Poetry School courses - 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2020

Maintenant / Vanguard / Mondo / Camarade / European Poetry Now / The Light Room / A Language Art

I have taught 10 courses at the Poetry School, an organisation dedicated to adult learning, wholly focused on poetry, in London and beyond. The courses have covered specific movements in European, British and World avant-garde writing, as well as programs on photography and poetry and modern art and poetry.

From teaching face to face in the Poetry School's old base in Lambeth, to an International Course, with participants from Mexico to Athens, on their purpose specific Campus platform, these courses have allowed me to communicate the methodologies, the theories and practices of the poets who have inspired me. I’ve also been commissioned for articles and interviews and organised events with the organisation.

• Article on poetry and photography https://poetryschool.com/new-courses/the-double-image-of-poetry-and-photography/

• Interview with Sarah Dawson https://poetryschool.com/interviews/maintenant-interview-s-j-fowler/

• Commission for How I wrote it http://www.stevenjfowler.com/blog/2015/7/31/how-i-did-it-the-interrupters-my-article-for-the-poetry-school

• The Poetry School Camarade event http://www.theenemiesproject.com/poetryschoolcamarade

Course #10 - The Language Art: Modern Art & Poetry : July August 2020

Explore the intersections between the post-war traditions of modern art and avant-garde poetry.

Over this intensive Studio+ Course, you will discover poets and artists who make use of language, sound, space, printing, and writing, to see how these practises are fundamental to both artforms. We’ll also bring light to some great moments in modern art and poetry that have enriched the traditions of both writing and art-making.

This is a practical course for people interested in developing their skills in either art forms, alongside furthering their understanding of experimental poetry and contemporary art; the onus will be on how these great moments in modern art and poetry can enrich writing and art-making, rather than dense historical analysis. https://poetryschool.com/courses/the-language-art-modern-art-poetry

Teaching photography and poetry at Poetry School January 31, 2019

a bit of man ray and paul eluard

Had another generous experience sharing ideas at The Poetry School, this time developing concepts I came up with in 2018 for a course at the photographer’s gallery, and moving them into more practical territory for poets. I spoke a lot about the possibilities of hybridity, and as before, really sought to pick people’s minds on what they thought were the reasons for these two arts overlapping with success so rarely. Some really talented folk in the room, it was a lovely few days down by Canada Water, and like with so many PS courses, I’m sure some of the poets will go on to become friends in the future.

Course # 9 The Light Room: Poetry & Photography - a course for Poetry School

Explore the light and dark of poems to develop new ways of seeing

A course that explores the traditions of photography and poetry, entwined. We’ll aim to reach beyond the notions of illustration and response to reveal the connections, potentials, and co-habitations of the two artforms and explore how collaboration can enhance each medium and evoke what makes them so uniquely compelling. Participants will discover poets, photographers and artists from around the world and discuss ideas surrounding composition, language, light, sound, space, printing, narrative and writing. We’ll take inspiration from the work of Blaise Cendrars, Paul Eluard, and Paul Muldoon, alongside Duane Michaels, Wolfgang Tillmans, Tacita Dean, Sophie Calle and John Baldessari, before producing new pieces of your own. This is a chance for poets to develop their own projects and understandings of new and original ways of seeing, reading, and writing. No photography experience is necessary.

Plus an article for Poetry School, introducing a new course I’ll be teaching in the new year

Creative mediums are not indefinable. They have essential elements that mean they are not something else at root. But their practise is not best served by recourse to the ‘it is whatever you want it to be’ line of thinking…. https://poetryschool.com/new-courses/the-double-image-of-poetry-and-photography/

Course #8 - Mondo for Poetry School November 2018

Mondo Monda Mondu Monde Mondi https://poetryschool.com/courses/mondo-the-global-avant-garde/ Saturday 3 November and Sunday 4 November. Two-day workshop, 10.30am – 4.30pm.

