A couple of years back, I created a collection, Metallurgy, which consisted of 100 found poems sourced from 200 metal lyrics. All poems were original but sources were named. This year, I was trying to decide what to do for National Poetry Month as I hadn’t written too much recently – apart from as a longer work (Mason Gorey).

As a spur to writing, I decided to go back to found poetry but this time mine the songs of my teen years. Punk appeared in the UK in the mid-70s. Songs started to filter through on the radio and I also discovered John Peel’s radio show at 10pm each week night on Radio 1 (which took my listening away from the very crackly Radio Luxembourg I tried to tune into back then!). Peel was a great advocate for indie bands and new music and enthusiastically shared his finds with his audience. Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Stranglers, The Clash, Joy Division, The Undertones, amongst many others, became firm favourites, and I still listen to them today. The music was very much rooted in anger and a feeling of hopelessness against the situation at the time – years of government messes, union strikes (rubbish not collected, bodies not buried, power cuts), unemployment – and people wanted to find their own way through. Today, sadly, with the turmoil in the UK and around the world, I am feeling that time coming back. But punk was more than anger, it was energy and exuberance, of getting up on stage even if you’d never sung or played an instrument before and having a go. Anyone could do it. It was also showed you did not necessarily need the big record labels to advance and small indie labels would dominate Peel’s playlist.

Punkology is my nostalgia trip, found poems from my favourite songs and which I have been sharing on bsky rather than Meta because of the whole scraping issue. It’s probably a futile gesture, but it’s still one I can make. I have created a poem for every day in April and hopefully will be able to create a collection of a similar size to Metallurgy. Even if I can’t get to 100, I will aim for 50! Punk songs were short in comparison to songs you usually hear, the lines simple and repetitive, so it was even harder to come up with something original. But I think I’ve managed.

Here are the first 10 which have been shared on bsky.

If you want to hear the songs of my youth, the Punkology playlist can be found here: