The European Poetry Festival is the biggest consistent celebration of continental poetry in the UK. For nine years as a festival, and over fifteen years as an event series, over 1000 European poets have performed new collaborations across the British Isles. The festival celebrates, in the UK and beyond, the grand resurgence in avant-garde and literary poetry that has marked the 21st century across Europe and it aims to not only innovate what a live poetry experience might be, but to inculcate community and engagement between poets across the continent, as well as between new audiences and complex poetries. At the heart of this is our collaborative model, the Camarade events. Here pairs of poets, visiting or based in the UK, create brand new works for each event, free to create as they wish. Each event often features multiple pairings, and so our events become energised, engaging playgrounds for experimentation as well as friendships. https://www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/
A festival built on collaboration should be considered in collaboration. Here I have asked five poets who represent the spirit of the European Poetry Festival over the last decade to reflect on what community at the European Poetry Festival has meant for them and their work, with derivation and idiosyncrasy inevitably welcome, given the experimental tone of the festival. Each poet has then generously provided me a question to answer. – SJ Fowler, May 2026
David Spittle:
Performing at the European Poetry Festival has become an integral part of my development as a writer in ways that have challenged and expanded my creative practice alongside stoking a burgeoning social network of fellow poets and artists. This network has continued to support and extend the possibilities of my own work, in addition to furthering my poetic education. Areas of the poetry and publishing culture in the UK have suffered from rising trends in anti-intellectualism, aesthetic conservatism, short-sighted and repetitive awards circuits and the sadly alienating knock-on influence of algorithmic cycles of commercial viability. This has roots in many problems and is not unique to the UK, however, in such times, the sincere and innovative spirit of the EPF has become an annual source of great renewal and sustenance. The festival has fostered a vast and diverse community across generations, countries and different practices that, passing through the possibilities of experimental poetry, has built a profound motor for cultural exchange and invention. Through SJ Fowler’s energy, curation and vision, I (and countless friends) have had the privilege to work with and discover many poets I would otherwise never have had the joy of encountering. It is a rare and wonderful experience to find such a genuinely inventive and welcoming space.
My question to Fowler would be: has your sense of what the festival is and can still aspire to be developed or changed over the years that you have been doing it?
SJ Fowler:
It was around the lockdown that I realised the festival had become sustainable because it was interpersonally sustaining. Or rather, my approach of putting collaboration first, rather than translation or singular solo readings, had led to people being put first, as everything was being created for the events, and communities and friendships spiralled out from this model. As such, in the absence of people getting together for one night to share new collaborative performances I realised the festival was sustainable for me for an individual as all extraneously reflective consideration, including goals or even curatorial visions, had drained away and I was just doing it, wanting to do it, to see people and see their work. I wanted to get a few hundred good people together, connect them, and have a lovely few weeks in their company, and all else could flow from that, because of that, often oblivious to me. Since then this has increasingly been the case, that I am able to be in the moment of the events and not mind the admin and effort it takes to build up to these moments, for they are just less nice but neutral moments in the service of me seeing and meeting and working with people.
Krišjānis Zeļģis:
European poetry festivals feel a bit like stepping into a small sports tournament. The first time I went, it seemed like everyone else had been doing this for years—seasoned, calm, already part of some invisible rhythm.
You’re paired with someone you don’t always know well, and sometimes you don’t fully understand each other. But there’s a shared task, and somehow you make it work. Through doubt, through chaos, through last-minute changes. It’s that same quiet tension before a competition begins—the mix of uncertainty and focus—followed by the realization that, despite everything, you’re ready enough.
Question to Steven. How big a role does the occasional failed reading play? For the festival and for those who read.
SJ Fowler:
Failure is wonderfully relative, but it does happen. A joke that isn’t a joke when one is interested in experimental work (that isn’t really experimental but is called such to define itself against that which is expected) is that nothing can fail as awkwardness and negative aesthetics are valuable, or sought. Realistically this is not the case when one wanted it to be good. I think there are times I feel this deeply when it is me, trying to take a risk and having a bad idea and not having the sense to mediate it. This has happened more than once, and it makes me wince, because I am performing at my own festival. When others perceive themselves as failing, it is often not the case, for we aren’t the best judge of ourselves, or what others take from what we do. The only failure which plays a big role is when people do things which seem the result of conceit. Reading twice as long as the allotted timeslot. That destabilises all things on the night. And once someone had bullied their collaborator into interviewing them in their creative collaboration slot. These things play a role in me learning how to curate and who to invite, but otherwise, to answer your question, there are few things at the fest that can be failures of any size because the model and permissiveness holds them tight as successes.
Lavinia Singer:
And the question – a special ‘silly riddle’ that ‘occurred widely throughout Europe’ which I hope captures some of the surprise and delight of the collaborations you so marvellously make happen:
It flew like a bird without feathers;
it sat in a tree without leaves;
a person comes without hands;
set it in motion without feet;
roasted it without fire;
and ate it without a mouth.
