SJ Fowler : How the Crocodile Tear Waterfalls Flow…

 

 

 

 

 

Things are what they are where they are. This has been one of my pre-occupations. The poetry collection is never a suite of singularities, it is poems changed by the poems around them, the physical design of the book, the blurb, the cover, and indeed the endless unknowable subjectivities of the reader - their mood, prior knowledge and more. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and so content should then be cognisant of context, it is responsible to it even! And so so much of my work has tried to walk into this volatility, be it with textual, visual, conceptual or live poetries. Here then is not really a selected uncollected visual poems, but a new book made out an ambitious idea – what can a visual poem be? What is a visual poem?

That many poets concern themselves only with semantics is fair enough I suppose, though confusing for me when language, written, printed, plastered or carved, is innately visual as well as semantic. Inherently so. Leaving design to the publisher is one thing, but collectively being uninterested in how meaning changes as the appearance of language changes is another. Suffice to say, as I have passed a dozen years writing, the various modes and means of visual poetry have taken me in - concrete poems, asemic writing, handwriting poetry, collage poetry, photo poetry, film poetry, poster poetry, art poetry, minimalist poetry, parietal poems, conceptual poems, constraint poems, sculpture poems, illustrative poems and more. The found, and made, the painted and inked.

This book is about range, and moments in my learning process. A funny, weird, pleasant little passport of visual experiments that is trying to show what is possible for the curious. And trying to show those who think visual poetry a novelty are themselves naïve, or under exposed to the history of human written culture. This has been another passion of mine, rooting modern methods of poetry to historical context, and this floats around this book, the originary sources of our written literature, from cave poems to calligraphy.

What the book contains is something like 30 works from 10 sequences, projects and exhibitions. They are all works outside of my eight published volumes of visual poems as of now 2023. They have been chosen from 100s of pieces, and this choice was not made with a sense of what was best, but what was best for this selection, for what would fit the specific contents and confines of this book. So that together, this selection, would present a glimpse into my ten years of researching, collecting, sharing, and teaching, having shared these modes and methods to thousands of people across the UK and Europe.

Crocodile Tear Waterfalls is a bringing together of the best of the lost, the glimpse of potential books that will never be and the various experiments across what is a vast and profound field – poetry that cares what it looks like.

             SJ Fowler, 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and performer who lives in London. His work explores an expansive idea of poetry and literature - the textual, visual, asemic, concrete, sonic, collaborative, performative, improvised, curatorial - through 50 publications, 400 performances in over 40 countries, 4 large scale event programs, numerous commissions, collaborations and more.

Kim Fahner : A Celestial Crown of Sonnets, Sam Illingworth and Stephen Paul Wren

A Celestial Crown of Sonnets, Sam Illingworth and Stephen Paul Wren
Penteract Press, 2021

 

 

 

          Anyone who writes sonnets impresses me as I’m a free verse, lyric kind of poet. Whenever I’ve tried to shove my foot into the glass slipper of rhyme or iambic pentameter, I sort of panic and tell myself I should stick to the less structured poems. In A Celestial Crown of Sonnets, the poets tell a story of astronomy by way of ‘an heroic crown of sonnets,’ which is also known as a sonnet redouble. The fourteen sonnets are Shakespearean or Elizabethan in origin, following the traditional fourteen-line structure, and the last line of each sonnet is the first line of the proceeding one. A fifteenth poem, known as a ‘mastersonnet,’ in which the poets use “the first lines from each of the fourteen previous sonnets” makes up the final piece in the book. Enter the book and quickly find yourself swept up into the mystery of a night sky, and into the minds and hearts of early and contemporary astronomers.

          The list of astronomers who feature in this corona of sonnets reads like a Who’s Who of a study of the heavens: Thales of Miletus, Plato, Aristotle, Shi Shen, Claudius Ptolemy, Aryabhata, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, Ibn al-Shatir, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and William Herschel are all included. They share one quality in common—a deep curiosity about the stars and planets, and how the sky worked. In the earliest days of astronomy—as one can imagine when one reads about the work of the more historical figures named in this list—studying the constellations would have seemed an odd thing to do. At the time, they would have been going against common (mis)understandings of science, in an age when the Catholic Church posed a real threat to any scientist’s life. The obvious threat for those who lived and researched in the time of the Inquisition might have dampened their quest for answers but, in many cases, only served to make them more certain and passionate in their studies.  