Grand to do another weekend course for the Poetry School, I had such a positive experience earlier this year, sharing European work and this November, I hope to repeat the trick. Mondo draws on a personal interest of mine, attempting a global vision of what poetry has gone through on the last 70 years or so - how individual cultures, languages, seismic political changes have shaped fundamental modes of writing. Not just content that is, which translates and then sits across nations through that translation, but actually context too. How poetry itself has shifted, and what we can glean from that. I've followed quite a few hundred rabbit holes thanks to friends across the world and the fact this isn't the most popular area of research. I will make this weekend quite open, explorative, using examples from many nations - Nigeria, Japan, Russia, Peru, China, Syria, Canada, etc... - so it won't be built around geography so much as ideas. Come and join me if you please

Mondo: The Global Avant-Garde Face-To-Face Course
Journey through a world of avant-garde poetry over this jam-packed weekend with SJ Fowler.
Explore a world of avant-garde poetry and discover how remarkable explorations in the written word often compliment, rather than antagonise, more formal writing practice. Using examples from Canada to Nigeria, from Syria to Japan, from Latvia to Brazil, the course will focus on methods of original poetry practise that have emanated from some of the 20th centuries most exciting experimental poetry groups of the post-war period. Rooted in making, this course – with the energy, dynamism and invention of the writing it explores – will enrich anyone’s poetry horizons. Mondo is not intended as representative of anything but an idiosyncratic selection of international avant-garde movements, all presented as a gateway to new writing methodologies for contemporary poets.

Farewell Lambeth, a great experience teaching European Poetry at Poetry School (March 2018)

Lambeth Walk is synonymous for me with the Poetry School. The city is a massive patchwork of associations, splicing my own experiences against the ground. I feel part of something larger in London, in small patterns, of walking, visiting places for a purpose. Getting the Bakerloo line to Lambeth North, walking down to the Poetry School, where I started teaching in early 2014, and where I really developed the teaching techniques I tend to use now, and where I met lots of poets whom are now friends, is a really positive memory. I learned so much in that building, that row of buildings. The Poetry School is about to move on, as all things must, but I was really pleased I managed to do one last course in the old building before I've no real reason, for now, to visit Lambeth Walk. It was as good as anything I've done for the PS, a weekend exploring contemporary European Poetry, that I ran alongside on online course, on the same subject, with poets from across the globe.

I woke up very early on both weekends days, in the snow, the tubes quieter than normal, and was joined by a dozen really brilliant, positive minded poets. They couldn't have been more engaged and enthusiastic, it was just one of those experiences where the human mix makes it resoundingly positive. I shared some poetry I've never taught before, most especially around the notion of a new european lyric tradition, with poets like Max Czollek, Ann Cotten, Tomica Bajsic and many others I've been lucky enough to meet. This complimented explorations of sound, visuality, materiality, performance, new surrealism and pretty essential ideas that drive a lot of european poetry. Some of the participants will read on an upcoming European Poetry Festival event and it seems already that the contact with others that really motivates me to do these courses has begun once more, anew, thanks to what the poetry school does. www.stevenjfowler.com/poetryschool

Courses #6 & #7
European Poetry Now! 2018

My storied relationship with the Poetry School, where I have had the fortune to meet and work with many brilliant people who are also fine poets, continues after over two years of hiatus with a pair of courses dedicated to exploring the contemporary golden age of European Poetry, not only because I'm directing a brand new massive European Poetry Festival next April 2018 in the UK, but also because we must celebrate European work, that is our work, as many try to prize it from our fingers. Both courses will explore numerous poets and practises, rooted in methods, extensive examples on the page and on video, and tied to modern poetry history. They will each be special I think, as both are passion projects for me, things I'm doing for the love of the subject and I have every intention of making them as inspiring for those on the courses as the work has been for me. See below for more information on these courses, and further below for info on my previous work with The Poetry School.

