“The Other Room has come to an end. Ten years of remarkable events that have led the way in a resurgence of decidedly contemporary forward thinking poetry in the North West have wrapped themselves up as of April 2018.” SJ Fowler’s thoughts on The Other Room, here. This video is of an interview Steve did with us in 2011.
Friday April 13th
The International Anthony Burgess Foundation : Free entry : 7pm doors
Engine House, Chorlton Mill. 3 Cambridge Street. Manchester M1 5BY
Bringing together some of the finest modern poets of the thriving Manchester scene in collaborative pairs with writers visiting from Norway, Lithuania, Latvia, France, Germany and Italy, this special Camarade event will present dynamic new duets of live literature made especially for the night:
Rike Scheffler & Livia Franchini
Jon Stale Ritland & Harry Man
Iris Colomb & Serena Braida
Endre Ruset & Christodoulos Makris
SJ Fowler & Tom Jenks
Inga Pizane & Scott Thurston
Rimas Uzgiris & Robert Sheppard
Marius Burokas & James Byrne
Sarah Clare Conlon & David Gaffney
Plus The European Union of Imaginary Authors with readings from Robert Sheppard & Sandeep Parmar, James Byrne, Joanne Ashcroft, Patricia Farrell, SJ Fowler, Scott Thurston.
Full details here.
European Poetry Festival : Austria – Thursday April 12th
Austrian Cultural Forum – Entrance Free : 7pm
Entrance Free : 7pm – 28 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1PQ.
Monday April 9th, The Poetry Cafe, The Poetry Society 22 Betterton St, London WC2H 9BX. Entrance Free : Doors at 7pm
A special focus event of the European Poetry Festival, some of the finest literary poets from Lithuania, nation of focus at the London Bookfair 2018, and their British contemporaries present brand new collaborations made for the night. Featuring:
Marius Burokas & George Szirtes
Aušra Kaziliūnaitė & Colin Herd
Giedrė Kazlauskaite & John Clegg
The evening will be opened with short solo readings by other visiting European poets including Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (Iceland) Erik Lindner (Holland) Muanis Sinanovic (Slovenia), Martin Solotruk (Slovakia), Theodoros Chiotis (Greece).
The event will also feature new collaborations by poets from the Poetry School programme – European Poetry Now
Sarah Dawson and Selina Rodrigues
Fiona Moore and Caroline Davies
Eleni Cay and Robert Peake
The 21st century Lithuanian poetry scene has been marked by an unusually prolific and original array of poets. Often lyrical and engaged in a new formalism, connecting to those who oversaw the transition to independence, the new Lithuanian poet is also idiosyncratic, witty, often linguistically. experimental, well travelled, technologically savvy. While spiritually connected to the revolutionary underground spirit of creativity that underpinned some of the greatest poetry Europe produced while Lithuania was under Soviet occupation, there is a marked move to a new kind of poetic voice, that speaks the same tone as the rest of its continent and is not necessarily framed by politics or history, but by vision, originality and humour.
This is a Lithuanian Cultural Institute event, supported by The Poetry Society.
Photos of Lithuanian poets by Monika Požerskytė
Curated by SJ Fowler. Full details here.
Saturday April 7th 7.30pm at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA. Free entrance.
32 poets in 16 pairs presenting brand new collaborations of literary performance, made especially for the night. The grand event of European Poetry Festival, formerly European Poetry Night. Featuring:
Livia Franchini & Rike Scheffler
Christodoulos Makris & Frederic Forte
Kinga Toth & Simon Pomery
Erik Lindner & Harry Man
Max Hofler & SJ Fowler
Robert Prosser & Alessandro Burbank
Theodoros Chiotis & Sergej Timofejev
Tomas Pridal & Iris Colomb
Astra Papachristodoulou & Muanis Sinanovic
Damir Sodan & Martin Solotruk
Giedrė Kazlauskaitė & Simona Nastac
Aušra Kaziliūnaitė & Serena Braida
Jen Calleja & Daniel Falb
Hannah van Binsbergen & Nina Bajsic
Marius Burokas & Tatiana Faia
Daniela Chana & Ana Seferovic
Full details here.
www.europeanpoetryfestival.com
April 5th to April 14th 2018
over 50 poets from 24 European nations
9 events in 10 days
THE EUROPEAN POETRY FESTIVAL 2018 BRINGS TOGETHER SOME OF THE FINEST LITERARY AND AVANT-GARDE POETS OF THIS GENERATION, TO LONDON AND ACROSS THE UK, TO COLLABORATE, PERFORM AND SHARE THE BRILLIANCE OF CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN LITERATURE
Programme Click the event for further information : All events are free to attend
April Thursday 5th : European Poetry at Writers’ Centre Kingston : Rose Theatre
Opening the festival by the River Thames with readings from nearly a dozen European poets.
April Saturday 7th : The European Camarade : Rich Mix
The grand event of the festival. 30 poets in 15 pairs present brand new collaborations made for the night.
