SPEAKER_00 0:02

Stephen Fowler's enthusiasm. Fowler's a poet, contemporary poet enthusiasm. The book he brought out about ten years ago. I like it. How does fertilizer help the bomb? Fowler's right question. Ask what or who? Where time, city, rural encampment, rubble shack, the evaluation at the abyss, or in the long run, song calculation, algebra, logical filigree. Ask what epistemic holy ghosts hissing like a hot philosophical lava miniaturize with poetry. So starts Fowler's new collection, a golden horde of disabled will, where the clues ask around for what might be tagged as surveillance of change, change of mind, heart, feeling, rationality, calculation, and gadget technologies dressed as learned prim theologies of rationality or other kinds of monkey stuff. What's the fertilizer, we ask? What the shit? T S Elliot produced the herb poetic gadget for digging it out and spreading it, reading Frasier's junk anthropology for faux metaphysic slurries, shimmering it around, so the muck eventually calibrated different degrees of an idealization where limits of memory, history, psychological backdrops, sheer physical stamina in the pen, camera, digital peg, imagination, future, hope were disguised and rendered a wasteland. This ability to make material idealize into something transcending our actual epistemic situation fooled some into thinking we actually have transcended it, suggesting there is some metaphysical substance holding the fall of words and thoughts to account, epistemic holy ghost hissing like a furnace baked philosophical depth bond. Fowler's too wise to make that mistake. He works in the limit of what he calls as an abbreviation for the complexities enthusiasm. Of course, there's not a single proposition attached to that label, but it is something not limited by anything, and the imagination of flight is apparently a mild head cold to the viral germ welfare we ought to suddenly employ when thinking about what we might do with our future time. That is the ultimate focus. No summarized norms, epistemic stanzas calibrated to measure the dream and metaphysical ghouls, maybe even harness them, or drive a stake through to the heart, or yacht to navigate territories. Water doesn't need a boat, you arrogant fuck. Fowler works in the line of poetics that sees poetry as a way of changing its reader, perhaps first put out in 1751 by Sam Johnson in The Rambler, where he writes of the force of poetry being able to change and shape its readers. Pound writes of poetry's rhythms being forced into the voice of readers' speech. W. S. Graham, who haunts this collection as a lost poetic demon, wrote in 1946 about a poetry of release which makes the readers change. What Fowler is doing, it seems to me, at least, is evoking a readership, seeing poetry as an activation in living and an intrasubjectivity in reading. All sorts of things tug at this idea.

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J.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

S. Mill wrote of poetry being something overheard, in contrast to being heard, a view resulting in the private vector of its influence. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude. Well, there's something valuable in this. Fowler's war poetry, I'm labelling it thus just to exaggerate a point, can be read as apostrophes directed elsewhere, to use Coleridge's useful phrase. To emphasize that Fowler's poetry protects poetry's special value and is much much more than mere propaganda. In fact, he doesn't think it's about communication at all. Yates as always helps. Fowler is assuredly quarrelling with himself, not others in this. Yet his imaginative links are nevertheless public too, as public as Whitman's Leaves of Grass or Ginsburg's howl, and if Mill helps, there's always the fear the definition pushes poetry further into the unheard margins. His poems require more from us than brooding reflection and mute feelings in domestic solitude. There's a somatic demand, poetry urging us to rewire body and nervous system as well. The disturbances of syntax and unexpected diction are political engagements with consciousness to bring about the making of the reading and the reader. And it's not only a one-way street. As Ordin writes in his Yates elegy, the words of poets are modified in the guts of the living. Art writing, and Fowler's is definitely that, if it's anything, as a response to war is not an obvious move these days. Yet art is natural. Everyone can, without help, talk about how things seem to them, and because of that, everyone should be able to do so as well. Alvanor makes this point vividly. The art sense is like nipples on a man, useless but universal. Forever we've been creatures with language, dress, pictures, technology, and art. Art presupposes technologies of doing. Choreographers presuppose dancing but aren't dancers. Poets presuppose language, both spoken