Punk Poetics by Jones Irwin

We need a new cosmology. New gods. New sacraments. Another drink. – Patti Smith The fucking clocks are fucking wrong. The fucking days are fucking long. It fucking gets you fucking down. Evidently Chickentown. – John Cooper Clark Punk, in its myriad manifestations since the late 1970s, has had its own aspirations to being an art movement, whether through the music form itself or through film, performance art or even fiction. It is perhaps surprising then that the conceptualization of a ‘punk poetry’ has been so little addressed, insofar as ‘poetry has not been an art form associated with the punk movement’ (Hannon 2020: 1). In this workshop, we will look at specific counter-examples of a punk poetry, including the poems of John Cooper Clarke, Jim Carroll and Patti Smith.

BIO: Jones Irwin teaches Philosophy and Education in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. He has published original monographs on philosophy and aesthetics, including texts on Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction and Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalysis. He has published poetry widely with independent journals and small presses and has developed recent work on metafiction and poetics. His longer poem ‘What Will Happen Then?’ won the Tofu Ink Press Poetry Prize for 2023. His second Chapbook of poems, entitled ‘Deep Image or a Painting by Jeffrey Dahmer’ will be published by Tofu Ink Press in 2024.