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 genuine authentic originality in poetry, without overt recourse to biographical context and identity, resisting a literature of control, neatness, poise and direct, didactic meaning.
Poem Brut has nurtured the work of dozens of poets across the UK, supporting those who might otherwise be overlooked, through over thirty live events, nearly 100 commissions, workshops, sharing days and courses, as well as numerous exhibitions at the likes of The Poetry Society and Rich Mix. We 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 since 2017 and has formed a quiet 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, somehow, aberrantly and quietly, 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.
The project is part of the subtheme Mental health narratives in poetry.
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European Poetry Festival
The European Poetry Festival is the biggest consistent celebration of continental poetry in the UK, ever. For six years as a festival, and a decade 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, our 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.
Our sixth festival took place across spring 2023, with 11 events across the UK, witnessed by near enough 1000 people. www.europeanpoetryfestival.com/2023