          From Plato, who “kept the sun and moon and stars all bound,” to Aristotle, who lit fires that “would never cease,” to Galileo, who “claimed the sky was not a holy site,/Observing truth yet tempered with delight,” Illingworth and Wren create stunning images of these men’s relationships with the science of astronomy. There are lovely images in this small book of poems, but it is more the stories that are told within each sonnet that garner my interest and curiosity as a reader and thinker. By the time you get to the final piece in the corona of sonnets, with “Mastersonnet,” you have had time to think about what a struggle it must have been for these early scientists in particular—to have gone against churches and governments when it might have meant certain torture or death. Still, they continued, pressed against that oppression, and asked new questions that begged to be answered—even if the asking or the answering could lead to persecution.

          In the time of which these male astronomers lived, science and poetry would have been more seamlessly woven together. Galileo, for instance, was an astronomer and an astrologer, so those worlds overlapped then. In more recent times, the disciplines of science and poetry have found common ground again, and serious, peer reviewed literary journals—like The Goose and Artis Natura here in Canada, and like Consilience in England—have sprung up to share the beauty that resides at the crossroads of the two fields of study. What once might have seemed an odd coupling now seems less rare and even more valuable, especially in a time in human history when we are faced with a global pandemic and environmental destruction. Poets and scientists who know the value of both worlds can see the similarities and elevate them for readers in both disciplines, so that there is a blending of curiosity, experimentation, and gathering new knowledge. I’m curious—as always—about when and where the women astronomers edged into what has traditionally and historically been a male-dominated field, and their marked absence somehow makes them more present in some ways.

          If you love looking up at the night sky, finding your favourite constellations, and sharing that with a friend, lover, or family member, then you’ll also love Illingworth and Wren’s A Celestial Crown of Sonnets. The last two lines of the final poem sum up the importance of the work those fourteen astronomers have done: “Observing truth yet tempered with delight,/You tamed the sky and welcomed in the light.” So much of what we love about light as poets, and as readers of poetry—from stars, to sun, to moon—is the notion that it dispels darkness in both literal and metaphorical ways. Science does this, too, in its explorations, as well as in its ongoing quest to attain answers to questions. This book of poems bridges disciplines, inviting readers in and asking them to take the time to look up and consider our place in the universe.

 

    

 

 

 

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Ontario representative of The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-22), and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

SJ Fowler : Adult Waste and Childish Wonder: On Writing Crayon Poems

‘The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously – that is, he invests it with large amounts of emotion – while separating it sharply from reality.’

                                         Sigmund Freud

Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming

There are methods and meanings behind every work, and they oscillate, naturally. There is what these poems are, and then, what they are made of, in order to be what they are. There is a balance I must try to relate. What the poems might mean, and what attention they desire.

Crayons are the domain of children because they are less messy than most paints and markers, and they are blunt. They smell, faintly of excrement, in a pleasant way, and children often try to eat them. Dogs eat them too. Thus, they are required to be non-toxic. They occur to me as a means of getting to a tactile process of writing that embraces instinct, the symbolic and an aesthetic that needs not even countenance figuration or font-love. They are a thing of potential, because they require loyalty to their actual physical constitution. They rub, they snap, they stink. They are small in adult hands and their mark is unmistakeable. Moreover, they appeal because most adults don’t wish to be seen making pictures with a little scat stick any more than they want to write poems that don’t offer an immediate insight into their emotional intelligence. Of course, most adults don’t want to write poems at all. Perhaps it is because this book of crayon poems is so potentially appealing to everyone except poets and artists, that it might very well end up appealing to no one?

