words by Fletch Fletcher
Poetry: artistic writing that stirs a reader’s imagination by using the lyrical arrangement of words. The poet carefully chooses language for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
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.
See, Brutalism taps into the fear of the sublime. The Schopenhauer sublime, where you feel insignificant in the face of overwhelming vastness. Where the stars in the sky are terrifying, and the sea is too wide, and huge blocks of concrete are just too heavy. The Gig Economy has this power. Its immenseness batters you down. It makes you realise that you are nothing and you will die with nothing. Hopes of a better tomorrow are crushed under a wave of ads and bills. Utopia comes in a four-pack of Lech … Oh, dear God … We need words to help us understand the state we’re in, and the Brutalist poet provides them. Words that battle with the times.
The verse is raw, you can feel that. The surface texture is rough. Saxon words are preferred to the more elegant Latinate. Entrance is gate. Fissure is crack. These words are good on the ear, and look good on the page. Hard consonants. Sharp edges. They have energy. Verse is written in concrete and it sets hard and fast. Like the buildings, it has permanence. It’s difficult to change. Even tougher to destroy. It makes a mark.
The style is narrative-driven and sparse. It’s pared down to the bone. Nouns and verbs have a blunt force, whereas adjectives and adverbs are hooked for being unnecessary or vague. It’s a Hemingway thing. The narrative is built on tension. The daily war of the free-lance class. Conflict which is, or is not, resolved.
Get the tone right and the rest slots into place. Radical imagery constructed from blocks of untreated slab. The music, for once, is secondary.
Resist the metaphor. After all, it’s nothing more than deception, right? It’s intellectual masturbation. Brutalist poetry is transparent and honest. A mirror is a mirror. The ladder is only ever a ladder. What good is metaphor to the Uber driver? It’s ice on the road. And how does that pan out? Cones round a wreck.
Reject the classics. The Brutalist refuses to reference ancient scripts, archaic language, and classical characters. All that Greek in Eliot? The Dante? … I just want to sit in the Spoons and drink Stella with you, girl.
Authentic. The Brutalist poet lives and dies in the words. We’re not voyeurs. Ask Mick Guffan. Ask Jose Arroyo.
Contradictions exist. Of course, they do. Many mistakes are made and they are accepted with a weary shrug.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
BIO
Fletch Fletcher
Deliveroo operative (free-lance)
Brutalist Poet
Books – published by Red-Raw:
- If You Drop Dead
- We Weren’t Invited
- Wrote Your Name in The Dirt
- Just Another Damned Couple
Poems published in:
Viper’s Tongue
Poetry Bus
Red Raw
Poetry Shop
Northern Lights
Valencia 24-7
E17-Zine
E-List
.………………………………………………………………………………………………….…
When We Had It All
The same sun shines on all of us
The same rain falls
And I knew you as a flower
Then as a fruit
Ripe and round
Now falling to earth
To rot in the dirt
I reach for the bottle
And stare at the screen
Your leg flopping against mine
And I know that you’re down
Because I’m down too
Slumped there
Glugging cheap booze and
Gazing at the show
JESUS
We might as well be watching
Our own graves being dug
There was a time when we glowed
Me and you
Like butter knives in the tray
Our hips curling in the sun
And your hair
Your hair was the colour of aubergine
Yeah, that was when we had it
Had it all
Look at that photo over there
Me and you
Road tripping round Spain
Back when our pants hung loose
And every light was on green
Yeah, back then
Under the sun and the rain
That’s when we burned bright
Me and you
Mr and Mrs 20-years-ago
But at least we had it, I think
At least we had it once
.………………………………………………………………………………………………….…
