SJ Fowler is a concrete, sound and experimental poet. His work has been featured in over 60 journals and magazines, and his collections and pamphlets have been published by over a dozen presses. He is a member of the Writers Forum, the London based avant-garde poetry group formed in the mid-1950s by Bob Cobbing. He edits the Maintenant interview series for 3am magazine, introducing avant garde European poetry into England. His work is concerned with the latency of repression in capitalist culture, and often, the sport of boxing.
I went bookstomping in East Finchley & Highgate yesterday, so reading a lot. I also have to work up something to read at a poetry workshop on Saturday.
They know about my work but they think its all squiggles and stuff. They are wholly accurate and I appreciate their brevity.
Reinhard Heydrich
Smell, though I fear losing my sight above all else.
A lot of people know outside of poetry, but I used to be a professional mixed martial artist, fighting in cages. Im on youtube punching people in the face alot.
Not my undergraduate education, it was a mental vacuum. Since then it has been the very centre of my life and owe it almost everything that makes me happy.
Tomorrow, I’m always using two Ms.
In the last decade or so, Sloths have been regularly found eating out of toilets and cesspits. Their digestion system works so slowly they can subsist on human faeces. True.
Hope to get my doctorate in Philosophy soon and teach at a University. Seems a nice life.
Have a family, be a house husband, write poetry & read all day.
If anyone is picking up the mantle of experimental poetry at the moment it’s Tom Jenks. He is at the centre of the community in Manchester, as part of the team running the Other Room readings and website and his own press, which produces avant garde poetry objects, Zimzalla, is a leading light in the UK right now. His poetry is phenomenal too, really well thought through and vivid.
For far too long experimental poetry has been isolated, from both the poetry mainstream in the UK and from practises in the visual and sonic arts which share its primary concerns. Experimental music and sound poetry, and collage / conceptual art and concrete poetry has so much in common and yet they are divided. There are younger artists breaking this divide, and Jenny Hval, a brilliant singer, musician, poet and theorist from Oslo is doing some groundbreaking work at the moment.
Márton Koppány has been producing work of immense quality in the field of visual poetry for over thirty years. His work is led by a suspicion and engagement with the limits of language and verbal expression, and maintains a incisiveness that always attracts me. There’s really great work coming out of Europe at the moment, there is a renaissance in visual poetry and he is at the forefront.
Ragnhildur Jóhanns is a unique craftswoman, and a really exciting poetic presence emerging from Iceland. She creates poem objects, pure concrete poems, that is literally fashioning books out of her work and embodying the text. A really gifted and vital approach to poetry.
Cobbing is one of the greatest British poets of the twentieth century and without his work, concrete and avant garde poetry as it is today would not be wholly possible. I have always been indelibly drawn to the humour in his poetry, how it accompanies his verbal sophistication and irrepressible energy. He achieves what so much smarmy mainstream poetry cannot – a true sense of Britishness, the banality, the irony, the fugue of England.
