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some of my favourite poems i've read this month:

emily jungmin yoon bell theory

sumita chakraborty dear, beloved

s.j. fowler violence on the internet

david bromwich separate dwelling

a.m. sullivan symbols for deceit

g.e. murray arts of a cold sun: "long story short"

john murillo upon reading that eric dolphy transcribed even the calls of certain species of birds,

tory dent the moon and the yew tree

alice fulton personally engraved

#words #poems #emily jungmin yoon #sumita chakraborty #s.j. fowler #david bromwich #a.m. sullivan #am sullivan #sj fowler #ge murray #g.e. murray #john murillo #sylvia plath #tory dent #the moon and the yew tree #alice fulton #poetry list

Close reading - SJ Fowler - Wolves in Chernobyl

Wolves in Chernobyl

today is nothing. the future won’t come Vasyl Stus

April 26th 1986

but even apart from our wood I do not know how one should say things in the dark have colour

will the wise do things, things that are forbidden, knowing it won’t be found out? a simple answer isn’t easy to find but freedom from trouble in the thing and from pain in the thing are still in the pleasure, but joy in the thing, and exultation, are considered, involving motion.

all the day life in the town goes on as normal families shop and walk their dogs fisherman lug their tackle off to the Prypyat river couples sunbath around the cooling ponds football matches go ahead as do sixteen outdoor weddings sponsored by the communist youth league

how can an object be good if it withdraws the pleasure of taste, (retreat for the cowardly) and withdraws the pleasures of love.... and withdraws the pleasures of hearing... and call of the button and withdraws the pleasurable emotions caused to sight by beautiful form? yet it can be, good, giving, living in the goodness of our wood. by stable conditions, by well-being, by the sure hope of its continuance, Kyiv, it was good, rightly calculated do not eat green vegetables or milk.

the nature of the universe is things and void. the nature of all existing things is body and space. the nature of all space is things and colour. if you wish to make me wealthy, with me not to make me glow, but diminish my desire.

yet do not extinguish my desire, allow me just enough left that I may not preach of being one, or without desire, and above my peers, but happy in the clutching of a ball or an artist’s postcard. or a parents plot of land. I hold in my hand my most precious object - one’s own pickled, cancerous appendix.

I am thrilled with pleasure in the thing’s body. I spit black spit on clear glass that is not somehow opaque - or how we say ‘frosted’ - not for its own sake, ancient armour, a gift from the basalt, that blocks waves because of the inconveniences that follow them. With protection we may have a feast.

the schools debated whether or not to go ahead with a planned ‘Health run’ and settled on outdoor gymnastics instead

this is not anxious to please the mob. for what pleases them, it does not know, and what it does know is far removed from their comprehension. it knows that when flesh cries aloud, not possessing flesh, it is unnatural that the mind should cry aloud too. a silent stomach communicates in sweeping thoughts

it is better to be a thing of wool and rag that provokes freedom from fear than a golden couch that brings trouble and woe.

sweet is the simple memory of a dead thing, a friend, a flag and how one would not mind so much the joining of you both.

more firemen came up complaining of vomiting and acute headaches

if this wooden thing listened to the prayers of all men, all men would quickly have perished; for they are forever playing death against one another.

if the prayers of women were to come true... of this i cannot speak, knowing not.

a foal had been born with eight legs piglets without eyes calves without heads or ribs. deformities due to inbreeding

vain is the thing that does not heal suffering in man for there is nothing new happening in the universe, the warp closes like a mouth, always readied for opening.

If we consider the infinite time passed, and thus there is no excuse for distractions. dumb things are for drowning, thus the sea is deep.

helped us understand we are a colony

What is it?

‘Wolves in Chernobyl’ is a mysterious, unrhymed poem in nine parts. There are no wolves in the poem, except for the title, yet there is a palpable sense of their presence, or the presence of something dangerous, lurking in the woods. This could be wolves ‘living in the goodness of our wood’, it could be a nefarious woodland spirit, it could be impending nuclear disaster, it could be something else entirely. The poem is dated April 26th 1986, the date of the calamitous safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant, but again the poem makes no direct reference to the disaster, only leaving sparse clues, for example ‘more firemen came up / complaining of vomiting and acute headaches’ and ‘I spit black spit’. The poem is preceded by an epigraph from the Ukrainian poet Vasyl Stus: ‘today is nothing. the future won’t come’, which ties together various hints that the events of the poem mostly take place before the effects of the nuclear accident, a peaceful moment where ‘life in the town goes on as normal’, before imminent destruction wreaks havoc.

