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Teenage Kicks: Poetry and Post Punk? Yes.

Posted at 8:00 AM on July 30, 2011 by Jacquie Fuller (1 Comments)
Filed under: Teenage Kicks

This week on Teenage Kicks, our band of the week is Joy Division. Below is a poem about the band's front man, Ian Curtis, written by the poet Craig Arnold. When you're done reading, you can check out this video of the band performing "Love Will Tear Us Apart."


Leader of Men

Ian Curtis, 1956-1980

In all the photographs your eyes
are pale and pupil-less and look
too big for your head, your head
likewise for body. Because you're dead

we read into the frail frame
the ardor of a Bonaparte,
a Führer - the desire to stand
out, to be looked at. But art

and not the state took you in hand
and crushed you, the grim fame
you've massed not of a demagogue
but a scapegoat. On the first tour

the skinheads wearing National Front
T-shirts turned up. Who is this c---?
they muttered at you, catching the hint,
something not altogether pure

in the way you brought the microphone
up to your mouth, the way the crowd
did not stomp or clap or brawl but stared,
the way you stared back, eyes wide

open to any suggestion. How hard
they were to penetrate, their shut
bodies, stiff fabric, asphyxiate
leather of laced-up black jackboot,

the uniform aggressive gray
- gunmetal, Prussian, mole, charcoal -
zipped, snapped, hooked, buttoned knee to throat,
faces the only spots of skin

left open, extras in a war
movie whose maker can't decide
which is more victim, whose soundtrack
is your thick voice, the epilept-

ic's rapture swallowing his tongue,
mouth a sad black hole, the young
bodies kept from each other, kept
from touching, kept from falling in.


- Craig Arnold
(1967-2009)


Comments (1)

nice article. thanks.

Posted by TedD | August 1, 2011 6:57 AM

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