Poetry: artistic writing that stirs a reader’s imagination by using the lyrical arrangement of words.
Brutalist poets are different. Their music is discordant. They work in the Gig Economy and they suffer. They drink too much. They’re in the airport pub long before the flight to Crete. Onboard they won’t sit still, won’t shut up, and the plane gets diverted to Utrecht. They’re taken off in cuffs and everyone cheers, films it for TikTok.
This is the poet of the Wetherspoon generation. This is the poet I want. Brutalist on the page and Brutalist in the head.
And OK, it’s like the architecture. It’s divisive. Unsettling. The buildings are often derided as ugly and bleak but at the same time there’s a purity of line and space in there … an underlying sense of weight and mass. There’s poetry.
We discuss it. We write it. We perform in.