Here is a formulation I would not say I believe, but have often thought of, making these works. If the crayon is for the child, and children are the most living of human beings, the most life orientated of us, being new, being closer to birth and further from death, and the crayon is their artist tool, evoking bio-matter, edibility, refuse, mulch, excrete, bodily colours and vegetation, then are crayon pictures not somewhat symbols of mortality? Otto Rank, given to me by Ernest Becker, suggests the primary trauma of life is birth (not the Oedipal Complex, causing Freud to cast Rank aside for this break in psychoanalytic dogma). Being birthed then begins our uncomfortable relationship with creatureliness. Going for a shit reminds us we were born and we will die. We are repulsed by the reminder, the smell of it, and the gushing of blood, popping spots etc.., and with good reason. These things are often, unlike their imitation in crayons, disease bearing. This is why, I believe, I was drawn to crayons to write poems, and that these poems became illustrations of deaths heads, dream animals, drowning faces, organ geometries, daft monsters and natural disasters. Things alive but not alive in the way the human mind thinks they are alive. Perfect for kids and a book which is a celebration of life.

If creatureliness drives the images of this book, then wonder drives the texts. In a sense, these ‘reminders’ that interest me so much, in my work and in all things, can be equated to wonder. They are the shock of realisation. Surprise. This may stretch beyond extreme emotions like love and near-death, into any kind of alive consciousness or moments of distinct knowing. These moments also evoke both our childhood, that process of constant discovery that masks the confusion of our adult lives, and our end, that we cannot imagine the world without us, in one moment. The shock of wonder, like the reminders of creatureliness, put us in time. They force us to realise, in that temporality, we are.

Some of the poems nod towards ancient Greek or classical Latin phrases that encapsulate this idea of wonder, and I reference them not to show my reading back to readers but to reflect on how permanent this sensation is to human experience. Et in Arcadia Ego might be the most concise example, being not just a statement of curiosity, but of warning and mystery. Beyond these quotations, I am striving in the poems to get to the immediacy of the decisive moment myself, in making, methodologically. I have always been fascinated by the dissolving of self-awareness that is obvious and essential to any moment of creativity - the downregulating of the pre-frontal cortex etcetera - always mysterious and unknowable, lost to us and rarely discussed outside of phrases like ‘flow state’. In these poems I am embracing this lostness not to flow or create what others might term ‘good’ poems, but to marry this inattentive focus to the material of the crayon itself – accidentally and inevitably moving against the second phase of ‘quality’ writing, editing. The making of these poems negate the possibility of the textual edit, in the age of word doc replacements and synonym optionality. I think of the tradition of the calligrapher, or even painter, making their mark and then on to the next page, and then, afterwards, one of these being correct to their eyes. I think of this but in strictly literary terms. And I think of these terms with a crayon in hand.

I have tried to capture language moments that are absolutely poems but are also about the crayon making the words appear. Too quick to edit. The text is done without planning. They are from the depth of my own strange process and from the language around me. Any editing was then addition, semantically, decided stop or twist until often bust, with more being more and then in the bin. Any editorial process was overwriting, which I didn’t plan but I grew to enjoy. Rewriting, in a different colour, over the original text, somehow fixing it, trusting it, illuminating it. I created hundreds of crayon poems and binned the majority, ripping them up happily.

This is my fourth book exploring the possibilities of a literature that fades between the legible and the illegible, aiming to make a literature abstract and illustrative, asemic and semantic - to not patronise the eyes into immediate linguistic understanding - an attempt to allow a fight for understanding. However, this is the first book where I have also been thinking through literacy. Perhaps it is because the crayon carries with it the spectre of the child, learning to write as they draw letters. I have often said in teaching and interviews, literature likes to justify its own importance by conflating literacy with literature. The first is an inarguable benefit to every human, the second is arguably a hobby with an exalted past and religious delusions of grandeur. So using my hands, using coloured sticks, I found myself attempting, for the first time in thirty years, to really try to write the text, sometimes allowing that, sometimes failing. I thought of myself as a child only then, my childhood literate but actively unliterary, thankfully. My parents never reading, but me knowing they were definitely able to, and that being something known because of how often they would talk of leaving school so young, at 14 years of age in post-WWII Liverpool. They were proud to be literate; they had an active sense of it. As I grew older I saw the limitations of this and in writing this book I realised one small reason why I became a poet even though I often feel contempt for myself for being so.

