Speaking about the poetry of Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly states that, for his generation of outsider poets, Rothenberg ‘played the role Picasso did for the painters . . . opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges’ (Kelly, quoted in Rothenberg 2013). This conception of a primal oral energy from which literature derives is a significant thesis when one explores the specific case of Irish literature. The history of Irish literature includes the poetries of two languages, one in Irish (or Gaeilge) and the other in English, both with strong roots in the oral traditions of narrative and verse. Oftentimes, these two languages intersect and co-operate, at times of course also they end up in sectarian conflict (most notably, during the British colonial period of Irish history, when the Irish language was suppressed). Much has been written about this complex history, but more recently a somewhat unlikely example of such cross-fertilisation has emerged in Northern Ireland; the Irish language hip-hop poetics of the band (from Belfast and Derry), Kneecap (Kneecap 2024).

In the semi-fictional docu-comedy drama about their emergence, also simply entitled Kneecap (Peppiatt 2024) and directed by the English director Rich Peppiatt, one of the characters realises that, on being questioned by the police, an Irish-language speaker can demand to have an Irish-language translator, fundamentally changing the dynamic of any such police interrogation and potentially any relationship between language per se and the police/the state itself. In this moment, the very relation between English and Irish oral languages is foregrounded, and the irremediable (legal and coercive) tension between them. As Peter Bradshaw has noted, ‘Kneecap have been a blazingly fierce presence since they emerged from the Irish language movement in the North, reinventing the political purpose of hip-hop and fighting a rearguard action for republican and Irish culture against a somnolent consensus.. a day after (Prince) William and Kate’s royal visit to the city’s Empire Music Hall, they showed up there doing a gig that involved raucously shouting (in English) “Brits out”’ (Bradshaw 2024). In the film, this bluntly anti-British sentiment phrase appears daubed on the pallid bum cheeks of one of the protagonists, as he bends over on front of the baying crowd to make his political statement for Irish freedom and unity. As his girlfriend (unaware of his involvement, as his face is disguised in an Irish nationalist tricolor balaclava) later notes; ‘I recognised your lovely arse on TV'.

The three members of the band, Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and cheeky arse DJ Próvai (a pun on ‘okay’ in Irish and a slang term for the Provisional IRA) play themselves in the film (having taken acting lessons to prepare), the first two young Belfast natives and the third an older music teacher from Derry, the last associated more formally with the Northern Irish political movement for Irish language equality. The origin story of the band is presented as having this music teacher effectively ‘discover’ the two poetic rappers through the police translation encounter, thus joining together to form the band. The film imagines a lost dad of the two younger members, an IRA man played by Michael Fassbender, who is supposed to have faked his own death and now lives somewhere else under an assumed identity, teaching yoga and surfing to hippy tourists: ‘from Bobby Sands to Bobby Sandals’ (Peppiatt 2024). The band are depicted (by all accounts, a realistic portrayal) as vehemently refusing to confirm to ideological purism (this latter purity often associated with both the Irish language and Republican Nationalist movements in Ireland). One of the band has a covert relationship with a woman from a Protestant Unionist background, Georgia – their differences become a version of bedroom kink – and the trio are involved in supplying drugs in the high rises of West Belfast, with a hilarious portrayal of anti-drugs Republican thugs (Radical Republicans Against Drugs or RRAD). Both of these ‘crimes’ – fraternising with the purported ‘enemy’ and being involved in illicit or hedonistic activities – make the band a ‘legitimate target’ for punishment from the terror thugs, and the ‘kneecap’ scene is one of the highlights of the film. Again, and tragi-comically, much of this narrative is all too realistic for those of us who grew up watching daily updates on punishment beatings and worse on (Northern) Irish BBC and Ulster Television in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

From a Southern Irish perspective (where the native language is more spoken than in the North but still in a minority), the phrase ‘Irish language movement’ often signifies a traditional philosophical vision, of looking back. This is captured in the film when the characters talk about wanting to free the language from being a ‘like the last Dodo, living behind glass in captivity….I want to smash the glass and set it free’ (Peppiatt 2024). However, both North and South, there have also been significantly anti-traditional and progressive elements to the Irish language movement, which might be seen as forerunners of Kneecap’s more iconoclastic approach. For example, in Cork city in the early 1970s, a revolution in Irish-language poetry was about to be launched on the banks of the river Lee. The seminal inspiration for this emergent grouping was the artistic vision of Corkonian composer and musician Seán Ó Riada, while the existentialist Cork poet Seán Ó Ríordáin (Ó’Ríordáin 2014) kept a typically critical eye on proceedings.