and written, but they aren't speaking or writing. They are showing us what speaking and writing. They can startle us out of our complacent acquiescence, make us see, perhaps for the first time, what we are saying and writing and reading, what is sayable and unsayable, and work into the foreground what we leave back in the background, and so change our minds, help us think what hasn't been thought before, or remind us of what is hidden by what we do think, what we do say, write. And also what we read and don't read and how we read and don't read. Art is the space that requires minds to critique, so criticism becomes something essential too, and no contingent journal sideshow. What's Fowler writing out of? He's responding to other poets, other writers, other artists, audiences, teachers and students. He's responding to journalists accounting for the wars abroad, the pieces here, there and everywhere, the newsbytes and the elongated discursive pieces, the mediated event stuff that are hyper technologies of propaganda, information, opinion, etc., etc., churn out minute by minute. And finally, he's listening in to the conversations that are happening all over the place about all of this. His art is its own problem because it is itself a critical practice. Power is removing the discursive pieces about war from their settings, and from his angle, they become strange. His poems are, to use Noah's Fecund term, a strange tool, an alien implement. With this tool we investigate ourselves. First order activity, talking about wars, inequality, the environment, etc. etc. This organizes us. Art and philosophy takes these activities and builds a space for us to examine ourselves doing these things. And then the activity of art loops back. Again, this is the terminology of no, that reorganizes the first order activity. Our free, untutored activity of war talk, and the rest has now been represented and so becomes shaped by the critique, and then this new, shapely talk becomes subjected to more art critiques, and this in turn is looped back. It never ends. This theory of the aestheticization of writing changes some assumptions that commonly hang around. One common assumption is that writing is the recording of speech, but it wasn't. It was originally a technology of scoring for the purpose of counting. The first writers were bookkeepers, and they wrote not to represent their speech or talk about goats or bushels, but to keep track of goats and bushels. This means speaking or writing, it's an open question which came first. There are graphical practices at least as old as linguistic practices. Writing, however, does record speech, but when it does it comes from our need to keep track of what is being said. Writing was a scorecard, tracking the first order practice of talk. Of course, it has been looped so many times now, there's no way of knowing where writing and speaking begin and end. Art makes poetic technologies so we can interrogate language practices. Fowler is working his poetic gadgets to display our linguistic discourses of war in the new context of now. The frenzy and mix is measured risk taking. The chauvinistic self outcasting invokes a dream world where we're invited to crawl along and out of our now remote intimacies. Other voices enter his sequences and help curate his protein strangeness. Brian Catlin of the Stumbling Block, Ian Sinclair, Alan Ginsburg, Gavin Jones, Alan Moore, Stuart Holm, Laura Oford Ford, Kathy Acker, Paul Holman, J H Prynne of Tortricks. This skin river was directly marked, its tracks to Le Su for the second eye opener, and you bite at his instep is corrosive and colloidal at one throw. Catching the same sheen as foul as the city, always a beloved space of trans, to accept what is greeting pets not so much in reasons, for the clothes will open in matters of delicate urgency, for a winter bonus to claim his prescience, because of bark numbers anyway. Suicide was induced by with octopus limbs no teeth. Reading this collection in the context of terrorist threats, Syria, the inequality class wars, domestic hells, all the nightmares roosting, what we realise is that Fowler is our war poet, breeding his lilacs out of the blood soaked April ground of current history. Should I begin as if it were a story for in, not during wartime? They mistook a story for a poem as often as, I'm not saying you never had it so good, but that is a fact, isn't it? He's grappling with the extreme consciousness of these mediated discharges of extreme violence, the weird collision of mutable elements of the everyday with the excessive, unavoidable degradation of sensibility constantly bombarded by violence and names of violence and symbols of violence and effects of violence and rumors, denials, gratuitous, unclear, unclean of such. You've never had it so good, is where the war starts, and places the reader squarely there, in not