/03/2019 by Theo Chiotis
poem brut #55 – dogtags published by John Mancini
poem brut #54 – father published 02/02/2019 by Dovydas Laurinitis

A note should be made that when I published Tony Rickaby, whose beautiful work I took last year, I heard from his family that he recently passed away. He was a brilliant poet working for many decades to expand what we know to be poetry and it’s a grand and sad thing to have published his last work

A note on : Dramm violioning before my Scribbles in Indonesia

My ongoing and inspiring and feverish collaboration with the musician performer violionist Diamanda Dramm continues to bear prickly fruit. Recently Diamanda played at the Rewire festival and in Indonesia and utilised some of my Scribblings (poems taken from my Poem Brut book The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling published in 2018 by Tom Jenks’ Zimzalla press) as projected walls of backdrop in front on which she violioned, singing some of my hard words too, in the midst of sense. No larger compliment could be paid to my penning. https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-selected-scribbling-and-scrawling/