In this particular context, a group of four pioneering poets established a journal that would alter the course of Irish-language poetry and literature. This journal was called Innti. In a collection of essays, Inside Innti. A new wave in Irish poetry (Ni Gherabhuigh and Rosenstock 2023), recent Irish commentators and poets contextualise the significance of this progressive vision of Irish language poetry in a manner that I think is prescient for the emergence of Kneecap’s poetics.

Kneecap’s first album, Fine Art (2024), involves a significant collaboration with Dublin post-punk band Fontaines DC in the shape of the song Better Way to Live which involves vocals from Fontaines lead singer Grian Chatten. Fontaines DC themselves have connection back to poetics and the relation between music and verse. The title of the band’s debut album, Dogrel (2019) is a self-deprecating homage to ‘Doggerel’ the working-class ‘poetry of the people’ popularized by William McGonagall and the band have stated that they first bonded over a shared love of poetry. They also collectively released two collections of poetry – Vroom (inspired by American Beat poets) and Wingding (inspired by Irish poets) – before recording their debut album. Chatten is also a perceptive lyricist. Hailing from the Dublin North County seaside town of Skerries (himself the product of an Irish-English marriage), his songs foreground the overt but dark romanticism (as well as climate) of his home city (DC in the band name refers to Dublin City), as in the song Big’s ‘Dublin in the rain is mine, a pregnant city with a Catholic mind’.

Chatten also sings in a thick and heavy North Dublin brogue and his lyrics often connect to the national literary tradition; for example, Boys In The Better Land’s shout out to another local and infamous muse; ‘The radio is all about a runway model, with a face like sin and a heart like a James Joyce novel’. Kneecap’s Northern Irish 2024 album Fine Art, as a title and a concept, can similarly be seen as playing with the relation between art and the everyday, the beautiful and the ugly, the high and the low. Better Way to Live itself lyrically foregrounds the existential quest to live a more meaningful existence (depicted in the film in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles). The song moves between the two languages of Irish and English with ease, a highly unusual feat in the context not only of popular music but even of literature. While most Irish writers (North and South) employ English as their chosen language of expression, a minority use Irish. But to employ both/and rather than either/or as a principle of expression and of poetics, and within the same text, is highly original and provocative.

For example, in the following verse, ‘Faoi dheireadh tá deireadh tagtha le mo rut/Mar bhí lá maith agamsa inniu buíochas le foc/So I stroll I dtreo an pholl sa Bhalla/Four digit code, what do you know its Mo Chara’ (Kneecap 2024). The four lines mix Irish and English wilfully and the aesthetic and semantic effect is surprisingly effective and immediate (whatever language(s) you speak). ‘Finally my rut has ended/Because I had a good day today, thank fuck/So I stroll towards the hole in the wall/4 digit code, what do you know its My Friend’. By choosing this hybrid mix of languages, Kneecap enact a poetic pluralism, but also a political openness to the other. If it is true that ‘gach focal a labhraítear i nGaeilge… is é piléar scaoilte ar son saoirse na hÉireann’ (Every word of Irish spoken.. it is a bullet for Irish freedom), according to the character of the absent father Arló Ó Cairealláin in the film (Kneecap 2024), then what is happening in the poetics of Kneecap is something different, a kind of third space beyond the old antagonism and dualism of English (Bearla) vs Irish (Gaeilge). It is not coincidental that this song also in its title points towards a different, but also a new and progressive form of existence for Northern and Southern Ireland – Better Way to Live (Bealach Níos Fearr Chun Cónaí).