during. If taboos are a way of vanquishing violence from the everyday, then our contemporary context is where taboos are being reversed. Fowler mixes actor and costume, mask and dance, plays coric master to the dionysia of this reversal, is a voiced chorus of phallic tragedy played across the broken hip syntax of polyphonic marginal identities. How long would you like to fight? You pick the term, for we are not under bombing, we are facing it. What is feared is a story that explains itself so much it almost isn't there upon its head. The helicopter gun that's known as birth control. This is chorus intruding the action, standing at the centre which years ago didn't hold but imploded. So the fragmentary uncentered is everywhere. It's an ironic usage, prepared like a kid's saw in a cat's paw, happy hinge to lift a black eye, with domestic violence and domestic pressure, nose to nose with helicopters and bombs somewhere else, but intimately ours, nevertheless, addressed simply and partially as it disappears from view in the poem Done the Line, for example, or Black Eye, for instance, an experiment as notable as Arsene's Esther or Goethe's Faust II. What's the reason for saying there's a chorus element here? Well, throughout the sequence there's an interplay between actor speech and what loosely I'm thinking of as a chorus with richer imagery contrasting with the movement proceeding. There's often a pairing of actor voice and choral in the same broken back line. So we have I've been to prison and patted down on the way in this sorry event, which then is infused with the chorus. I've been birthwell blue, truffling up the tree grove. It seems to abandon its traumatic identity just for that moment before returning it. I miss my pet, my training partners, friends, family, wife, children. And then I can go again to the margin where images crank up once more, who in the night were snowy peaks. This is interesting because the use of the chorus died out when private subject matter replaced the public, and Fowler's versatility is partly his recognition that the private and the public infiltrate themselves more than ever before, that we're both bombarded with news of others' lives while channelling private echo chambers of solipsistic narcissism. No two can meet the way we have met, is a quote from W. S. Graham, that slides into this wild doubling space we now inhabit, and in the poem The Interrupters, Fowler of Antriloquizers, an analytic voice. This is how violence starts first, the perception of a slight of an insult within the context of a culture that has caught the imperative that you must never back down. Second, the decision that the affront can only be answered in a physical reprisal. So death ensues. The slight of an insult plays with the notion of the kirtle shrinking to priza harmony, complication and overcomplication. So slight becomes something smaller than it is, and the letter longer, so larger, slight. S L E I G H T. Itself a sleight of hand, creating the illusion of unity, when in reality there's nothing but multiplicity and cunning paradox. Hopkins would have been proud of this moment. Elizabeth Bishop played all day with Kirtle double sonnets, and Fowler plays to the extended miniaturized sonnet cut in half and then divided again by a randomizer. His extreme use of syncope can find the textures it needs, cutting up huge passages to remove excess, but it's less rash here than in earlier collections. Yet his gathering everything all together is refined almost to a secret. Some objects are displayed out of its material or consequence. Man's device for private rooms and the happy distance between rich and poor was as it is, stands in for the award nomination of the furry royal pardon fest. Fowler has learnt the Martian Highchinks, but integrated them so well that they don't advertise themselves that are subliminal, and nothing is anything unless it overlaps. As always, his use of the synagogue can depend on how it's interpreted, whether it's expected, and links with Hobbes, a multitude of men are made one person, and also links with anthropological studies, where it mediates between different groups in the social structure and species and genera found in nature. It's a trope, banded about when environmentalists and business interests do battle, and that's another battlefield Valerie's writing towards, like Bruce Chapman done by Werner Herzog. Aboriginal prisoners of war are allowed their kangaroo tailed delicacies, even if they have been tried by white courts. Here in the desert, where snakes have need of their horrific poison, lest they starve. Fowler's imagination inverts. His erotic convulsions are deathly, the urges of the flesh become decent and induce final feelings of nausea and piety. Two quiet high points in space shuffling, rivaling the Tory in the actual event. Pity is gutted. Well, here again we see Fowler at