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 damned 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 beer … Oh, dear God … We need words to help us understand the state we’re in, and the Brutalist 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 a gate. Precipitation is rain. These words are good on the ear, and look good on the page. Hard consonants. Sharp edges. They have energy. Lines are written in concrete and set hard and fast. Like the buildings, the poetry 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. The narrative is built on tension. The daily war of the free-lance class, where the conflict 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 a trick, 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’s The Waste Land? All that Dante? … I just want to sit in the Spoons and drink Stella with you, girl.

Be authentic. The Brutalist poet lives and dies in the words. We’re not voyeurs. Read Mick Guffan. Read William Wantling.

Contradictions exist. Of course, they do. Many mistakes are made and they are accepted with a weary shrug.

Fletch Fletcher – published in Flux magazine 2025

Brutalist Poetry – Manifesto 

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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

Poetry published in:
Viper’s Tongue
Poetry Bus
E-List
Valencia 24-7
The National Poetry Library
Poetry Shop
Northern Lights
E17-Zine

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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