April Sunday 8th : Performance Literature & Sound Poetry : Parasol Unit
Celebrating innovation in live literature with new solo performances by a dozen of Europe’s most considerable avant-garde poets.
April Monday 9th : Lithuanian Poetry in collaboration : The Poetry Cafe
Lithuanian and British poets collaborate and share new works at the home of The Poetry Society in London, joined by many other festival poets.
April Tuesday 10th : Versopolis poets in focus : London Bookfair
Lithuanian and British poets celebrate the pan-European poetry platform and review, Versopolis.
April Wednesday 11th : Polyphonic at Romanian Cultural Institute
A multimedia poetry show celebrating the Centenary of Greater Romania with readings by ten of the most talented Romanian poets.
April Thursday 12th : Austrian Poetry in collaboration : Austrian Cultural Forum
Austrian and British poets collaborate and share new works just off Hyde Park in the heart of London, joined by many other festival poets
April Friday 13th : The European Camarade in Liverpool
The festival leaves London and presents a night of new collaborations between poets local to Liverpool and those visiting from across Europe.
April Saturday 14th : The European Camarade in Middlesbrough : MIMA
The festival closes in the North East of England, where once more European poets will present collaborations with their English counterparts, many local to the area.
Poets presenting at the festival in 2018 :
Max Hofler, Daniela Chana, Robert Prosser (Austria), Damir Sodan (Croatia), Tomas Pridal (Czech Republic), Helianne Kallio (Finland), Iris Colomb (France), Rike Scheffler, Dagmara Kraus (Germany), Theodoros Chiotis, Astra Papachristodoulou, Katerina Koulouri (Greece), Erik Lindner, Hannah van Binsbergen (Holland), Kinga Toth, Orsolya Fenyvesi, George Szirtes (Hungary), Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (Iceland), Christodoulos Makris, Ailbhe Darcy (Ireland), Alessandro Burbank, Livia Franchini, Serena Braida, Giovanna Coppola (Italy), Sergej Timofejev, Inga Pizane (Latvia), Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, Marius Burokas, Giedrė Kazlauskaitė (Lithuania), Jon Ståle Ritland, Endre Ruset, Henriette Hjorthen Støren, Vilde Valerie Torset (Norway), Simona Nastac (Romania), Olga Kolesnikova (Russia), Colin Herd (Scotland), Ana Seferovic (Serbia), Martin Solotruk (Slovakia), Muanis Sinanovic (Slovenia), Daniele Pantano (Switzerland), Anastasia Mina (Cyprus) Harry Man, John Clegg, Jen Calleja, SJ Fowler, Helen Michael, Simon Pomery (UK) and more…
European Poetry Festival is curated by SJ Fowler
Animal Waste : The second of a set of five cinema-poetic collaborations with the artist-filmmaker Joshua Alexander.
Animal Waste spreads itself over the lands of London which seem to have inspired a re-understanding of the city’s literary and psychological history, from Limehouse to Wapping, Rotherhithe to Ratcliff. Mutely nodding to this profound and now taken for granted reexamination of these once were slums, Animal Waste sets itself against the confident and touristic glean of that history, instead aligning itself with the suffering sediment of the actual past. Shot around Wellclose Sq and Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s, and hiding from the Thames, the film evokes Falk, Swedenborg, Linneaus in all their intelligent menace.
‘Manichean visions revive disputed and despoiled London ground. Poetry in light and stone’ Iain Sinclair
The animal films explore 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. The films aim to capture the ambiguous menace of an often accidentally humorous resolve, manner, apology and understatement so prevalent in the English character.
Supported by the Eurimages TEM grant and Arts Council England via The Enemies Project.
“A book that asks, abstractly, are letters shaped like bodies? Can words evoke faces, captured in a screen? Who, or what, is assimilating, who or what? Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire is a collection of art poems, hand wrought in black, grey, silver and white, fashioned with indian ink, paint and pen, worked with techniques that edge around writing, vying with abstraction, constantly harrying semantic meaning and legibility.
Five years in the making, conceptually this is a book about sex, poetry and pornography and the disconnect between the former and the latter. These pages explore technology in its absence and aim to evidence the power of materiality and the body, and our hands, that are still required for touch.”
“Searching AOAE online (Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire) shows a YouTube clip of Japanese cats mating. What’s a word in any case if not a monster? A monster that eats words. The toner explodes on the office carpet spilling out a perfectly formed oeuvre. Serifs skywrite like migrating gannets. The rorschach accidentally tells you what to think. The printed facsimile becomes original when the world goes JavaScript. The dollar sign is a duck walking backwards into a lake. The ATM dispenses glyphs. How do we know people have faces when they take the day off work? The tank rolls over the charcoal leaving a map of Iraq or a new version of Cathay. We’re back in the world of Artaud’s final journal where, thank fuck (and at last) we’re not being told what to think. Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire is an almighty triumph, a well-earned relief. Picasso said it took a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. Or, for that matter, like the mad.” Chris McCabe
Part of Poem Brut, supported by Arts Council England. Available to purchase here – Aletta Ocean’s Alphabet Empire.
Details here.
