Poem Brut is a transdisciplinary project curated by SJ Fowler for the purpose of exploring how the blending of art, poetry, and neurobiology can better reflect why people behave the way they do and how they can expand their capabilities. The project welcomes practitioners from a variety of disciplines. Towards making both a live and paged poetry, it is a discussion of the implications of biology, psychology, psychiatry, and neurology among other disciplines. This is what Fowler terms neuropoetics or a concern with how the materiality of human brains and the materiality of poetry might intersect. It is an example of the twin cultures, taking creative expression and the natural sciences side by side. The project explores how poetry can attend to all five senses. Poem Brut attends to the materiality of poetry with respect to the process as building, drafting, mess-making, and revising. Poem Brut delights in open-ended and unfinished works that celebrate the process of creating.
Poem Brut shows how literature is created at the intersection of art, diversity, and neurobiology. It explores how a diverse range of human brains and bodies experience language in order to understand how they produce the poetry. Poem Brut aims to bridge a gap between art and poetry by means of commissioning transdisciplinary works. It celebrates artistic creative writing through embracing abstraction, color, handwriting, composition, illustration, and motion. Poem Brut foregrounds the material nature of writing and argues that the page as a part of the poem rather than the poem as a part of the page. 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 affirms the possibilities of the page, the voice, and the pen in a computer age. Poem Brut foregrounds the role of the handmade to create new ways to making, sharing, presenting and understanding literature. The project functions as a series of commissions, exhibits, performances, and publications. Multiple presses have supported the project through the publication of experimental books: Hesterglock, Penteract, Sampson Low, Stranger Press, and Zimzalla. Since 2017, Poem Brut has been supported by the Arts Council England, Serendip Studio, the Museum of Futures, Writers’ Centre Kingston, Rich Mix, 3:AM Magazine, National Poetry Library, the Poetry Society, and Kingston University.