Why it works

The poem is set on a precipice, much like the film Titanic, the reader already knows the outcome [the biggest nuclear disaster in history] which looms over the poem, amplifying the tension. The poem moves back and forth between descriptions of human activity by the woods and philosophical musings which seem to emanate from the woods or are the woods themselves speaking.

The poem is unlike a lot of contemporary British poetry, which tends to be quite insular, as it bears a strong influence of post-war European poetry, it benefits from this influence, making it stranger and more adventurous. It is a poem which rewards multiple readings, never giving the answers to the riddles it poses, always teasing and probing. Wolves in Chernobyl works as a window into a brilliant mind, it shows of the depth of Fowler’s investment in poetry and is one of his most beguiling and accomplished poems.

Anything else?

The Ukrainian poet who Fowler quotes in the epigraph, Vasyl Stus, died the year before the Chernobyl disaster while on hunger strike in a forced labour camp, serving a ten year sentence for ‘anti soviet activities’. He is now celebrated as one of Ukraine’s greatest poets.

Fowler seems the unlikeliest of poets to quote from the Bible, but in the last section ‘there is nothing new happening in the universe’ seems too similar to the famous phrase from the Book of Ecclesiastes ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ to be coincidental.

The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner, the collection in which Wolves in Cherbobly can be found, contains the affidavit “ALL ERRATA IS INTENTIONAL AND THIS WORK HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY PROOFED” - a helpful note for readers unfamiliar with the nuances of experimental poetry.

_________________________

Buy a copy of The Rottweiler’s Guide to the Dog Owner

#poetry #analysis #sj fowler

5 questions with SJ Fowler

Why do you write?

Chance discovery that writing was. And then as a job. For meaning in my days, with some guilt and great doubt. For a way of being in the world, in my brief opening in the world, before it closes shut on me and Im dead like everyone else, that is nice and full of mostly good and kind folk. And to pursue problems of the mind and language itself, for the challenge of writing itself, to feel less alienated, when most ways of working and passing time are dominated by people who want things simple comforting sentimental selfrighteous careful cautious. That is saddening and some poetry aint. Good reasons but also stupid. I could do better with my life but Im not hurting anyone really so thats a fine baseline I reckon.

How would you define the relationship between poetry and film?

Depends on our definition of the former. If its just a word used as a metaphor and not a concrete artform then whatever anyone wants. If poetry is an actual thing that operates on and through language for spmething other than direct info or emotional confession then the relationship is scant. Film can utilise a kind of poetic cinematic grammar which is very exciting and poetry can explore image realisation without realism. There are filmmaker poets all over but its all a bit tenuous.

What do you feel are the limitations of a poem?

All language is fundamentally approximated but that's good. That's a beautiful and wondrous grounding with which we can begin to play not only with semantic content and grammatical convention but also with infinite contexts like the unsaid unseen page shape colour neologism sound shape mispelled etc. Poetry is the place we can make new languages and understandings and world codes which are new to each reading ape. Brilliant but limited because of this, because of the limits of knowing other consciousnesses. We cannot know another mind. Poetry is confined only by our mental experience but thats a prison well enough.

Who are you reading/what are you watching? Do you rate the contemporary poetry scene? Is it any better than previous generations? Why?

Not reading much poetry. Only books sent to me by friends and connections and publishers as that is a lot / enough and is my job so has its limits, busmans holiday.

Yep I rate it. Internet has created democracy of access and Im plugged into english translations literally across the globe. The 21st century is the best time ever for poetry. The world population has doubled since 1970s, everyone online and world travel. Amazing time, so much work happening its just the best isnt the famous work in the UK. The most exciting poetry in most countries seems to rise in most nations but not always in England because we can be, on one side, anti intellectual for fear of being elitist, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and trying to be populist for no well investigated reason, maybe straying into being patronising etc, and on the other side, being way too insular academic (?) keepung to coteries and exploring only one furrow of conveyor belting all intelligence and knowledge. But wow when you read I dunno stephen emmerson lucy harvest clarke tom jenks prue chamberlain eley williams karen sandhu ryan ormonde david berridge john catherall chris mccabe astra papachristodoulou jacqueline ennis cole paul hawkins and 100s of others. blows your mind the quality

and previous generations, who knows, i cannot (yet) travels the times

Do you fear Rihanna’s best work is behind her?

I know who she is but I genuinely have no working knowledge of her oeuvre. I saw her not act in luc bessons shite sci fi film with those two models and given how wooden she was I reckon not.

_____________

I Stand Alone by the Devil and other poems on films is out now from Broken Sleep Books

Read 3 of the poems up on Anthropocene.