Course #5 - Camarade : collaboration and poetry : July 2016

An event was held to finish this weekend course exploring the ways and means of collaborative poetry http://www.theenemiesproject.com/poetryschoolcamarade

Course #4 - Mondo: a world of avant-garde poetry - 2015: Nov 5th to Dec 3rd

Explore a world of avant-garde poetry movements and discover how their remarkable explorations in the written word often compliment, rather than antagonise, more formal writing practice. http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/mondo--the-global-avant-garde.php

Over 5 sessions, 5 global avant-garde poetic movements will be used as references to springboard you into new writing techniques, stressing the possibility amidst the history. Covering five different movements of the post-war period, in five different nations, this course - with the energy, dynamism and invention of the writing it explores - will enrich anyone’s poetry horizons. Mondo is not intended as representative of anything but an idiosyncratic selection of international avant-garde movements, all presented as a gateway to new writing methodologies for contemporary poets.

Poets from the Maintenant & Maintenant International courses read at Camarade (June 2015)

An event I staged during my solo exhibition Mahu, this Camarade event followed the usual format of pairs of poets being asked to write together to present new works for the night. It was a lovely reading, but what made it somewhat special that night was that six of poets performing had been participants on my courses for the Poetry School. Sarah Dawson and Lucy Furlong has attended my very first program in early 2014, and have since become peers, having read for me more than once. Their work together was so outstanding that many who hadn't come across their work before immediately asked me for links and information. The other two pairs, Alice Kate and Kate Wakeling, and Cathy Dreyer and L'Abri Tipton, had been participants in my Maintenant International course, which involved people remotely, from around the world. To that point, L'Abri visited from Lille, Cathy from Oxfordshire, outside of London and Alice from Lima, Peru. They all created wonderful works via correspondence and it was really satisfying to see the content of courses have such a positive effect on writers already quite clearly accomplished in their own right. Hard not to be proud by association.

Course #3 - Maintenant International: a course to the world (Spring 2015)

I was delighted to again be teaching my Maintenant course for the Poetry School. This was exciting on two fronts: The first is that this course, the first time round, was undoubtedly one of my most positive teaching experiences. The second reason in that this second go of Maintenant was an International course. This meant it could be taken by anyone in the world. It was very exciting to be able to relate my ideas and my thoughts about these 5 great movements (you can see the course breakdown below) with people who have a wholly other perspective than my own. This accessibility is such an exciting prospect when teaching, and a credit to the innovative pedagogical approach of the poetry school. Moreover it meant the course wass assignment driven, i.e. writing driven, and this was always the hope, that the course would be a platform for others to create their own work, their own movements, or at least radical and personal ideas for themselves and their writing. 

Three asemic poems by Kate Wakeling, written for Maintenant.

The great upside of the experience was seeing how generous the participants were, many of whom were brilliant and established poets in their own right - Vahni Capildeo, Jack Little, Kate Wakeling (whose incredible asemic writing triptych sits above, produced for the course) - and how my assignments seemed, at the least, at least unique. So much of the material was new to everyone and they responded with enthusiasm, which was best seen in the work produced. Of course everyone had to rely on a basic self-sufficiency to participate and this took me a small while to properly realise, that I perhaps needn't do more, or as much as I was doing, but to trust that people would take it upon themselves to write and read as much as they wished. There is an inherent cutoff in the teaching process in International, online teaching, there isn't the exchange, often unmentioned, but vital to the experience, between people who meet face to face when sharing ideas, especially methodological ones. But in the end, and it was towards the very end I truly realised this, this had a different but not lesser momentum, and the visual poetry, the asemic writing, the collage, the sound poetry and the constraint writing these kind people produced, from Mexico to Peru, from Greece to France, was really often of amazing quality. It really buoyed me to see just how much fine work had come from these ideas, once again.