Rich Mix Gallery 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd, London E1 6LA (downstairs from the Indigo Cafe) December 9th 2017 to january 14th 2018 with a special view performance event on January 13th 2018
.Collecting together the art poetry of SJ Fowler, this solo exhibition aims to pose several questions of the poem as a concrete, visual thing in the world. What is in the shape of a letter and what images do words recall? What is the meaning of colour in poetry and text upon the page, and white space? How does the situation of a poem change its meaning? Why is composition not a concept that applies to a medium that is innately visual? In literature, why has content overwhelmed context? Why has product dominated process? HARD TO READ poses these questions and answers them poorly, playfully, with over 40 original works drawn from multiple publications and previous exhibitions – works that interrogate handwriting, abstraction, illustration, asemic and pansemic writing, scribbling, crossings out, forgotten notes, strange scrawls – the odd interaction between paper and pen, and pencil, and coloured words that randomly collide with image recalling words.
The European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture is an online literary journal, funded by the European Union, aiming to create an anglophone publication platform with a focus on continental Europe and world beyond.
Over 80 original essays, articles and reflections from writers across the world will be commissioned and published over the next 12 months. Initial commissions include new pieces by Rasha Abbas, Harry Man, Joanna Walsh, David Spittle, Christodoulos Makris, Andrew Gallix, Rocio Ceron, Catherine Humble and many more. New articles are soon to be published daily at www.versopolis.com
[vimeo https://vimeo.com/244246277]
The first of a new set of five cinema-poetic collaborations between SJ Fowler and artist-filmmaker Joshua Alexander. Full details here.
A literary event celebrating the visual, visceral, messy, handwritten and colourful in poetry with new unique commissions from writers exploring alternate ways of making literature. Films from the evening, including this from Christopher Stephenson are online here, plus full details of the project..
New performances, readings and artworks by Verena Duerr, Eley Williams, Phil Baber, SJ Fowler, Stephen Watts and more to be announced.
One of the world’s foremost novelists, playwrights and poets, Peter Handke’s body of work is a question to the entire consciousness of post-war Europe. Wholly singular, often particularly divisive, Handke’s work creates an intensity out of the observational, skewers complacency and layers literature with the kind of distant complexity and forceful difficulty that actual living tends to bring. His work has been a beacon of critical and prolific experimentation, and his polarising persona and numerous works have forced European novelists of the last 50 years to, at the very least, accept or reject his style and substance. His output is remarkably underappreciated in the UK, if not generally unrecognised and so this event, in a small way, aims to rectify a considerable imbalance.
Verena Duerr, vienna-based musician and innovative lyric poet presents a made-for-the-night sound performance / Eley Williams, acclaimed fiction writer and poet presents new prose / SJ Fowler leads an in house mushroom forage / Stephen Watts reads Handke through his friend WG Sebald’s critical writing / Phil Baber, amsterdam-based performance artist and writer presents new translations and publications of Handke’s Repetition and To Duration. With more artists to be confirmed.
This event, by commissioning contemporary artists, writers, poets and theatre makers to each make a new work responding to the works or life of Handke, aims to transpose his work into a new moment – one that will stimulate as well as illuminate.
Details here.
Kingston University’s literary cultural centre’s new year of events, projects, festivals and initiatives begins in October. The core programme consists of a dozen events – each themed, with three speakers responding to that concept with a new reading or talk or performance. The speakers are both guests to the Centre, including Tom McCarthy, Stella Duffy, Nell Leyshon and Iain Sinclair, as well as those drawn from the academic staff at Kingston University. Student and alumnus readings often accompany this main programme.
The Centre will present brand new initiatives including a programme of adult education courses, a bookclub curated with Stanley Picker Gallery and a publication series for student poets with Sampson Low. See www.writerscentrekingston.com for more details on the centre and the year ahead.
An ambitious new project, Poem Brut is an exploration of poetry and colour, handwriting, composition, abstraction, scribbling, and illustration, affirming the possibilities of the page, the pen, the pencil – in a computer age – generating over a dozen events, multiple exhibitions, workshops, conferences and publications. The first event will take place at Rich Mix on November 25th followed by an exhibition – Hard to Read – also at the Rich Mix, opening December 9th. 3ammagazine, a partner in the project, is also running open call for new works that fit within the tradition. More details here.
Stephen Mooney will be reading at our next event on Tuesday 31st October at The Castle Hotel, Oldham Street, Northern Quarter, Manchester. Here is Stephen reading as part of SJ Fowler’s Enemies project. The other readers are James Davies and Pascal O’Loughlin.
Duos: collaborative poems written / made by two poets. There is no criteria for the poems or process. Please send a single bio and single photo for both authors.
Poem Brut: poems exploring handwriting, abstraction, illustration, asemic and pansemic writing, visual poetry and material process, colour, scribbling, scrawlings, crossings out, ink, forgotten notes, found text, interaction between paper and pen, and pencil, geometric poems, inarticulate poems, minimalism, collage, toilet wall writing. No works produced on a computer.
More details here.
otherroom.org 