Report from London: SJ Fowler – The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling | Out now from ZIMZALLA
This is my asemic writing book. Originally published in 2018, it will be released in a second edition in 2020, with new works, articles and interviews, collecting my Asemic work in one place.
“The scrawl or doodle is not a by-product of distraction; it is an active production of the mind when concentration moves downwards in the brain. It is the poetry of the mind’s rearguard, and it is more often a product of writing, pen in hand, than it is a visual art. So why should poetry, the language art, not have held scribbling to its chest? This volume of SJ Fowler’s collected works in the line let loose tradition attempts to return the wandering shapes of letters and words back to the front. Selected from over 1300 works spanning 11 & ½ years and touching upon asemic and pansemic writing, widely varying in tone, density, form and character, this selection of poems shows SJ Fowler’s fundamental impatience and childishness.”
https://zimzalla.co.uk/051-sj-fowler-selected-scribbling-and-scrawling/
In this new/old inexhaustible asemic writing genre, SJ Fowler digs, not a grave for literature, but a hole to plant seeds for a new scribal species currently undergoing a wild flowering on and offline. Fowler keeps his asemic gestures rolling onto the cloud white pages by his pen striking like neuronic lightning, waking up the reader to an essential epiphany: we are here to be human and to acknowledge ourselves. From cave scribbling to blinding internet speeds, It’s up to each generation to reinvent the human asemic scrawl and scribble, and SJF is a natural at this form of artistic expression, his “primitive” pen being a perfect tool for him to use for this type of calligraphic work. In Selected Scribbling and Scrawlings, and asemic writing in general, the purpose is about taking in writing in its complete totality, and capturing the grand swathe of historical and the contemporary writing styles, unifying and synthesizing the non-verbal with the slightly legible word(s). SJF champions his mighty pen like a precision instrument to harvest the agriculture of manuscription swirling around inside his mind. As asemic readers and writers we witness this experience together, and Fowler strives to entertain us well in the amount of time we spend between the covers. Asemic writing is an interesting glue to hold an essential part of early 21st century writing culture together, and SJF knows how to creatively express himself honestly in this zeitgeist.
—Michael Jacobson, author of Works & Interviews and Hei Kuu
