EPF 2021 : Event #4 - Scots and Irish poets

An event long in development, excellent to work with the Scottish Poetry Library and Asif Khan on this for many months, this one saw Irish and Scottish poets produce new collaborations for the night. Some last minute changes saw us hosted by the remarkably hospitable Austrian Cultural Forum in Mayfair, and the poets put on four brilliant, concise, clever, charismatic performance.

Unlike the normally exhaustive mode of my events, this was rapid and memorable for that. We had a good time post readings in the chandeliered ballroom of the ACF, enjoying what we had all missed for the previous year.

All videos https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/irishandscot

A note on : Limbo at Cannes Court Metrage, Manlleu Film Fest, Dokufest Kosovo

A few years back I co-wrote a short film called, LIMBO, originated and filmed by Lotje Sodderland. Thanks to Lotje and the films producers, it has been doing festival rounds recently, after being screened the London Short film fest it has upcoming screenings at Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage, Manlleu festival in Catalunia and Dokufest in Kosovo.

“LIMBO is a true-fiction short following the story of Witold, a young, Polish Londoner who takes a new job as a care worker. Under-trained and underpaid, he speeds from home to home on his bicycle, feeling the enormity of his responsibility as he enters hidden worlds to administer care to a delicate but dynamic assortment of elderly men living alone.” https://www.lotjesodderland.com/portfolio/l-i-m-b-o

Ken Loach said of it ‘This is a film of compassion and tender observation of lives we rarely see – it’s in the performance of the routine tasks made by one person for another that we start to grapple with meaning, dignity and what it is to be human.’

EPF 2021 : Event #3 - with Peer gallery, in Hoxton Trust Garden

Another outdoor event, this time adjacent to Peer Gallery in Hoxton Trust Garden.

A little rained on but well worth it and brolly prepared, four pairs of poets followed Stephen Watts, whose program of happenings made this event come to be. Swirl of words / Swirl of worlds, worth checking out https://www.peeruk.org/swirl-of-words

I performed with Karenjit Sandhu - doing forward rolls and running round the garden, celebrating our new book - and it was good to see Fabian Peake, Clover Peake, Kristina Kuneva, Susie Campbell, Vik Shirley and others.

All videos are up https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/peer

A note on : Ten years of 3am magazine poetry editorship

I took over the role of poetry editor from Darran Anderson in July 2011.

In ten years, working with the brilliant Andrew Gallix and other remarkable colleagues, I have kept open submissions most of the time, at least 8 of the 10 years, and fielded often up to 5 submissions a day. Sometimes more.

It has been an immense privilege. It has actually started friendships for me, making contacts with poets kind enough to send their work, from around the world. It has been a way to discover what is happening now with people and places I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to encounter. And I’ve had the chance to keep up a continual correspondence with many making their first submissions, helping them work up their work for publication.

Moreover, with the literary / experimental publications of 2011 to 2017, all listed here https://www.stevenjfowler.com/3ammagazine followed by the Poem Brut series https://www.poembrut.com/3am (both pages need updating) I believe I have created a recognisable aesthetic for my editorial choices, and attracted practitioners working in that style.

I also think, without being arrogant, it is a space like no other online magazine for poetry, that supports brilliant work that wouldn’t find a home elsewhere. Or something akin to that. Over 300 publications and 100 interviews. More than that even. From Jerome Rothenberg, Iain Sinclair and other established names, to I would estimate at least 80 first ever publications, it’s a list I’m proud of, and I have no plans to give up the mantle soon.

A sincere thanks to Andrew Gallix for making 3am magazine what it is. http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/

EPF 2021 : Event #2 - The Camarade

The grand event of this first iteration of the EPF, it was great to be back inside the inimitable St Johns on Bethnal Green presenting an event with 20 european poets sharing 10 new collaborations made in pairs. This event, happening while England beat Ukraine in the euros, so much so we could hear the screams from nearby pubs as the goals went in, turned out to be a celebration of european poets living in london and the UK, because travel restricted our international guests. This made it something else, an event about a community, as well as about a true range of what is possible in contemporary poetry. / All the videos and loads of pictures from the special night here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade21 (pics below by Madeleine Rose Elliott.