play. Pity can be a matter of being gutted at a push, perhaps, but here it's refined out to something savage and self-aware enough to wobble to a hotel, a wall, pre-penicillin walls with crows cawing in the forests. In a poem, this poem that I had dreamt, oh well, on with the end of the German basics, the lean to a spider you are afraid to become, which catches the wry desolation of the poet facing the need for epic afterlife and finding there's nothing to build it from but rubble. Without the perfect line, the poet recognises that not going very well is what has to be bred here. One of the needs in this writing is a reader who works to change the habits of minds that are wealthiest, a sort of pale, friendless mercenary, so equipped to deal with irrascible children and a frightening lack of perspective, which is as good as a summary of the culture at the present that I've read for some time. A time seemed to be led by pale, friendless mercenary minds, and in response, Fowler hovers between answering back with blunt nettled spirit, or else intoning half-baked charms, spells that hint at secret cults, liturges, hymns, folded into atonements, rinsing the mind of their bleaching desert attachments. That the mind holds to illusions that we are able to function as if there's no horror happening just over the horizon, or even in the same room, is something that Fowler is drawn to again and again. The suffering that grows so deep you can't bear to pay, but pay you must is a central theme and a conceit that makes his war poems resonate with a felt truth about a special kind of modern warfare. For our war reveals the possibilities of the human mind to pretend everything is fine. In a particularly subtle physicality, his poem, The Bleached Is Not a White, takes the death of a whale as a way of showing the heartbreaking route away from civilization we've taken. A place that's as public and as private as can be, a narrow road to the interior that is literally broken up. As it perishes, its heart bursting in attack, the salt, water damming its arteries, the whale turns eyes down to watch its death place rise into view. There's a marvellous, deadly, hard-won simplicity and directness in this that can invoke the physicality of his spiritual journey, a kind of zen mixed with highest art. Bashu's journey to Oku, recalibrated as allegoric caustic satire. He also evokes the allegiance we remember from Emily Dickinson, perhaps a bird came down the wall, as well as Cummings since feeling is first, so like a child, like a foreigner, a joker. He plays, compares, couples, contrasts, double arranges, jams semantic inquiry into fragments, anti paradigms, colloquial, dialectical, vulgar, irregular arrangements that seem to forget what they started, or else never intended a main clause to have any finer closing. Heft, which after a while may be taken to be a political stance. In this at times CSB Elzebub in Milton's Paradise Lost, who refuses the conventional obligations to honour what he starts with a completion, that is sorry, for example, if thou behest he, but oh how fallen, how changed from him. Milton wrote, confound the poet tasters of his day, who had put together edifying verse for educative reasons. He deliberately wrote so that his poetry could not be easily chopped into such squeamish morsels. Reminded of Dylan here. Whatever they're up to, it's not wallpaper. Shelley moved toward the impenetrable, shifting expectations by removing closure commas, staying on the side of grammar but posing something unacceptable to the reader not wanting to think recursively. Extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, the bloom whose petals nipped before they blew, died on the promise of the fruit is waste. Shelley is asking the reader to puzzle with him, and reminds us again that language isn't always not essentially, never essentially, communication, but keeping a difficult score. So too the poem tracks dark nights of the soul, where if we're lucky it's the smaller death drive today a near tendency, and that nearness is the key, as if Fowler is drawing everything from a distance into a circle of reach, his clothes shaves are those at hand, and the dark enchantments he extracts are ways of bringing everything, no matter how huge and distant, into his circle of intent. If anyone can restore the price of the stumbling block to poetry, then Fowler, devouring whole the evil spirits of his figures and tropes, is our best last bet. An abbreviated tour of this roadmap reveals the considered will of his haunted poems, the spectral momentum that comes with the names of animals and the numerous maledictions of children and childbirth, as if birth was the fault and the gift immersed in the primal maledicted horror of poetry's elemental voice and violence. Our blind activities are overheard as chunks of patter in a public space. It's like we get what Bruno