A note on : Horror films poems for The Glue Factory

Thanks to David Collard and Vik Shirley for the invitation to present something on the Glue Factory zoom reading series (my 2nd appearance in a month or so) for a special themed night about horror and horror films.

I read, in my office at uni, poems from my booklet https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/sj-fowler-i-stand-alone-by-the-devils-and-other-poems-on-films - my “slim volume of cinematic poetic ekphrasis.” I talked about being in Mexico a bit, had a real juicy cold, read poems about films like American werewolf in london… The ending is nice as are the masks

Published: Are You Keeping Cardboard? JOAN publishing

https://joanpublishing.org/Project-Are-You-Keeping-Cardboard

Are You Keeping Cardboard? by SJ Fowler, Mireille Fauchon, John Hughes, Rachel Cattle
Newspaper poster
Comes in orange internal mail envelope, 37cm x 52cm, produced for the Small Publishers Fair 2022, Conway Hall, London
£5 + £2 p+p

A pleasure to write with John, Mireille and Rachel, and have my second collaborative publication of 2022 out in the world. Below a full reading of it, launched at the publishers fair

A note on - Readings from Small Publishers Fair 2022

A set of grand performance documentations from the remarkable Small Publishers Fair 2022. My readings with Angie Butler and Egidija Ciricaite in the hallowed Conway Hall Library and my launch of MUEUM as well as the brilliant Andrew Kotting in the Green Room the day before. From the Library above and from the Green Room below

A note on : European Poetry Festival : Winter Camarade!

European Poetry Festival:
Winter Camarade
November Wednesday 23rd 2022
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/camarade22

7.30pm - Free Entry. Old Paradise Yard, 20 Carlisle Ln, London SE1 7LG
Closing our the EPF’s program for 2022, poets in pairs from countries across the continent present brand new collaborations of literary performance, made especially for the night. Held at the remarkable Iklectik Artlab in Waterloo, London with New performances and commissions by 
Xelis de Toro and Blanca Regina
SJ Fowler and Benedict Taylor
Egidija Čiricaitė and Jules Sprake
Milo Thesiger-Meacham and Gianna T.
Daniel Kramb and Julia Rose Lewis
Laura Davis and Shani Cadwallender
Michael O’Mahony and Matt Martin
Aea Varfis-van Warmelo and Prudence Chamberlain-Bussey
Radosław Jurczak, Marta Koronkiewicz and Paweł Kaczmarski
iklectikartlab.com/european-poetry-festival-winter-camarade-2022/

A note on : MUEUM in Mercurius

https://www.mercurius.one/home/mueum “I wander to the book table. One volume lies atop the other two, so you can't read them. Because you can't touch. The large, faded book above the others is shut and attracting no visitors. The cover is creamy, for it’s a big, jaundiced thing. Normally this is the book at the bottom of the pile. I look around, there are no visitors near me or aware of anything but themselves. The label says, Hastur. It feels a bit rude reading someone’s thoughts, but I open the book. As my fingers lift the pages, there is some movement in the gallery that I should take notice of, though I am sick of doing so, so I ignore it. I am on the precipice of reading something important. It's hard to even look up. The tiredness just gets in your bones. The day I've had. The motion attempting to draw my attention is what seems to be a visitor walking through the gallery at a pace that makes no sense. It is too fast, too tall. I have no choice but to slam the book shut and glare.”

