User:Arms & Hearts/Sean Bonney

Life and work

Bonney was born in Brighton in 1969. He grew up near Kingston upon Hull, where he was involved in protests against the poll tax. His early poetic performances were during hardcore punk concerts, where he would read between bands' sets. In the mid-1990s, he moved to London, where he attended Bob Cobbing's workshops at Writers Forum and was involved in the punk and free jazz music scenes. Bonney later said that, in the late 1990s, the combined influence of the Witers Forum workshops and the anthology Conductors of Chaos transformed his sense of the possibilities afforded by poetry. In 1998, Bonney began a PhD on the work of Charles Olson at King's College London. Later, after returning to postgraduate study, he received his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, submitting a thesis on the work of Amiri Baraka. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Free University of Berlin, where he researched the work of Gogou and Diane di Prima.

He identified himself politically as an anarchist communist.

Bonney later said he had lost his capacity for political involvement following the poll tax protests, and only returned to political organising in a lesser role in the late 2010s.

In 2011, Bonney argued the previous year's increase in tuition fees in the United Kingdom would lead to the wholesale transformation of UK universities and characterised the policy as an attack on critical thought.

Bonney's work in the early 2000s addressed similar concerns to psychogeography, emphasising the pursuit of "cracks" in urban space associated with memory and power, though he distanced himself from that approach.

Andrea Brady argues that gothic themes appeared especially in Bonney's work written in 2010–11 and thereafter, during which events in British politics such as the election of the Cameron–Clegg coalition, the 2010 student protests and the 2011 riots led him to incorporate ideas related to the Stuart Restoration (????), the Paris Commune, the Red Army Faction, and George Jackson into his work, in order to consider the ways poetry may persist in spite of political defeat. Brady suggests that in this respect Bonney's work echoes themes in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Brady argues that these events led Bonney to pursue "an engagement of poetry with the struggle in the street."

Eltringham argues that Bonney's work from the early 2000s invoked London as a "muse and antagonist", and examined its privately owned public spaces and "yuppiedromes"'.

Jacob Edmond argues that Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud and Baudelaire in English both form part of a broader project of rewriting prior poets' work.

He was married to the French-Canadian poet Frances Kruk, with whom he co-founded the small press yt communications.

Bonney died in Berlin on 13 November 2019.

Notes on Heresy (2002)

Notes on Heresy, Bonney's first book of poetry, was published by Writers Forum in 2002, and draws on histories of rebellion including the 17th-century pamphleteer Abiezer Coppe and the anonymous ballad "Tom o' Bedlam".

Poisons, Their Antidotes (2003)

Poisons, Their Antidotes drew on influences from the Chartist, communist and anarchist movements.

A poem in Poisons refers to Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell, London.

Another poem incorporates passages from the Scottish poem "Thomas the Rhymer and the Queen of Elfland", one of the Child Ballads.

Mark Jackson takes the title of Poisons as implying an interest in both "considerations of what is sick, insidious, politically or socially", as well as "solutions, possible modes of repair".

"Filth Screed" (2003–4)

Bonney's collection "Filth Screed" refers to the black bloc protest tactic and cites the work of Guy Debord.

Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005)

Blade Pitch Control Unit includes the entirety of Poisons, their Antidotes and other earlier works. In a review, the poet Jeff Hilson highlighted Bonney's "overriding emphasis on the visual organisation of the text" and his use of invented compound words, which Hilson argues "creates a bastard word which wanders the world trying to find its place".

Baudelaire in English (2007/8)

Baudelaire in English comprises a series of mock translations of the work of Charles Baudelaire, and was composed using a typewriter, with lines layered as in a palimpsest, and nonstandard punctuation.

Bonney's version of L'albatros, a poem which likens the condition of an albatross trapped on a ship to that of the poet, reject Baudelaire's conclusion, siding with the crowd who mock the bird.

Bonney's version of "Le cygne" reduces the length of the poem and changes its focus from Paris to London in the 2000s.

Bonney's translations make much greater use of vernacular than Baudelaire's originals and earlier translations by William Aggeler and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Lines translated by Millay as "When the low, heavy sky weighs like the giant lid / Of a great pot upon the spirit crushed by care" are rendered by Bonney as "&& sometimes th entire City / pisses me off".

Bonney described the poems as a response to Bob Cobbing's work. Bonney described the "fractured arrangement" of the poems as allowing him, when reading aloud, to improvise to a greater degree.

David Nowell Smith has argued that Baudelaire in English stages "a confrontation between the ‘antiquated’ diction Baudelaire rather regally employs and his own disjunctive techniques".

Nowell Smith argues that the poems constituting Baudelaire in English "take Baudelaire’s texts as starting points for a transfiguring of language and form, historical time and place."

Nowell Smith argues that Bonney's "translations" draw on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno's work on Baudelaire.

Esther Leslie argues that Baudelaire in English "samples the original historical energy of [Baudelaire's] poems ... and releases that energy into the frenzy of the now."

