Poem Brut celebrates artistic creative writing and its relationship with neurobiology - embracing text and colour, space and time, handwriting, composition, abstraction, illustration, sound, mess and motion. It affirms the possibilities of the page, the pen, the process and the performance in a computer age and celebrates authentic originality in poetry, without overt recourse to biographical context, resisting a literature of control, neatness, poise and direct, didactic meaning.

Poem Brut has nurtured the work of hundreds of poets across the UK, creating a longlasting and vibrant community, often supporting those who might otherwise be overlooked, with over 70 live events and nearly 100 commissions, workshops, sharing days and courses since 2017. We have held exhibitions at Kingston School of Art, The Poetry Society and Rich Mix and have helped produce and release new volumes of poetry, anthologies and over 150 online publications on 3am magazine. Poem Brut has offered an alternative understanding of 21st century literature and has formed a quiet, dynamic movement in British, and global, poetry.

Poem Brut embraces aesthetic possibility and all possible artistic poetic methods of writing, making and presenting poetry. At the same time, it roots it’s activities in a mindful thinking through of the potentials and possibilities of neurological and physiological diversity for a literature that expands our understanding of what the medium can do. It is also a discussion of the implications of psychology, psychiatry, biology and neurology - a neuropoetics. Rooted in an exploration of cognitive difference, of everything from autism, dyslexia, aphasia and dyspraxia to mental health conditions, Poem Brut seeks to ask whether it is in service to original and powerful writing for writers and poets with these experiences to try and ‘escape’ them into sense and order, rather than embracing how their brains understand language.

More on Poem Brut - Poem Brut aims to ask what is in the shape of a letter? What images do words recall? What is the meaning of colour in poetry and text upon the page? And white space? How does the situation of a poem change its meaning? Why is composition not a concept that applies to a medium that is innately visual? In literature, why has content overwhelmed context? Why has product dominated process? Poem Brut, in a playful, creative and accessible manner, aims to redress some of these concerns.

Poem Brut, conceptually, aims to not only support contemporary practitioners, but to illuminate an alternative history of modern poetry while exploring how innovative methods of poetry are often utterly purposeful - emerging from alternate experiences of language and consciousness in the world. In this way, Poem Brut aims to bridge a gap between poetry and art, and to support artists and poets who often have to navigate an unfortunate binary of outsider / insider.

Poem Brut will evidence the brilliance of poets working in underexplored traditions or whose work responds to their own alternative experience of consciousness, be that through neurological disorder, intellectual disability or mental health experience. It is a project which aims to share their methods and means, to create new works and bring light, primarily, to the inspiring potential of a poetry of colour, shape, composition, geometry, handwriting and material.

The project supposes that returning to the gestural and instinctual methods, often mistakenly associated with ‘high art / poetry’, can have an extraordinary effect on many individuals who are often ill at ease with formal learning of literature. In doing so, Poem Brut aims to create a narrative through historical poets who have explored this exciting territory, to show audiences and participants interested that they are part of a tradition. 

Poem Brut will be an examination of words that are meant to make you squint, to battle for legibility, rather than you be able to pinch and extend your thumb and forefinger against the page to get a closer look. It will be a celebration of scribbling, crossings out, forgotten notes, strange scrawls - the odd interaction between paper and pen, and pencil, and the colours that randomly collide. It is a project about the page as a block, about geometry, about lines that sever meaning, about inarticulate shapes, about minimalism and collage. It is about making, gesturing towards the handmade, the amateur, the outside, liquid and wood, ugliness, toilet wall draughtsmanship and mess.