Course #2 - Vanguard: exploring the British avant-garde (Autumn 2014)

A course I taught during the Autumn term 2014  http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/vanguard.php Really something I felt a responsibility to formulate, to realise after my first course at the Poetry School that there was a real appetite to find out more about a tradition I had been exposed to from day one of my writing in London. I made the decision, after a great deal of thought and research, to divide the course into concepts rather than movements or eras, or factions. For obvious reasons, perhaps, and I was very happy with the results. The experience of the course was different than Maintenant, full of brilliant moments, including a psychogeographical lesson where we walked about Lambeth at night during classtime, recording our thoughts and creating new Situationist texts, but also more about dialogue, perhaps because everything in the room was, by and large, British. It seemed more personal and a little but more contentious, which wasn't my intention but is often productive in it's own right. So beautiful to have to chance to share the work of those who should be known so much more than they are and who have proved fundamental to my own writing.

“Explore the expansive modern tradition of British experimental poetry, as SJ Fowler presents a necessarily idiosyncratic insight into the vibrant innovative poetries which have sought originality in the UK over the last 50 years.

Five bi-weekly sessions will explore the distinctive qualities of the British avant garde and chart a course through an enormous field of writing. Not formed by generation, region or faction, Vanguard explores characteristics that are possessed by, but in no way encompass, the work of many great British poets. These are qualities, and poets, chosen through the acknowledged limits of Steven's knowledge and interests, & representative of that alone.

During the course the onus will be on how these qualities in modern British poetry can enrich writing practise, rather than dense historical analysis, and how experimentation emerges from necessary innovations that are required for a poet to be truly contemporary in a rapidly changing society. Vanguard is a chance for students to diversify from singular, retrograde modes of writing and provides an all too rare insight into a world of poetry that is a profound part of our literary culture and heritage.”

Poets from Maintenant reading at Camaradefest II (October 25th 2014)

A vital part of my pedagogical practise is the synthesis between sharing work and methodology in a classroom and then creating the opportunities for those receiving the information to use it. Though I emphasise process over product and context over content always, one still needs the chance to make the content for the context to happen. So it was lovely to host five of the poets from my first Maintenant course (Sarah Dawson, Robin Boothroyd, Lucy Furlong, Jonah Wilberg and Harry Wooler) at the 2nd Camaradefest, held at the Rich Mix in Brick Lane, London on October 25th 2014, where 100 poets read in 50 pairs over one day.

Interview for the Poetry School: with Sarah Dawson (Spring 2014)

One of my most considerately prepared interviews, this discussion with Sarah Dawson presaged my first course with the Poetry School and remains a valuable representation of some of my thoughts behind the course and my activities in general. You can read the full whack here: http://campus.poetryschool.com/maintenant-interview-s-j-fowler/

Your course will be covering Oulipo, Austrian postwar modernism, concrete poetry, CoBrA and the British Poetry Revival. Can you explain how you came to be interested in these movements?

S J: I think because I came to poetry quite recently, only four years ago really, and very much fell into it, my reading habits, my influences, are not really formulated along formal lines. I wasn’t handed classical poetry as a child, didn’t listen to whatever was taught at school, didn’t grow up valuing a certain tradition or style or form, I have just read continuously, whatever I could where I could. For years I was completely isolated in my reading too, being led into it by philosophy, which I studied, and as such I was in a bubble, didn’t have the chance to develop any sense of prejudice against poetry in translation, or avant garde work, as somehow otherly. That’s perhaps why I read this kind of work alongside poetry that might be better known in this country in equal measure.

Moreover, each movement that I’m going to be covering in the course has its own special place in my own development as a poet. The Oulipo showed me how structural freedom can actually be more restricting than formal structures and concepts, because that freedom is mediated by very specific influences and tropes. Austrian postwar modernism is the example par excellence of avant garde writers writing for a purpose, and not as a self-indulgent stance against something, and that is to expose the ever present instincts of fascism in a nation that had tried to plaster over in immediate history and responsibility. Concrete poetry showed me that language is not mediated only by its content, but by its appearance, by the material it appears on – it has multiple dimensions, it is art as well as language. CoBrA really exemplifies the very best of what post-war European poetry aims to achieve – collectivity, collaboration, dynamic experimentation. And the British Poetry Revival, well this was a seismic discovery for me. An entire legion of incredible writers, writing about my country, writing works of genius, completely hidden from the mainstream reader.