Leslie reads Bonney's translations as reflecting the view that Baudelaire's poems resist translation in traditional lines and stanas.

Leslie argues that Bonney's translations construct a representation of urban space that differs from Baudelaire's: "Any lingering languorousness in Baudelaire’s mournful glance across the city is expunged. The city appears but as an even more hyped up place of language contortions, violent clashes, word manglings, battles over space and order."

Leslie characterises Bonney's translations as "splenetic anti-verse."

Leslie describes Bonney's language as "one that can only splutter its senses out, on the edge of inarticulacy."

Document — Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos (2008)

Document — Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos, published by Barque Press, includes poems as well as prose and visual works.

The Commons (2011)

The Commons: A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle, a sonnet sequence comprising 140 poems written between 2008 and 2010, was published in 2011.

The collection draws extensively on the politics of music. It combines voices from contemporary protest movements with those of the Paris Commune, the October Revolution and the English Civil War.

The poems contain references to The Angry Brigade.

The work begins with a reference to Benjamin Péret's Je ne mange pas de ce pain-la (1936).

Daniel Eltringham argues that the poems reflect the 2010 student protests, 2011 riots, and the police's use of kettling, and constituted "the interpolation of widespread social protest into Bonney's longstanding imaginative militancy".

David Nowell Smith argued in 2013 that The Commons then constituted Bonney's most significant work, and was "one of the first major long poems in English this century".

Leslie argues that the poems make reference to the War in Afghanistan.

The Commons makes use of fragments of popular and folk songs.

Jon Clay argues that the experimental quality of The Commons is central to its politics, and examines Bonney's experimentation through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's conception of minor literature. Clay argues that The Commons is an experimental work insofar as "it mixes utterances of different register and, it seems, source, even if the latter cannot be clearly identified; it combines modern and archaic lexis; it interrupts itself with violent outbursts; [and] what coherence it has does not seem to be either semantic or syntactic, though there are suggestions of the possibility of coherence through these".

Four Letters Four Comments (2011)

Four Letters Four Comments (2011) is a commentary on contemporary poetry and its relation to politics, taking the form of correspondence with an unnamed interlocutor. The work was written during in 2010 and 2011, a period that saw student protests, nationwide riots, and Occupy movement encampments, which Bonney saw as indicating a broader political discontent.

The volume includes "Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)", in which Bonney turns to the work of Arthur Rimbaud to respond to questions concerning poetry's response to social conditions.

Happiness (Poems After Rimbaud) (2011)

Happiness responds to the poetry and political views of Arthur Rimbaud, in particular his relation to the Paris Commune, and uses Rimbaud's work to understand contemporary neoliberalism.

Bonney describes Happiness as a response to political events including the 2010 student protests, the UK Uncut movement and the black bloc activity during the March 2011 London anti-cuts protest.

Happiness begins with an epigraph taken from Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray's Histoire de la Commune de 1871: "They who tell the people revolutionary legends, they who amuse themselves with sentimental stories, are as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators."

Happiness includes "Letter on Poetics", which had previously been published in Bonney's blog. In it, Bonney reflects on the student protests to argue that poems and political slogans should become more alike, and returns to Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.

Multiple poems appearing in Happiness first appeared on Bonney's blog. Jacob Edmond argues that, as a result, "the book functions as a retrospective archiving and framing of poems written as news, as part of and in response to a movement for revolutionary change."

In Happiness, Bonney first developed the use of epistolary prose that he would make central in Letters Against the Firmament.

Bonney described Happiness as offering "a critique of the Rimbaud myth" which seeks to replace an image of "the poète maudite taking lots of drugs and having lots of sex and this fairly chaotic life" with one in which the Paris Commune is foregrounded.

Bonney described Kristin Ross's work on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune as an influence.

Bonney argues that Rimbaud's work must be understood in the context of the Commune, and especially its last week and its aftermath.

David Nowell Smith argues that the poems featured in Happiness "ask what Rimbaud’s work and legacy demands of his descendents."

Nowell Smith argues that "Letter on Poetics" offers an implicit critique of Bonney's own earlier work, in particular Blade Pitch Control Unit. Nowell Smith argues that, whereas the earlier work offered a positive valorisation of drug culture, the later work finds "individualistic excess ... to be politically unviable" and complicit in, rather than offering an alternative to, consumer capitalism.

Jacob Edmond argues that in Happiness, Bonney uses Rimbaud to retell the story of 2010 and 2011 protests in London.

Edmond argues that Happiness engages with the question of how to narrate histories of revolutionary moments without risking commodifying them.

Letters Against the Firmament (2015)

Letters Against the Firmament, published by Enitharmon Press, responds to the protests and riots of 2010–12 in the United Kingdom. The poems are framed as letters to a liberal acquaintance who is criticised for lacking political commitment, but appealed to as a contact in the "respectable" world. The poems use alchemy as a metaphor and connects the image of the firmament to forms of surveillance in the 21st century, and draw on Friedrich Hölderlin and C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins. Eltringham argues that Bonney's use of prose in Letters Against the Firmament represents the culmination of a suspicion of poetry "as a bourgeois technology of lyric disposession" that Bonney had articulated in earlier works.