#sj fowler #poetry #interview #rihanna

I’m working on something for this with Turkish poet Efe Duyan as part of the European Literature Festival.

Thank you SJ Fowler - see you on May 14th, 7.30 pm, Rich Mix, also enjoy this rare photo of me looking very European smoking cheap cigarette.

#poetry #european literature #polish cultural institute #sj fowler #efe duyan

Servant Drone one of SJ Fowler’s 3:AM MAGAZINE 2015 Top Reads

‘Brilliant collaborative poetry collection (of which there are far too few) taking on a necessary issue in necessarily disjunctive ways.’

SJ Fowler 3:AM magazine on Servant Drone

We made the 3:AM MAGAZINE Top Reads of 2015 list for Steven J. Fowler. It’s exciting to be alongside the stellar company of;

Tom Jenks, Spruce (Blart Books)

One of most overlooked poets in the UK, doing the work conceptualism should be doing, getting to the heart of uniquely British ennui through splicing methodology and jet black humour.

Sandeep Parmar, Eidolon (Shearsman Books)

High modernism powerfully maintained and redeployed by one of the most interesting poets crossing the American / UK scene.

Tom Chivers, Dark Islands (Test Centre)

One of the clearest voices in British poetry in his finest work to date, beautiful rendered, written and designed.

Emma Hammond, The Story of No (Penned in the Margins)

Powerful for it’s immediacy, incredibly sophisticated for it’s lack of pretension in the face of profoundly personal poetry. Amazing book.

Christodoulos Makris, The Architecture of Chance (wurm press)

This is the future of a poetry which reflects our world of language without dispensing with the expressionistic skill of interpreting that language. Found text lies with lyrical poetry, a thorough achievement to balance them to such effect.

Peter Jaeger, A Field Guide to Lost Things (If P Then Q press)

Clever, resonant and profound, as all of Peter Jaeger’s works are, a fine example of the possibilities of contextual, process-orientated thinking getting to the heart of contemporary poetry.

Michael Thomas Taren, Eunuchs (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Best possible example of what is possible in contemporary American poetics of my generation. Excessive, authentic, ambitious.

Rebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty (Bloodaxe Books)

Reflective and observational in the most well conceived way, a clear poetic experience as a book, it accumulates and resonates as a collection.

Lee Harwood, The Orchid Boat (Enitharmon Press)

The last work by one of the most interesting poets in the English language in the latter half of the 20th century, a typically beautiful book.

Bruno Neiva & Paul Hawkins, Servant Drone (Knives Forks and Spoons Press)

Brilliant collaborative poetry collection (of which there are far too few) taking on a necessary issue in necessarily disjunctive ways.

Thanks Steve and 3:AM MAGAZINE

#sj fowler #bruno neiva #paul hawkins #tom chivers #3:am magazine #lee harwood #peter jaeger #emma hammond #sandeep parmar #tom jenks #Christodoulos Makris #rebecca perry #michael thomas taren #top reads of 2015

A Civic Survey of Edinbugh

A new generative text, performed with JR Carpenter at ENEMIES, Rich Mix, 31st July 2015.

Enemies organiser SJ Fowler writes, about the night: “A collaborative poetry event where the best of a vibrant contemporary Croatian poetry scene present brand new works written with their British counterparts. Celebrating the potential of collaboration to create dynamic new poetry that transcends style and language, the Enemies project: Croatia, with events in both Britain and Croatia, has its crescendo at the Rich Mix Arts Centre. Fourteen poets in seven pairs present their collaborations, for a unique evening of Anglo-Balkan poetry.”

http://www.richmix.org.uk/whats-on/event/the-enemies-project-croatian-poetry/

Damir Sodan & James Byrne Tomica Bajsic & Sandeep Parmar Maja Klaric & SJ Fowler Tamar Yoseloff & Justin Hopper Harry Man & Kirsty Irving JT Welsch & Nathan Walker JR Carpenter & Mary Paterson

#poetry #JR carpenter #sj fowler #enemies #rich mix

mahu

mahu http://wp.me/s1cGu9-mahu

Fluttering between asemic, concrete, calligram & collage – SJ Fowler’s art offers a state between reading and looking. I’ve long encouraged Fowler to go further with his visual art & like with everything Fowler does…he’s taking it to the next level. http://www.stevenjfowler.com/visual-art

View On WordPress

#art #asemic #hardy tree gallery #mahu #sj fowler

together with sj fowler i take part at the »text festival« in bury (uk). three works that emerged from »the dark would« dialogues and interviews are exhibited.

more information about the text festival: homepage, facebook, twitter

#anatol knotek #anatol #sj fowler #text festival #bury #exhibition