In writing this volume of crayon poems I have also realised it is unusual for one to ask, as I have very early in discovering writing-as-a-hobby, what is writing made out of? Is it made of colour, as well as shape? Is it made of wax or ink or does it not exist in the three dimensional world? The answers are of course banal, dependent on how literal one is, but the question does force us to not take such realities for granted. For in them, the childish certainties of what we are doing when we write, when we draw – poems or shopping lists – we might find new ways to make, read, learn. I have tried to create something unclever and distinct, that can be flicked through or studied, that worries about colour and its absence, illustrative potential and composition in order to open space for something wondrous because it is not really wonderful at all. I am attempting to communicate, but no communication can abolish a fundamental difference. I want, like a kid with crayons, more than anything else, more than anything like truth, to be understood. I want people to just look, very intensely at the things upon the page, and tell themselves what they mean. Then just like a kid once more, I don’t really want to hear about it again.

I have always noticed and remembered poets and artists who were not artistically productive in their childhood. They were busy with making things I am sure, but not did write or make poems or artworks when they were young. Robert Rauschenberg and Henri Michaux are perhaps the two most influential on me. They were not arty children. Both conceived of themselves without the practise of making art before they began to do so as a vocation. Both worked their whole lives, prolifically, without obsession for the delicate reveal of scarce gems. Both were inventive because they were curious. I too can think of no creative refuse that I made between the age of the crayon and felt tip and young adulthood. At least a decade of making nothing for fun or presentation that is now perhaps my most judicious, accidental creative holiday. In this vein, I will admit, finally and cheaply, there is a part of me that has made a book of crayon poems because I am often surrounded by intellectually brilliant writers and the works they produce, and find them no better in social, emotional and psychological terms, for that brilliance. There is a part of me that wants to be messy, dumb, clumsy, childish, ape-ish and impatient because I am quite naturally these things and these things are preferable to pretense. I never wish to be a child again, and will be granted this wish, but I’d rather be one than a fraught, bourgeois adult, and so robbing the techniques of infants seem a valuable, if petulant, path to safety. What better reason than childishness, amidst the recreations of mortality, animalisms, literacy and colourfulness, could there be for me to author and labour a book of poems made exclusively from the wax crayon?

This essay first appeared in SJ Fowler's Crayon Poems (Penteract Press, 2020). Crayon Poems is available now from Penteract Press. 

SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in London. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Somerset House, Tate Britain, London Sinfonietta, Southbank Centre, National Centre for Writing, National Poetry Library, Science Museum and Liverpool Biennial amongst others. He has published eight collections of poetry, five of artworks, six of collaborative poetry plus volumes of selected essays and selected collaborations. His writing has explored subjects as diverse as prescription drugs, films, fight sports, museums, prisons and animals. He has won awards from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Nordic Culture Fund, Danish Arts Foundation, Arts Council Ireland and multiple other funding bodies. He was part of the first ever Hub residency at Wellcome Collection, and is currently poet-in-residence at J&L Gibbons architects and formerly at Kensal Green Cemetery. He is associate artist at Rich Mix. He has been sent to Peru, Bangladesh, Iraq, Argentina, Georgia and other destinations by The British Council and has performed at over 50 international festivals including Hay on Wye, Cervantino in Mexico, Berlin Literature Festival and Hay Xalapa. His feature-length films have premiered at Whitechapel Gallery and his plays have been produced by Penned in the Margins and Dash Arts. He was nominated for the White Review prize for Fiction in 2014 and his short stories appear in anthologies such as Liberating the Canon. His visual art has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, V&A, Hardy Tree Gallery, Jerwood Space and Mile End Art Pavilion, with installations at Kielder Forest and Tate St Ives. His librettos have been performed at LSO St Lukes, Wigmore Hall and Guildhall Music School. His articles have appeared in Nature, Vice Magazine and Jacket2. He’s been translated into 27 languages and produced collaborations with over 150 artists. He has pioneered the fields of performance literature, literary curation, collaborative poetry and Neuropoetics. His asemic writing, sound poetry and concrete poetry have also become known internationally. He is the founder and curator of The Enemies Project and Poem Brut as well as poetry editor at 3am magazine and former executive editor at The Versopolis Review. He is lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University, has taught at Tate Modern, Poetry School and Photographer's Gallery and is a Salzburg Global Fellow. He is the director of Writers' Centre Kingston and European Poetry Festival.