SJ Fowler
These are concrete-language poems that aim to emphasise the shapeliness of runes, the purpose of their shape, and its aesthetic, physical, concrete power as a means by which aberrant evocation poems can be housed and hidden, and then how these two elements can intertwine.
“anachronistic Anglo-Saxon poems spelt out through runic images, the poems drive through an end-of-the-world landscape describing a violent love encounter with a woman called Erika. The poet captures the savagery of the viking death desire, as if language is the container in which all the offshoots of their hand-to-mouth struggles were captured in. This landscape of movement, uncertainty, lust and danger is propelled forwards through the compounded, a-syntactic language and the shifts in font type and size.”
Chris McCabe on the Rune Poems
SJ Fowler works in poetry, fiction, theatre, film, photography, visual art, sound art and performance. He has published seven collections of poetry, four of artworks, five of collaborative poetry plus volumes of selected essays and selected collaborations. He has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, the London Sinfonietta, Wellcome Collection and Liverpool Biennial. He has been sent to Peru, Bangladesh, Iraq, Argentina, Georgia and other destinations by The British Council and has performed at festivals including Hay on Wye, Cervantino in Mexico, Berlin Literature Festival and Hay Xalapa. He was nominated for the White Review prize for Fiction in 2014 and has won awards from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Creative Scotland, Arts Council Ireland and multiple other funding bodies. His plays have been produced at Rich Mix, where he is associate artist, and his visual art has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, V&A, Hardy Tree Gallery and Mile End Art Pavilion. He’s been translated into 27 languages and produced collaborations with over 150 artists. He is the founder and curator of The Enemies Project and Poem Brut as well as 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. He is the director of Writers’ Centre Kingston and European Poetry Festival.
http://www.stevenjfowler.com/
Twitter: @stevenjfowler