Published : Great Apes in Prototype Anthology III

Very happy to be featured in the “The third instalment of Prototype’s annual anthology: a space for new work, open to all and free from formal guidelines or restrictions. Poetry, prose, visual work and experiments in between.” My work is an excerpt from THE GREAT APES, a long poem in five parts that was written a few years ago and is awaiting publication as a book. It’s a work I’m excited to share, and this excerpt also features an original illustration by me I made for the issue. Always lovely to work with editor Jess Chandler. https://prototypepublishing.co.uk/product/prototype-3/

A note on : English PEN, against the PCSC Bill

Happy to add my name to this campaign from long time friends English PEN https://www.englishpen.org/posts/campaigns/uk-voices-of-protest-our-letter-on-the-police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-pcsc/

In recognition of the threat posed by the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (PCSC) to these democratic rights, writers and free speech campaigners today write to MPs to highlight the implications of the PCSC for freedom of expression in the UK, and to express their solidarity with protesters and activists threatened by the bill.

EPF 2021 : Event #1 - Writers Kingston in Richmond Park

The European Poetry Festival 2021 opened with the last event of the Writers Kingston program for the academic year. I led around 50 people from the Richmond gate of the park into the long grass, where some were eaten by insects and others haayfevered, but most seemed happy. We then had over a dozen performances from a range of poets, many local to the Kingston area, many students and member of the popogrou collective.

Four publications were also launched this night, by Sylee Gore in absentia, Nina Fidry, Patrick Cosgrove and myself and Karenjit Sandhu.

Watching the sun go down over the park, it was an atmospheric start to the festival punctuated by a genuine feeling of camaraderie and some fantastic live works. All performances are video’s here https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/writerskingston

A note on : Patrick Cosgrove's Slurps and Sylee Gore's Even Still

As part of my ongoing collaborations, through Writers Kingston and Poem Brut, with the remarkable publisher and artist Alban Low of Sampson Low, the start of the recent European Poetry Festival saw the launch of two debut publications I had the pleasure to support - Even Still from Sylee Gore and Slurps from Patrick Cosgrove. Both are original, conceptually remarkable poets and extraordinarily kind people. These booklettes were long in the making, as Sylee and Patrick and I have been in dialogue for many months shaping the works. It’s been uplifting to have a role in their debut works emerging into the world. Both have sold out, in fact, from Sampson Low, in limited editions. None the less, links here.

• https://sampsonlow.co/2021/06/21/slurps-patrick-cosgrove/

• https://sampsonlow.co/2021/06/21/even-still-sylee-gore/

  For Patrick’s books, I contributed a small essay to the volume, and here are a few excerpts “This is the first book of one of the UK's most unique poets, whose unforgettable performances over the last number of years, in galleries, libraries and arts centres, have been a feature of the British experimental poetry scene. Or certainly, I have come to think so, because these performances have influenced my own. Patrick's work emerges from a tradition of English eccentricity, encountered as so authentic and organic, so stripped of poise and self-awareness, that it is no longer unconventional, but entirely natural, even rational, by the given, unacknowledged logic of its happening. And this is what I am drawn to, after organising over 500 events and teaching for many years. A poet whose knowledge of themselves and their own true concerns is entirely present, without a single seam showing. Patrick is a real one……….”

“And beyond this daily, immediate, unpretentious abstraction, Patrick's interest in family, and in work, are present too. Slurps, like many of his performances, evoke the unconscious repetitive aspects of jobs that are learnt and held in the body and reproduced automatically through processes. For all the amusement of seeing Patrick smear Nutella on a radio, he also veers his work one step towards the living coma of a dead end job where the unthought, and unthinking within the body, becomes more than a metaphor between the coherence and incoherence of our actual lived lives.”

Michael Horovitz : April 1935 – 7 July 2021

Michael and I at the Freeword Centre 2012

I moved to London 15 years ago this September and I spent a decade of that time living in Latimer road, West London. In that decade, the poet of the area, often visible on the street, by chance, and in every bookstore, was the inimitable Michael Horovitz. I met Michael through the brilliant Sheila Ramage, who ran the Notting Hill bookshop for decades, and together they patiently initiated me into a London poetry culture that has formed a significant part of my work and what I see as a tradition I wish to be part of. Erich Fried, Christopher Logue, Alexander Trocchi, Elias Canetti, Ginberg, Burroughs, Gysin and more, the stories were endless and often unrepeatable. Those times are long gone. Michael had lessons for me beyond the tales of the past too, and he generously passed on much of what he had learned from his iconoclastic intervention into British poetry in the 1960s and beyond. He spoke to me specifically about the perils of being perceived as an organiser and anthologist in a national poetry culture that still championed a certain kind of singular poets, whose talent was perceived as mysterious and particular. I mean this not as a slight, but at times his chagrin at having his own work overlooked, and perhaps his place in British poetry too, educated me in other ways, on what would lie ahead for me if I sank my whole heart and soul into trying to change things around me. I ate with him at his home a few times and was fortunate to have him do a series of my events, early on, around 2012 to 2013. His achievements were remarkable, the Albert Hall poetry readings and his Children of Albion anthology the best known, whose importance can't be overstated (and are overlooked, even for their fame – they should've marked a turning point in the UK but remain instead vital notes of resistance to literary parochialism) but he never stopped writing, working, performing, anthologising, printing and sharing. He was a completely unique man, gregarious, droll, ebullient and I only knew him in his 70s and 80s. The energy he must've had as a young man, I can only imagine. To me, his work was also representative of something vital, that beat poetry has a place in the UK poetic vernacular. His work was almost pure beat, if that might be allowed to be a phrase, carrying with it the confident directness of the post-war American enthusiasm and the influence of jazz music on literature. Notting Hill and its environs will be a more muted place without him, as will British poetry in general. I shall celebrate his 86 years by revisiting his poetry and sharing it with friends.

