This 70 poem collection highlights the people, the pain, and the promises that make and break modern day punks. Like punk culture, Punk Poetry is gritty, careless, and unabashedly imperfect.

Punk bands have produced an abundance of poetic texts, some crude, some elaborate, in the form of song lyrics. These lyrics are an ideal means by which to trace the developments and explain the conflicts and schisms that have shaped, and continue to shape, punk culture. They can be described as the community’s collective ‘poetic voice,’ and they come in many different forms. Their themes range from romantic love to emotional distress to radical politics. Some songs are intended to entertain, some to express strong feelings, some to provoke, some to spread awareness, and some to foment unrest. Most have an element of confrontation, of kicking against the pricks. Socially and epistemologically, they play a central role in the scene’s internal discourse, shaping communities and individual identities. The Poetry of Punk is an investigation into the Anglophone punk culture, specifically in the UK and the US, where punk originated in the mid-1970s, its focus being on the song lyrics written and performed by punk rock and hardcore artists.

Alchemy of Punk, a thesis and opera developed by Aneta Panek as part of her PhD, investigates punk’s poetics and motifs, genealogy, and subversive reinvention. Reaching as far back as the Middle Ages and exploring the tradition of troubadours, minnesingers, madrigals, beggar’s operas, and murder ballads, Aneta proposes to understand punk as an embodiment of Dionysian art; a danse macabre celebrating life through performative, screamed poetry. In her textual exploration of punk—this thesis—she delves into the vast forms of expression adopted by punk’s vagabonds, outcasts, and poètes maudits, and in her artwork—the punk opera—she tests the theories and ideas presented in her thesis, bringing together the greatest voices of classical opera, punk, and industrial rock in an explosive spectacle of theatrical and musical experiences, video installation, and live performance.

During the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem. Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.

'Nothing short of dazzling' – Alex Turner 'A big-hearted poet of boundless humour and unmistakable style' – Kit Fan, Guardian Dr John Cooper Clarke's dazzling, scabrous voice has reverberated through pop culture for decades, his influence on generations of performance poets and musicians plain for all to see. In WHAT, the original 'People's Poet' comes storming out of the gate with an uproarious new collection, reminding us why he is one of Britain's most beloved writers and performers. James Brown, John F. Kennedy, Jesus Christ: nobody is safe from the punk rocker's acerbic pen – and that's just the first poem. Hot on the heels of The Luckiest Guy Alive and his sprawling, encyclopaediac memoir I Wanna Be Yours, the good Doctor returns with his most trenchant collection of poems yet. Vivid and alive, with a sensitivity only a writer with a life as varied and extraordinary as Cooper Clarke's could summon, WHAT is an exceptional collection from one of our foremost satirists.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Bielefeld University, 21 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Punk rock and the punk movement had a powerful impact on society and pop music. People influenced by it regarded crudeness and simplicity as a chance to express themselves, the constraints of conventions that demanded conformity and accuracy left behind. While breaking with those traditions concerning music, life style and attitude was at first the main motivation in the late 1970s, the movement emerged for many people to a force propagating virtues like equality, justice and social responsibility. The mixture of music always forcing attention and the prevalent notion of urgency in the lyrics proved a perfect basis for a countless number of artists to express vigorously protest, feelings ranging from despair to joy or just their personal perception of their environment. Along the history of American poetry the poems showed exactly those features, offering a channel to express oneself. The way poets express themselves just changed. It required centuries and many different stages to develop for example from the puritan style and fixed rhyme pattern of Anne Bradstreet's works to the flowing free verse of Walt Whitman expressing a fervent patriotism, which is again a great contrast to Allen Ginsberg's beat poetry, which features a very critical attitude towards America. Regarding the Native Americans' poetry, which deals in many cases with the balance between humans and their environment or appears in the form of vocables, as an additional facet, these developments illustrate how wide the range of style has already been when comparing it to later forms of poetry, and that always a breaking with conventions, accompanied by enthusiastic adherents on the one hand and sceptics on the other hand, took place. Analyzing a selection of punk rock lyrics by American artists I want to show that they posse

John Burgess writes his way through a punk world that is not altogether just music but also influenced by Buddhists, haiku and the essence on Montana bars. Included are nods to Patti Smith, Joey Ramone, Philip Whalen, Gregory Corso, Ken Kesey, Richard Gilkey, Jackie O and Dale Evans.