Steven J Fowler

Steven J. Fowler or SJ Fowler (born 1983) is a contemporary English poet, writer and avant-garde artist, and the founder of European Poetry Festival.[1]

Life

Fowler was born in Truro, Cornwall, and studied at the University of Durham and the University of London, Birkbeck College. He lives in London.

Work

Since his debut in 2010, Fowler has produced a diverse body of work across poetry, performance, experimental theatre, visual poetry, concrete poetry and sound poetry, short stories and non-fiction. Aiming to operate through all potentials of the language arts, concerned with method as well as meaning, his practice has been "associated with subjects as diverse as neuroaesthetics, mortality, linguistics, collaboration, fight sports, prisons & bears".[2]

He has received commissions for his work from prestigious institutions like Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, The London Sinfonietta, Wellcome Collection and Liverpool Biennial. Since 2010 he has been associate artist at Rich Mix Arts Centre, and since 2014 he has been poet in residence at award-winning landscape architecture firm J&L Gibbons.[3]

Poetry

Since his debut in 2010, Fowler has published 9 collections of poetry and 12 chapbooks or pamphlets.[4] Their subject matter ranges from prescription drugs to internet surveillance, boxing and prisons, museums and contemporary cinema.

Visual art

His work with visual art reflects an active contemplation of the aesthetic qualities of language or linguistic mediums in concrete poetry, photo poetry, writing art, calligrams and asemic writing. Building on traditions like Dadaism and calligraphy art, it explores writing materials, the composition of handwriting and mark-making and the role of illustration and legibility in determining poetic meaning.[5] His pieces include poems printed on synthetic silk, a book of calligrams in the shape of Moomins and other fantastical animals, and a concrete poem #1st Crown of the Hoi Polloi (Fights, 2014) engraved in granite by Danish artist Kamilla Jørgensen.[6] He has been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Southbank Centre, and in galleries in Vilnius, Berlin, Copenhagen, Lugano and Virginia.

Sound poetry

Covering practices like sound poetry, sonic art, and improvised vocalization, his work engages with the most experimental iterations of speech and sound. He was featured in The Liberated Voice (2019) exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, which recounted the history of phonetic and sound poetry in the 20th and 21st century.[7]

Other projects include Lunalia (2018), a collaboration with artist and opera singer Maja Jantar, which responded to the lunar cycle with exchanged recordings, and several collaborations with celebrated improviser Phil Minton. He is a member of Minton's Feral Choir.[8]

Performance

His work has become known internationally for his "innovation in the field of live literature",[9] in a practice that reflects the ideas put forth by performance artists like David Antin. Concerned with the potential of liveness, as opposed to the traditional poetry reading, his repertoire spans a diverse range of experimental practices. These include improvised talking performances, PowerPoint performances, sounds in movement, action drawing and painting, pugilistica, material destruction, auction performances, and mechanical hamster performances.[10]

Film

Following a series of cinematic collaborations, his first feature-length art film, The Animal Drums, premiered at Whitechapel Gallery Cinema in December 2018. The Animal Drums "charts the particular, baffled and morbid character of English attitudes to mortality, along with the specific influence of place and conformity on the quintessentially English deferral of emotion and melodrama."[11] Projects prior to this include The Soundings Films (2015-2016), which explores sound poetry and conceptual performance through film, and Enthusiasm (2016), which looks at the collision point between internal and external languages.

His latest cinematic project, Disappearing Worrmood (2020), is a collaboration with filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova, explored the overlooked aesthetic of Borough of Brent's Willesden Junction, Wormwood scrubs, Kensal Green Cemetery and The Grand Union Canal, the film strives to see a closer place, alien, idiosyncratic and yet familiar.[12]

Theatre

His two full-length plays, Dagestan (2015) and Mayakovsky (2017) were performed at Rich Mix, London. Dagestan was produced by Penned in the Margins. "Set in the shadowy world of global security", Dagestan invited the spectator to "enter the minds of private military contractors to uncover a culture of violence, gallows humour and moral uncertainty".[13] Mayakovsky, commissioned by Dash Arts for the Rich Mix' centenary commemoration of the Russian Revolution, explored the life and death of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement.

European Poetry Festival

Fowler is the founder and director of the European Poetry Festival took place the first time in April 2018, and "aims to not only innovative what a live poetry experience might be, but to inculcate community and engagement between poets across the continent, as well as between new audiences and complex poetries".[14] Since its inception, the festival has seen over 100 European poets gather in front of audiences across UK and Ireland for events pioneering performance and collaboration in contemporary European literary and avant-garde poetry.

