{Enthusiasm}

The seventh poetry collection by poet, artist, curator and vanguardist SJ Fowler, {Enthusiasm} is raw, fast and ferocious in its delivery, taking on subjects such as war, modernity and the environment, mixing these with references to popular culture. Full of energy, sometimes aggressive, Fowler’s collection is aptly titled, as its pieces are thrust at the reader in varying bursts, some of which are only a couple of lines long, while others stretch over the entire page.

Despite the poet’s intention is that the collection is approached as individual pieces, there is a unifying thread. Each poem focuses on language; Fowler plays with sound, accent and even grammar, keeping all his poems in the same register and using only one voice throughout. Attempting to be Avant-garde in its style, {Enthusiasm} appears initially to be poorly edited, complete with multiple grammatical and spelling mistakes. But the deliberate stripping back of punctuation and other refinements, similar to Cormac McCarthy’s work, allows only language at its most naked to emerge, and the use of sound to create neologisms and represent these on page is perhaps a deliberate Dadaist-type strategy. An example of that unedited rawness can be seen in his random omissions of capitalisations in “Retrospective when the artist is still alive”:

baby bowie one eye green one eye blue
you sing Berlin down. […] I
prefer Alice Eve though she’s posh whose
body you saw in starek into dkarness
which also launched beneland cumberbatch [.]

The sporadic and anarchic use of grammar, capitals and punctuation here are similar to the ill-educated reviews and comments we are all know online, especially on social media. This again hooks Fowler’s style to aggressive outbursts as his language and grammar recall some of the unfettered immediacy of Facebook communications.

Furthermore, these are not the only references to popular culture here. “Balmy” ends with the question “why did I watch the 4^th Underworld film?”; Game of Thrones is mentioned twice in the collection. Much like the reference to Star Trek, these cheapen the poems as often liberal and environmental messages are made less serious as the diversions to these references take centre stage, not unlike that seemingly superficial aside on Alice Eve’s body. These are however contrasted against more meaningful references: David Bowie, for example has often been praised for his activism in connection with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Fowler also includes typographical symbols throughout his collection, favouring “&”, “>” and “+”, despite also using their lettered equivalents in tandem. This creates a friction between the collection’s focus on the performance of these as a sound poems and how the work appears on the page. One of the shortest poems, “Hands harp” is full of sound techniques, such as its use of alliteration and rhyme:

thank the thought
of thinking
thank the night
of drinking
Kapar’s still dead
the grand piano
in his stead
is missing strings [.]

Here, the nonsense of the poem’s content is overstated by its commitment to sound, as the hard “th” alliteration of the opening is countered by the soft “s” sounds at the end, while the rhythm of the poem is made musical by its consistent metre and rhyming. However, at the other end of the spectrum, “I’ve been to prison” has no metre or rhyme to speak of, but does include symbols:

I missed my pet
>my training partners >friends >family >wife >
Children […]

Here, Fowler uses the “>” icon to visually represent the phrase “less than”, or html coding, rendering the poem more visual than oral. This, of course, can be located within the collection’s invocation of online writing, both in appearance, sound and unedited tactlessness. As well as a nod to contemporaries, there is perhaps a flavour of concrete poetry, which Ian Hamilton Finlay believed could not be read aloud.

This rawness means Fowler’s poems must be read slowly and carefully, but even at such a pace their loudness is inescapable. Each poem is elusive in its meaning, obscure and weird …in a very likable way. Reading {Enthusiasm} one cannot help but feel like Alice free-falling down the rabbit hole.

Kate McAuliffe