Read a whole chapter for nowt and please buy the book here https://tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

A note on : Finlay in Mayfair film in Living With Buildings Festival

Really pleased one of my short films, made with Vilde Bjerke Torset, entitled FINLAY IN MAYFAIR - one of the poets in London films I began during lockdown - will be screened at Coventry’s Living With Buildings festival run by Adam Steiner

LWB- IV - Live Film Screening - Wednesday, 23 November 2022
Find us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/events/1134689370589568
Living With Buildings is a festival of films that explore themes of people, poetry and place.
Past work has focussed on how we move through streets, the decline of social housing and the rise gentrification, roads to nowhere, and the space in between.
Find out more about the Disappear Here project - http://www.disappear-here.org/

Published : Show Me The Original

So happy to share the buying link for my first collaborative publication of 2022 - SHOW ME THE ORIGINAL: nine thoughts on poetic language (2022) made with (but entirely by) the remarkable Egidija Ciricaite. We made this for the Small Publisher’s Fair and the process was so smooth, fun, inspiring - a proper collaboration. And what a job Egidija did making this rare, beautiful, elegant limited edition

http://www.egidija.com/books.html

A note on : Poem Brut returns at Rich Mix / Nov 19th

Poem Brut at Rich Mix
November Saturday 19th 2022
www.poembrut.com/events

7.30pm - Free Entry - 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, Shoreditch, London E1 6LA
New performances and commissions by Jade King, Alice Evans, Michael Sutton, Paul Hawkins, Mary Paterson, Stephen Emmerson, James Knight and more..

I’m happy to say Poem Brut will return for a new season of events, exhibitions, publications and workshops, with its next happening taking place at Rich Mix. This marks the beginning of the fourth iteration of the project, which explores the potential of what a live poem might be, asking poets, writers and artists to present new works, made for the night, as performance. These live poems might explore language against space, time, mess, colour, writing, speaking and moving. Find out more www.poembrut.com and join us on Nov 19th in London.

Supported by Arts Council England and Serendip Studios.

A note on : MUEUM audio book part two on Resonance extra

https://extra.resonance.fm/series/tenement-press-presents-sj-fowler-s-mueum

If you go to this link you can hear two audio works, both sounds pretty grand I think.

The first is part two of the audiobook of my novella MUEUM read by me.

The second is audio from the novella’s launch including Iain Sinclair, Chloe Aridjis and Chris McCabe.

What an amazing job Milo Thesiger Meacham and Dominic Jaeckle have done with these.

A note on : Reading MUEUM at Small Publishers Fair, Green Room

The fourth launch of MUEUM, I spun in a chair. Such a lovely, intimate green room reading during my extraordinary experience having the exhibition at the Small Publishers Fair while also launching a novella. I felt feel fortunate. I wanted to monkey but not challenge, so I moved about. And so nice to read alongside Kyra and Cristina, and what a great job Dominic Jaeckle at Tenement has done with this film, full of mood

https://tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

A note on : Stink poems in new Disease Anthology

DISEASE An exciting collaboration between Carnaval Press and sunseekers, involving almost 50 poets and some visual artists writing on the theme of disease. https://carnavalpress.com/catalogue-2/

Very happy to have poems in this new anthology edited by Rushika Wick, Ana Seferovic and Virna Teixeira. Especially so because they are poems taken from my ongoing collection THE PARTS OF THE BODY THAT STINK, which I hope will emerge in the future.

Small Publisher's Fair, Bibliopoe

Without hyperbole, one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. So much to write about this I’ll be coming back to it later. Succinctly put, having almost everything I’ve published out in the cases of the Small Publisher’s Fair did give me pause. Whether it would appear egotistical, and whether I would deflated. The generosity of people, that comes from the culture of this fair - the curation of Helen Mitchell and the team, and the melding of poets, fine presses, indie publishers all together - was such that it really felt like a moment of real recognition. I had so many friends helping me with my book table too, over a dozen, and sold a lot of books. And I got to see so many friends, and make new ones too. Going 11am to 7pm two days in a row, I thought it’d be exhausting, but it wasn’t in the end. It was the opposite. And amidst it, my novella flew out into people’s hands, and I gave two readings, and had a lot of fun. I have a great debt of gratitude to the many who made this so special for me. Some pics below and more soon on it.

A note on : Poem Brut in Kingston, collaborating with Nick Roth

An amazing night in Kingston and the return of Poem Brut. https://www.writerskingston.com/poembrut22/

A jam packed evening with over twenty poets sharing new performance right across the literary gammut. So much good will, and properly exciting work, and a really big audience.