In the course description it says that the techniques used by the poets you’ll be covering can, ‘compliment, rather than antagonise, more formal writing practice’. Could you expand on what you mean by that?

S J: I think there’s a territorial, self-defeating dualism that seems to permeate through people’s perception of the experimental, that it requires a philosophical or political praxis to be part of their writing. That it is against something, more than it is for something. This isn’t true, fundamentally. Experimentation is about finding the authentic way to express a very certain content. And that’s why a lot of formal poems fail in my opinion, because they are using the wrong form, because it is familiar or it is all the writer knows, to express their content. I hope to just humbly, gently, suggest that these movements show us new worlds of form and method toward content we might want to access and express.

Course #1 - Maintenant: exploring European avant-garde poetry  (Spring 2014)

One of the best teaching experiences of my life, the first course for the Poetry School - Maintenant. I got very lucky with the group of people who came to share their thoughts, but also years of research, really from the start of my writing as a whole, as well as from the 98 issue deep interview series I ran here www.maintenant.co.uk, into contemporary European poetry came to bear. I knew more than I had thought I knew, and had a passion for much that I had forgotten. This in the ideas behind the movements more than anything - in teaching the course I came to realise so many of these brave, wondrous engagements with experimental literature on the continent since WWII had genuine and fully realised political, ideological and philosophical ideas driving them, and these were good ideas. Not at all pretentious or removed, so many of these movements were about responding to the horrors of the middle 20th century and could be gleaned for the unique problems, and opportunities of our time. So I realised more than I had that the European avant garde was wholly relevant to me, that I shared, often, its concerns, and so took much away in realisation of how and why my writing had become what it has. I think the 16 people who came every two weeks to speak with me at the Poetry school thought so too. So we engaged deeply with the potential of technology and writing, of political and social engagement, of collaboration and community. Their amazing energy and their desire to make these historical groups and movements new and real to them was palpable, and amongst other things, at one of my events celebrating Danish poetry, they did an incredible group performance which you can watch below. My connection to most of those who participated has gone on to stand the test of time and this really is the purpose of these courses for me, to extend a community, to meet like minded readers and writers.

The Maintenant course was taught in Spring term 2014 http://www.poetryschool.com/courses-workshops/face-to-face/maintenant.php & explored post-war European avant garde poetry.

The Poetry School: a cameo thanks to Chris McCabe - April 2013

http://www.poetryschool.com/ The Poetry school is an intriguing thing. An admirable endeavour, but one, perhaps because of my background in the avant garde (or towards it, a bit more than some), that I haven't encountered often. My first such tryst came thanks to Chris McCabe, who kindly invited me to join him for the last hour of his penultimate class on collaborations. Set back on Lambeth walk, amidst boutique shops and a few housing estates, the evening was spent chatting with genuinely engaged and interesting people about Enemies, Camarade and my opinions on collaboration in and outside of poetry. I brought some books, books in boxes and anecdotal stories along with the theories. Then I joined the group in a frightening local pub afterwards... The hope, of course, in such a class is that the teacher is just leading the flow of an organic exchange, rather than being demonstrative. In this situation, where those attending were so erudite, artists and poets of significant merit in their own right, and the teacher was so capable and multifaceted as a poet himself, this was the inevitable result. It is really considerable that people will pay to attend such a focused programme about poetry, and collaborations at that! after working a full day, and bring so much creativity, energy and enthusiasm. Respect to everyone involved. I'm sure the relationships began on the night will bear fruit in the future. Here is a link to one of the students in the class speaking with the Poetry School too. http://www.poetryschool.com/courses/featured-student--sophie-herxheimer.php