We started with Robert Kelly’s claim for Rothenberg that he played the role ‘which Picasso played for the painters.. opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges’ (Kelly quoted in Rothenberg 2013). This conception of a primal oral energy from which literature derives has an especial relevance for the origins of Irish writing, as the Gaelic tradition is one which has a powerfully rich oral tradition of storytelling and of expression. It seems most appropriate then to be analysing the ‘fine art’ of a contemporary Irish Hip-hop poetics. Rothenberg evolved a central vision of what he came to call ‘Deep Image’. Through this vision of experimental writing, he shakes up received ideas of what poems ought to be like. Poems can be everywhere, anything and everything, what he refers to as an ‘omni-poetics’ (Rothenberg 2013). In many respects, one can see both Kneecap and other poetic practitioners of contemporary music (such as Fontaines DC), as descendents of the earlier American counter-culture in this respect (Chatten especially refers back to the inspiration of the Beat poets and of Kerouac).

In this manner, I see Kneecap’s Irish language Hip-hop (effectively punk) poetics, alongside the artistic vision of others such as Fontaines DC, as allies in the expressionistic new wave of transformation out of a hegemony of parasitism across much of contemporary arts and media. To this end, let me add a haiku dedicated to the subject of this essay (in a dual Gaeilge / English mode, up front and then translated).

Kneecap Haiku (Original)#

You’ll end up face down
In a back alley way
Unless you speak as Gaeilge

In a hip-hop style
Tiocfaidh ár lá
Agus Georgia in lingerie

She’s screaming the North
Belongs to the Brits
You’re not convinced

But you’ll agree 100%
With a Prod bird who
Gives the best head

Who wouldn’t?
Anyway God is bust
Buíochas le foc

Plus a rhyming rap
That disses IRA
But just as much DUP

Leaving us laughing
Pissing féin
Loving our United Nations

Tráthnóna na teangan in Éirinn
Gach duine
A people once again

Kneecap Haiku (English)#

You’ll end up face down
In a back alley way
Unless you speak [in Irish]

In a hip-hop style
[Our day will come]
[And] Georgia in lingerie

She’s screaming the North
Belongs to the Brits
You’re not convinced

But you’ll agree 100%
With a Prod bird who
Gives the best head

Who wouldn’t?
Anyway God is bust
[Thanks be to fuck]

Plus a rhyming rap
That disses IRA
But just as much DUP

Leaving us laughing
Pissing ourselves
Loving our United Nations

[Late evening for language in Ireland]
[Every person]
A people once again

Footnote#

1.This has inspired in my own work the development of a hybrid form chapbook, including examples of metafiction and prose poems as well as verse, entitled Deep Image or a Painting by Jeffrey Dahmer (Irwin 2025, forthcoming). In this short chapbook, I have sought to operationalise this philosophy of l’écriture (also with a tip of the beret to Jacques Derrida), juxtaposing metafiction texts with prose poems, haikus, and shorter verse. In our times of contemporary crisis, it is hoped that the writing of poetry and of poetics, as a kind of minor literature, might serve and supplicate as a surprisingly robust resource contra the banality of mainstream culture (whether Spotify, Facebook, or worse).

References#

Bradshaw, Peter (2024) Kneecap. The Guardian, London.

Fontaines DC (2019) Dogrel. Partisan Records, London.

Irwin, Jones (2025) Deep Image or a Painting by Jeffrey Dahmer. Tofu Ink Press, California.

Kneecap (2024) Fine Art. Heavenly Records, London.

Ni Gherabhuigh, Ailbhe and Rosenstock, Tristan (2023) Inside Innti. A new wave in Irish poetry. Cork University Press, Ireland.

Ó’Ríordáin, Seán (2014) Rogha dánta. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

Peppiatt, Rich (Dir.) (2024) Kneecap. Fine Point Films, Dublin and Belfast.

Rothenberg, Jerome (2013) Eye Of Witness. A Jerome Rothenberg Reader. Black Widow Press, Boston.