I had the chance to work with Nick Roth again, who had flown in for this from Dublin. He is an amazing artist and musician, and conceptually so unpretentious but resonant. We are really trying to get to what is possible in improvisation when the instrument is a voice and the voice is an instrument.


A note on : Kamen's Lens, collaborating with Rebecca Kamen

I have had the great privilege to collaborate with the artist Rebecca Kamen since we met at Salzburg Global in 2015. Her pioneering work exploring high concept scientific ideas and her own neurological experiences have allowed me a way in to my own explorations of neuropoetics. Our work together, for me, methodogically, is probably the purest form of found text writing I do. I take her words and rearrange them.

Our latest collaboration is for her exhibition https://gershoni.com/culture/dyslexic-dictionary Dyslexic Dictionary in San Francisco. You can watch the video here, or visit this page which has some wonderful information on Rebecca’s work https://gershoni.com/artist/rebecca-kamen

Launching MUEUM at Waterstones

The third MUEUM launch and a really lovely evening with friends and students and colleagues at Waterstones, Kingston, hosted by Katerina Koulouri. The pictures below and at the link show what kind of night it was. My performance was improvised.

Everyone performed remarkably well and many were very kind in their comments about me book. All videos here https://www.writerskingston.com/museum/ and novella here https://tenementpress.com/M-U-E-U-M

and the amazing Alban Low did sketches of the poets live, all here http://artofjazz.blogspot.com/2022/10/sj-fowler-mueum-launch.html

Onion Boys at Hundred Years Gallery

A brilliant Sunday evening, October 9th 2022, my debut at Hundred Years Gallery (who couldn’t have been nicer and more welcoming to my specific kind of work) and the first performance of the Onion Boys - which is just musician Benedict Taylor and I, as a duo, exploring talking and playing at the same time, with complete non-preparation. For my own part, I brought my collection the goodness gang, who are veg and fruit with faces. It was a nice time. We did 36 minutes but only 12 was filmed, here >^

Launching MUEUM at Brick Lane Books

A night I’ll not forget. Made special not only for it being the first fiction I’ve had out, launched in such a resonant way at such a staple of a bookshop, and with peers I admire so. But also because the night felt like it was about lineage, or something like that. Brian Catling had passed away in the days before, and Iain Sinclair, who has been so so supportive of me was his dear friend. Iain spoke of him, and with Stephen Watts also in the audience, I felt very much a fortunate person to be aligned with their work and concerns, in this book MUEUM, and in general.

Tenement press has crafted a film of the readings, from Chris McCabe, Iain Sinclair, Chloe Aridjis and I here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXDljjgonug

MUEUM audiobook on Resonance and interview with Eley Williams

Resonance Extra will broadcast my novella MUEUM tomorrow Saturday October 1st at 1pm as an audio book. extra.resonance.fm/episodes/tenement-press-presents-sj-fowler-s-mueum-i-of-iv-2022-10-01 It is the first of four parts, recorded in their studio chapel in South London, with parts 2, 3, 4 broadcast on November 5th, December 3rd and January 7th respectively.

The novella and all information on these broadcasts, here https://tenementpress.com/m-u-e-u-m

In addition to the novella's launch at Brick Lane Books on Wednesday October 5th, https://bricklanebookshop.org/events/#mueum, there will be additional launches.

Thursday October 13th, 7pm,. at Waterstones, Kingston Upon Thames https://www.waterstones.com/events/an-evening-at-the-museum-meet-sj-fowler-author-of-mueum-and-writers-kingston/kingston-upon-thames

And Sunday afternoon October 9th, 4pm, with Benedict Taylor, at Hundred Years Gallery http://hundredyearsgallery.co.uk/music-the-onion-boys/

And also a video of a chat between the amazing Eley Williams and I, about MUEUM