A very fine and detailed obituary has been written here by Douglas Field https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/11/michael-horovitz-obituary

Published : Sight and Sound summer issue feature

Extraordinary to open up the summer issue of Sight and Sound magazine and find this article on page 30. I was pleased to find out recently the international film magazine, run out of the BFI, would have a feature on my latest collection ‘Come and See the Songs of Strange Days : poems on films’ but the way it turned out, written by David Spittle, is exceptional. It’s obviously really positive that editor Kieron Corless asked someone familiar with my work to write the article, and David has been extremely generous. A couple of my poems from the book are also featured, a pair of what i call my ‘screenshot’ poems. I found my copy in a big Tesco, which was funny, so it’s available all over, but also online https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/magazine/summer-2021-issue

European Poetry Festival : summer 2021

Presenting 5 events in July and 9 in November, the EPF returns, live, throughout 2021. For our quintet of summer happenings, we present our showcase Camarade, with 24 poets presenting new works at St Johns on Bethnal Green, alongside an outdoor reading in Richmond Park and events held in collaboration with the Scottish Poetry Library, Peer Gallery and the Manchester Poetry Library. EPF summer 2021 will bring together over 50 British, Britain-based and visiting European poets. All events are free to attend and socially distanced. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/

• July Thurs 1st : Writers Kingston in Richmond Park, London

• July Sat 3rd : The European Camarade in Bethnal Green

• July Mon 5th : Peer Gallery : Swirl of Words in Hoxton, London

• July Wed 7th : Celebrating Scottish and Irish poets, London

• August Thurs 26th : The European Camarade at Manchester Poetry Library

Published : STICKER POEMS

My new book, one I really am happy with. The press has done a brilliant job with it. 'Sticker Poems' from Trickhouse Press
£10.00 128pp, A5, full-colour. https://www.trickhousepress.com/product/-sticker-poems-by-sj-fowler/6?cs=true&cst=custom

From the publisher “Forget everything you thought you knew about stickers and everything you might have suspected about poems. From animals to Mexican wrestlers, football players to medieval knights, zombie apocalypse to motivational mantras, Garbage Pail kids to dinosaurs, Sticker Poems is no less than a snapshot of human cognition, narrated by Fowler’s idiosyncratic poetics. This book offers a bold new take on what poetry means, a playful shock treatment for arthritic literary convention, and the kind of crystalline insight which is usually reserved for the deranged. These poems will stick to you like gum to your hair. Strawberry gum.”

The book contains 99 sticker poems, full colour, on photographic as well as essays by myself and David Spittle. Every order includes two free stickers of sticker poems which you can stick to that which you  wish to stick to.

“Screw your courage to the sticking place! SJ Fowler has invented a new poetic form, and traced out all its kinks and convolutions in one deliriously weird book. Let your nail grow out a bit to really get under the corners of his language and prise them off the page and you’ll be rewarded. I found at least one of these adhesive little poems at the back of my knee after a particularly hard reading session and now it’s stuck. What is there in life but adhesion?” Colin Herd

A note on : Poem Brut in the City

the first live www.poembrut.com event in a long time, over 18 months, and the launch of my new book, sticker poems https://www.stevenjfowler.com/#/stickers/

I took people on a merry dance. I’ve spent a lot of time in the city of london, i explore it often, im interested in its history and so when i wanted to do a poem brut event, outdoors as we emerge out of lockdown, i thought it suited as a locale. 11 poets were given 11 locations but no one but they knew where the readings would be or in what order. so there was a sense of surprise, i hope, amidst the hot weather, hidden corners and general friendly ambiance. we began at bank and ended up at the thames, two hours later, a good few dozen of us. all the videos of the excellent performances are online here www.poembrut.com/city

Published : Photo Poetry Surfaces anthology

https://www.photopoetrysurfaces.com/

well happy to be in the book of the exhibition, an anthology and catalogue in one, of the upcoming photopoetry surfaces - a proper celebration of photo poetry, something i have been teaching, making, sharing, quite concentratedly for the last numbers of years.

works are taken from my book CROWFINGER, with Bard Torgersen, published in december 2020 by sampson low https://www.stevenjfowler.com/crowfinger

A note on : Interview with Angie Butler for The Printed Poetry Project

A conversation between Angie Butler and I, that was live streamed, and attended by more people than i wouldve thought, during, and about our Printed Poetry Project www.stevenjfowler.com/ppp

Angie’s hospitality was so good and we got on so well the conversation was really worthwhile i think.