Gantzer's angel in Wings of Desire hears before he resigns himself to the veracity of the human painted pink dips, the day of the dead, liver fluke packing ready bags, not born children, elicited sympathy, a part growing closer, shut slower, frosted grass, the recent meat, non homo, empty space, new towns like Swindon, Off Limits, Water Rats, Bear Trats, salmon, ghosts of the civil dead, cut bone and cocktails, deaf dolphins, my human skull, cat's paw, prison, Vyatnem Doubt, death, debt, bleeding nose and raw potato, comets, a lost jelly eye, your own regret in gardens, further nosebleeds, vigilante justice, auditioning in shirts with Michelle Wild, born again, born again, the eyes of children, cutting off people's heads, the Venus Nebula is ever expanding, the Gypsy wound, a tomb of trinkets, a baby dies in Bristol if thinly veiled my dog is on the fellows. A baby is cruel. Muslim is a hard hunter, eats the bed. God himself before social services let him down. Christie's clit Morals not changed from two thousand thirteen years ago in the Middle Eastern desert. Baby mooty, the baby of the north, an alcoholic, unemployed and eating the fatty foods like chops. Not good news, not good an abortion. Choosing between money and life. The English long baby made chain mail redundant. Baby men have always had murderers and mistresses. Baby in the bath baby bullied Bad parenting where the baby grows up to be a duck. Baby Bowie. She runs where once she crawled a baby being made in the oven. A shoal of baby orcas. But a my brother says is very tatty. She's descended from sunflowers which is a bath of balls. Death throws is not a dance. As ephemeral as if it is a colon is not a delusion. Day of the dead parades sober figure hush in the crib. Sore in healing as a planet earth Tetris elephant the butt of an Anglicolan rifle smash the natural eye from his head. Older in the last white sun horsepower colonies A filial son. How long would you like to fight? You pick your terms Weeping and smiling fits of those still asleep. Caspar still dead in missing strings A victimless act of catharsis. I have not killed a day so small His black dolphin spectre of miniature women a nightmare about a millipede with pistons. I sniffed the crotch the other girl soiled her underwear. The doctor stands by fondling the crease. A sheep floats, is all but eight months old into a black rubber bag. Ancient carrion on a beer East Greek strictly frontal stance, quarter naked hood dwarf, my prostation at gunpoint and the small one, the reins of Castemia, Tata Tamiline eats babies, slug trails, the will fall blinded. These voices convulse with disclosures that come from what is left behind or is just destiny or a hiding for nothing. Fowler catches the protein energies that tune our sentiments and reasons. He's showing us the decomposed contagions of our lively souls, their desire to touch and be touched without pacification. Every weeknight I'm at Paddington Station in London. There are always crowds. All over there are working Greeks, Pakistanis, Indians, Afro-Caribbeans, Turks, Irish, English, Welsh, Spanish, Portuguese, Italians, French, Nigerians, Poles, Ukrainians, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Australians, Americans, Arabs, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists, Hindus, Rastas, all a whole lot. All there waiting for trains, moving away to the underground or taxi ranks or the streets, or serving, buying, eating hot dishes from kiosks, or browsing temporarily inside the shops, or working on the lines, or tapping on their mobiles, or waiting, having a smoke, moving or rooted for a moment, or preening, or letting themselves go, and all of them superior to the life being lived, closer to illumination than a notch of mere recorded conscience, caught between living and history's noises unfolding outside in the superlucidity of exhausting, quivering liveliness. It's a wholly secular place of penetrable force, a huge disorder of facts, where alchemies of existence take place every day, and we're all bubbling up inside an immense kettle or melting pot. No matter that death and the butcher's eye is always haunting it, this immediate and apparent reality of facts, this bodily physical blossoming of anonymous people under the vast glassy dome of the station's insane confabulation, is delicate precious, of immeasurable value, like the poet's spirit ghosts of deer. Yet it's a secret. Fowler's voice brings us this news of ourselves, resonates with this intelligence and discharges the sentiment without sentimentality, unafraid to find a perspective that can recall the protein charge of our insanely complex contemporary existential veils. Arto summarizes this in his detonating comment on Van Gogh. He talks about a sensibility that arrives where thinking is no longer exhausting and no longer exists, where the only thing is to gather bodies.