(A shorter version of this dispatch appeared on Asymptote‘s blog here)
The ninth edition of the European Poetry Festival (London, UK, June-July 2026) involved exactly nine nations this year. Over 150 poets, many visiting from across Europe, presented new works at a series of “Camarade” events featuring poetry from Cyprus, Switzerland, Flanders, Estonia, Austria, Poland, Latvia, Norway, and Romania.
The festival has been founded and directed, and in most respects, single-handedly operated over the past decade by awarded poet, academic, author, and performer SJ Fowler, who also documents the festival on YouTube and at multiple literary venues.
Of the nine main features I only managed to attend the last, the Romanian poetry night at Poetry Society in Covent Garden on July 4th—-an event supported by RCI London and namely by their representative, poet, academic, and critic Gabriela Mocan. I was pleased to witness a prime illustration of Fowler’s trademark “camarade” concept that informs the entire festival. It involves pairing up each poet in the featured literature with one from a different background (British or other) and commissioning the resulting first-time duo to author and present a new collaborative/interactive work specially for the occasion.
Simona Nastac and Livia Franchini kicked off the night by presenting what they (ironically) called a “tutorial” on how to make a peace poem 106 years after Tristan Tzara’s “How to Make a Dadaist Poem.” An impressive paraphernalia of props ranging from DIY tapestry to toy music instruments were deployed—-—including a baby’s guitar amusedly played by Franchini in Jimi Hendrix’s graphic style (to which my 11-year old exclaimed, “Yay, now move on to Jimmy Page’s explicit style”). This facetiously childish plea for peace was strewn with memorable appropriations of literary landmarks, such as, “Thought is made in the mouth” (one of Tzara’s famous dicta), except now stated after tasting a lollipop. Miruna Fulgeanu and Andra Simons tapped into another rich pool of Romanian heritage, fairy tales and folklore rather than Dadaism. Their transnational, posthuman, gender-transcending approach was rather in the spirit of another literary school with Romanian roots, absurdism. The audience was evidently mesmerized when Simons gradually transitioned from reading to singing and finally to a most genuine blues performance. Luminita Amarie and Tony White represented probably the best demonstration of Fowler’s camaraderie in the literal personal-political sense of the term. An intriguing contrast informed the (anti)dialogic reading in which Amarie hummed her introspective, personal lyric brevities while White, in a commanding voice, did a ‘British (fake) translation’ by reading from one of his acclaimed novels. Amarie’s intermittently Romanian fragments were thus juxtaposed with an implicitly scathing excerpt in which street clashes triggered cynical discourse about the safety of riot police cracking down on demonstrators. Lastly, Margento and Nick Murray staged an intervention, tapping into Murray’s work on poetry gamification and tech that was leveraged in “astronomically” interacting with the other performer’s computational poetics and “monstrous moonshine” (i.e., algebraic-cosmological) intermediality.
“Camaraderie” was further enacted by featuring non-Romanian poets/performers that made equally rich and daring contributions to the event. Matt Martin & Albert Pellicer performed an infectiously engaging and farcically erudite critique of Eurocentrism, while Richard Ettiger & Victor Rees did a lyrically merciless indictment of illegal detainment and torture as a Western-culture-packaged not-to-worry-about. Annabel Taylor & Eleanor Wilders contributed a brief and incisive shared stream-of-conscience poem of wandering troubled physicality and erosive-corrosive shoreline unindulgent reverie. Last but not least, Katarína Krupičková & SJ Fowler himself presented a literally acrobatic and erotically charged number while improvising a both mundane and surreal dialogue touching on performance of/as delusion—–a tangibly alienating place or condition—–at times effusive and bonding, though, if risky an encounter.
If the Romanian evening was any indication, the European Poetry Festival continues to prove that its most enduring achievement lies not only in showcasing national poetries, but in creating genuinely new forms of dialogue—-of “camaraderie”—-between them.