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.

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

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.

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.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, Bielefeld University, 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 possess features that are typical for classical poetry, whereas the term classical poetry will represent the traditional understanding of poetry, which does not include punk rock lyrics. Intertextual elements as well as formal aspects will be pointed out and compared to similar cases in works of different poets that are supposed to serve as a kind of measuring staff, which will help to show where congruence is present and where it is not.

A collection of contemporary poetry that examines the multi-faceted meanings of the word "punk."