In 2019, the festival released Europoe, a special edition anthology featuring sixty European poets. It also launched the Sampson Low European Poets Series, a series showcasing contemporary Norwegian poets in translation.[15] In 2020, the series will focus on Austrian contemporary poets.

2019 also saw the debut of the Nordic Poetry Festival, a sister-festival to the EPF, which showcased the contribution Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and the Sami peoples are making to 21st-century poetry.[16]

Writer's Centre Kingston

In 2017 he was appointed director of Writers' Centre Kingston, Kingston University's "literary cultural centre dedicated to creative writing in all its forms with an annual program of events from talks, to workshops and festivals".[17] He launched Sampson Low Pamphlet Series,[18] a series of publications which evidence the work of current and recent Kingston University Creative Writing students.

Poem Brut

He is founder and curator of Poem Brut, an initiative that has generated over a dozen events since 2017, alongside multiple exhibitions, workshops, conferences and publications. Its aim is to "offer an alternative understanding of 21st-century literature" by "embracing text and colour, space and time, handwriting, composition, abstraction, illustration, sound, mess and motion, [to affirm] the possibilities of the page, the voice and the pen in a computer age".[19]

Fowler is the editor at 3:AM Magazine and former executive editor at The Versopolis Review.

Collaborations

In his own practice as well as his curatorial work, Fowler is a pioneer in collaborative inter-disciplinary practice. Collaborations include poets, artists, photographers, dancers, sculptors, film makers and writers. He has published two books based around the concept of collaborative practice: Enemies (2013) and its sequel Nemesis (2019).

Enemies Project and the Poetry Camarade

In 2013 he launched the Enemies Project, which curates original collaborative works, performances and exhibitions between poets, artist, photographers, sculptures and other creative practitioners. His "Camarade" model, a format of live literary events which was the flagship Enemies project event and is key to the structure of the EPF, has spawned hundreds of collaborative works. It asks pairs of poets, many of whom have never met before, to produce new collaborative works for the night of the reading, with no criteria other than a time limit.[20]

Attempting to innovative the possibilities of collaboration and the written word, Enemies has involved over 700 practitioners in nearly 20 countries and received awards from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, the British Council, Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Conaculta and others.

Fowler is lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University, has taught at Tate Modern, Poetry School and Photographer's Gallery, among others.

Selected bibliography

Poetry
  • I Will Show You The Life of the Mind (on Prescription Drugs) : Dostoyevsky Wannabe 2020
  • The Guide to Being Bear Aware (Shearsman Books 2017)
  • {Enthusiasm} : Test Centre 2015
  • The Rottweiler's guide to the Dog Owner (Eyewear press 2014)
  • Enemies: the selected collaborations of SJ Fowler (Penned in the Margins 2013)
  • Fights (Veer Books 2011)
  • Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (Anything Anymore Anywhere press 2011)

Art books
  • Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020)
  • Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018)
  • I fear my best work behind me (Stranger Press 2017)

Selected collaborators

References
  1. "About". European Poetry Festival. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  2. "About". SJ Fowler. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  3. "the greener infrastructure". the greener infrastructure. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  4. "Bibliography". SJ Fowler. Retrieved 2020-08-19.
  5. "S. J. Fowler — Hotel". partisanhotel.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-03-31.
  6. "kamilla jørgensen/dyrestien". Kamilla Jørgensen (in Danish). Retrieved 2020-03-31.
  7. "The Liberated Voice". Palais de Tokyo EN. 2019-02-25. Retrieved 2020-03-30.
  8. "Bio". Phil Minton. Retrieved 2020-03-30.
  9. Ep 12: Steven J. Fowler, retrieved 2020-03-29
  10. "Performance Literature". SJ Fowler. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  11. "After Animal Drums — Hotel". partisanhotel.co.uk. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  12. "Disappearing Wormwood". Whitechapel Gallery. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  13. "Penned in the Margins | Events | Dagestan (Scratch)". Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  14. "European Poetry Festival 2019 – EACWP". eacwp.org. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  15. "European Poetry Festival". Sampson Low. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  16. "NPF 2019". European Poetry Festival. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  17. "Writers' Centre Kingston". Writers' Centre Kingston. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  18. "Writer's Centre Kingston Sampson Low Poetry Pamphlet series". Sampson Low. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  19. "Poem Brut". Poem Brut. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
  20. "Camarade". European Poetry Festival. Retrieved 2020-03-29.
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