What is it?
SJ Fowler:
I’m so bad at riddles, which I’m very happy with, and relates to my feeling that a good piece of creative work – like the live poetry at the festival – is like an unanswered riddle. To fight against the desperate need to have things that suggest answers answered, to relinquish to the ambiguity of what it is actually like to be alive. This maybe one of the purposes of poetry, for me, and if this is so in a laid back and playful way, then that’s my taste. So no answer from me without a mouth.
Julia Rose Lewis:
For me the festival is a rare free opportunity to grow as a writer and observe other writers growing in real time. I attend as many of the events as possible in order to see how the poets work varies with their collaborators. A good collaboration has emergent properties, which means it is not reducible to elements of the work of either poet in the pair. This new complexity is what makes seeing the same poet perform three times in a week feel different. It is the willingness to become something that is not only ourselves that makes collaboration such a beautifully fulfilling challenge.
What can the fans of the festival do to further it?
SJ Fowler:
Be, as Julia has always been, present and supportive or all who also attend and perform, and share with me poets who they think would enjoy it and loose themselves in it, and tell people about it, and share the videos of it, and enjoy it while it lasts, as we should do with all things.
Zuzana Husarova:
connections beyond borders, into fluidity;
artistic experimentation beyond the thinkable and the experiential;
inspiration to clouds and cloth;
language at play: games, gestures, plays, and ludic win-win situations;
an exhaustion we seek to explore;
friendliness and depth;
physical poetry and sonic values;
the air we need to breathe
What is your message to the next poetic generation?
SJ Fowler:
Do your own thing and take the time to find out what that thing is by doing all the things you can and reading all the things you can and don’t put your foot down too early and do all this with other people in real life as much as possible and make loads of things and (this is all my opinion) do not prize the intellectual above the other forms of intelligence in writing, and living.
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet, artist and performer who lives in London. His work explores an expansive idea of poetry and literature in relationship with contemporary art. It explores the textual, visual, asemic, concrete, sonic, collaborative, performative, improvised, curatorial – through 50 publications, 400 performances in over 40 countries, 4 large scale event programs, numerous commissions, collaborations and more. http://www.stevenjfowler.com
Zuzana Husárová is a Slovak poet, performer, and scholar specializing in electronic literature, digital media, and intermedial and poetic performance. She is an Associate Professor of Digital Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, an editor for the gender-focused magazine Glosolália, and a vocalist in the music band Drť. She has published four poetry books — liminal, lucent, amoeba, and Hypomnemata — as well as Výsledky vzniku (laureate of a national poetry prize), a book generated by the neural network Liza Gennart and co-created with Ľubomír Panák, and a bilingual Slovak-German collection Hyper (translated by Martina Lisa). She has co-edited two collective monographs on electronic literature research. Her theoretical book The Culture of Neural Networks, co-authored with Karel Piorecký, received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism in Electronic Literature. Over the last 15 years, she has also authored sound poetry projects and experimental poetic performances, including those co-created with Steven Fowler, which incorporate poetic, sonic, and physical movement.
Julia Rose Lewis is a teacher and writer. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College, her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Kingston University, and her Doctorate in Creative and Critical Writing from Cardiff University. She has taught at Kingston University, Cardiff University, and Indiana University Northwest. Her research explores collaboration, applied neurobiology, and contemporary experimental British poetry. She is the author of Phenomenology of the Feral (KFS 2017), High Erratic Ecology (KFS 2020), The Hen Wife (Contraband 2020), Misuse (KFS 2024). James Miller and she co-authored Strays (HVTN 2017). She and Nathan Hyland Walker co-authored The Velvet Protocol (KFS 2022). Paul Hawkins and she co-authored the visual poetry collection Postcards From Mental States (Hesterglock Press 2023). She has published ten pamphlets, the most recent of which is Still Life (Storybox Collective 2025). Her poetry collection Traumatism will be published by KFS press in August 2026.
Lavinia Singer is a poet and editor based in London. She is the author of Artifice (Prototype, 2023), Ornaments: a handbook (If a Leaf Falls/Glyph Press, 2020) and co-editor of Try To Be Better (Prototype, 2019), a creative-critical engagement with the poet W. S. Graham.
David Spittle is a poet, filmmaker and essayist. Spittle has published five poetry collections: How Eyes Rest (HVTN, 2025), Decomposing Robert (Black Herald Press, 2023), Rubbles (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), All Particles and Waves (Black Herald Press, 2020) and B O X (HVTN, 2018). Spittle’s films have screened at festivals and been broadcast on the BBC. His debut feature documentary, Gift of the Gab(2026), is a portrait of the poet SJ Fowler. His film criticism has appeared in Sight & Sound and as part of select Blu-ray releases. He continues independent research across film, the occult and poetics.
Instagram: @david_spittle_
Website: https://www.davidspittle.uk/about