A note on: Interview with Sylee Gore for Oxford Review of Books

Thanks entirely to Sylee Gore, a poet I admire greatly and have the pleasure to get to know over the last year, I was interviewed for Oxford Review of Books. https://www.the-orb.org

The chat was themed around nature, the city, animals, humans, environment and so that led me to talk of my residency with j&L Gibbons, my time in Kensal Green Cemetery and then read from my 2017 book The Guide to Being Bear Aware, with Shearsman press.

Published : LINK journal

How I find myself in such places I do not know. LINK is a remarkably beautiful journal out of Barcelona, printed in only 25 copies and exploring “[in-between] spaces, modes of communication, and translations within creative practices. An enquiry into future thinking and cultural shifts.” It is “a collaboration that was initiated between Julia Bertolaso (spatial designer) and Veronica Tran (interaction designer), while we were both in Barcelona. The work we do is at the intersection of many creative disciplines, looking into the role of design - primarily through design literacies and embodied cognition.”

I am in it through my friend and collaborator Thomas Duggan, and it represents his world in a certain way, engaging with architecture, design, conceptual thinking around these and other issues. We have a dialogue in the journal, a discussion, about our concerns and collaborations, about what we are doing and why. https://link-journal.com/

Published : 2nd edition of 1000 proverbs and Knives Forks and Spoons books

In 2015 I published a full length conceptual collaborative book with my nemesis Tom Jenks. We sent each other warped poetry proverbs, one liners, for a few years, and Knives Forks and Spoons press, headed up by Alec Newman, put it out. It was a poetry society book recommendation and recently sold out of its print run. Took 5 years but none the less, it has been printed in a 2nd edition, with a fancy new cover, see images. I am delighted, as Tom and I continue our collaborations. It also made me reflect on how important Knives Forks and Spoons press has been to my own work and development. In the image below you can see the six books I have published with them. One of my three debut collections (I released three in the same summer) Red Museum, amongst four collaborative volumes and an early Fights pamphlet. I think if Alec hadn’t have supported my work around this time 2010, 2011, then perhaps I wouldn’t have become as overconfident with publishing as I have. But seriously, his faith in me did me a huge boost and I’m very proud to be associated with what the press has continued to do over the last decade. Visit them https://www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/

The book is available here for 7 pounds www.knivesforksandspoonspress.co.uk/product-page/1000-proverbs-by-s-j-fowler-tom-jenks-57-pages

EUROPOE : an online course on European Poetry

EUROPOE - exploring 20th and 21st century European poetry www.poembrut.com/courses

An online course. Begins June 20th 2021, running for 7 weeks. £200. For booking, via paypal, please click here

The character of European literature remains a hotbed of innovation – a constant remaking of what we know poetry to be. This ambitious course seeks to introduce the English-language poet, or anyone captivated by a wide understanding of what poetry is, to the European tradition in all its richness.

Over the course of seven weeks, we will trace a line from the aftershocks of modernism, to the arrival of symbolism, futurism, surrealism, and more. We explore the constraints that emancipate in the OULIPO movement, the collaborative asemic poetry of the CoBrA group, the onset of conceptual poetry, the birth of Concrete Poetry, the emergence of Sound poetry, leading to the current movement of Performance Literature. We explore electronic poetry and digital literature, and vitally, we present what is happening now – with contemporary poets working in the 21st century.

We will also dip into the ‘grand’ post and pre-war literary poets across the continent, focusing in on their technique to inspire new works. From Mayakovsky to Akhmatova, Brodsky to Dragomoshchenko, Celan to Sachs, Brecht, Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska to Różewicz, Ritsos to Elytis to Seferis, Popa to Jozsef, Salamun, Isou to Queneau, Cendrars, Pessoa. Müller, Ekelöf, Handke, Saariskoski. Alongside the dozens and dozens of contemporary poets, EUROPOE will situate the anglophone poet with roads into an often occluded European tradition that will hopefully last long into the future.