Our Death (2019)

Bonney's last work, Our Death, was published shortly before his death.

Influences

Bonney's influences included the poets Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Bill Griffiths, Friedrich Hölderlin, Amiri Baraka, Aimé Césaire, Anna Mendelssohn, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Katerina Gogou; as well as the philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord, and musicians including The Fall (band), Bob Dylan, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.

Bonney's influences included John Coltrane, David Henderson, and Amiri Baraka.

His work also draws on British poets including Maggie O'Sullivan, Barry MacSweeney, Basil Bunting, William Blake, Percy Shelley, and John Clare.

Other influences include Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Giordano Bruno, Abiezer Coppe and the anonymous poem Tom o' Bedlam. Andrea Brady argues that Coppe's apocalyptic writings, in which the apocalypse was understood as an ongoing process rather than something to occur in the future, as a particularly strong influence on Bonney, who, she argues, constructed a poetic persona in imitation of Coppe.

Brady argues Bonney's work is also influenced by Surrealism.

Among contemporary poets, Brady argues that Bonney's work addresses similar questions to that of Fred Moten, with whom he shares an interest in Baraka's work.

Bonney's use of visual elements is influenced by the work of Bob Cobbing.

In a 2011 interview, Bonney said his work in the early 2000s had been influenced by Charles Olson and Bob Cobbing, and their approach to the relation between poetry and performance, but that he had later moved away from seeing performance as a vital part of the poetic process.

Mark Jackson argues that Bonney's poems bear the influence of the The Fall's Mark E. Smith.

David Nowell Smith argues that Bonney's work can be read as part of a tradition also includng Vladimir Mayakovsky, the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno, and the Language poets, whose work foreground the possibility that poetry may challenge hegemony and create anti-authoritarian or utopian linguistic forms.

Themes

Andrea Brady argues that Bonney's work pursues a "communist poetics".

Brady argues that Bonney's work is characterised by a "gothic imagination ... filled with ghosts, zombies, and vampires", through which his representations of London are infused with past forms of suffering and political struggle. Brady finds that: "The dead infuse Bonney's city, his poetics, their noises channeled through the poem which recognizes that none are safe from the murderous predations of capital, not even the past. Bonney repeatedly invokes the dead, zombies and specters of past ages ..." As part of this approach, Brady argues that Bonney is attentive to the ways histories of oppression and exploitation are built into, or memorialised by, urban space.

Bonney's work draws on aspects of folk tradition, including using unacknowledged quotations from folk songs such as "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair", "The Unquiet Grave", "One Morning in May" and "Gallows Pole". Daniel Eltringham describes this as part of a "theory of collective language". Such songs, Bonney argued, could bear witness to revolutionary opportunities that were not taken. Eltringham characterises Bonney's use of folk song as a means to elaborate "a transhistorical poetics and prosody".

Brady argues that Bonney was sceptical of the possibility for revolution, and that this scepticism is connected to his understanding of the role of art in capitalist societies. In Bonney's account, Brady argues, poetry in such societies is "always under pressure from its historical contexts and at risk either of self-destruction or of obliteration."

Eltringham argues that Bonney, along with poets such as Emily Abendroth, Stephen Collis, Rob Halpern, Jeff Hilson, Myung Mi Kim, Fred Moten, Lisa Robertson and Juliana Spahr, is one of a number of poets whose work focuses on commons and enclosure.

Nowell Smith argues that Bonney's poems consistently respond to the social and political occurrences of the time in which they were written: work written in the 1990s engage with the growth of the financial sector and the property market in London at that time, while work from the mid-2000s directs its ire at the Iraq War and the governments of Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and work from the period after 2008 responds to the Great Recession.

In other poets' work

In the poem "Golfing St. George's Hill with Sean Bonney" (2016), Stephen Collis described the golf club at St George's Hill, Surrey, historically the site of a colony of Diggers, with Bonney.

Misc

Bonney was known for his performances, the style of which reflected an interest in punk music.

His work comprised seven books and several additional pamphlets.

Mark Jackson argued that "Bonney’s poetry attempts to rupture the linguistic universe of the establishment and seeks its own language by taking recognizable speech and grinding it up, creating a consistent indeterminacy and breach of conventional poetic form." Jackson argues that in Bonney's work, both poetic form and the poems' contents carry political significance.

David Nowell Smith argues that Bonney's work explores the tension between the expression of individual outrage and the necessity of collective political engagement. Bonney's work, Nowell Smith argues, "seeks to provoke and cajole its readers into political reflection, and ultimately into collective action".

Bonney's "Communique—(After Rimbaud)" responded to the 2011 London anti-cuts protest

"Communique—(After Rimbaud)" responded to the 2011 London anti-cuts protest, in particular protesters' targeting of The Ritz Hotel.

References

• Brady, Andrea (2019). "Sean Bonney: Poet Out of Time". In Jennison, Ruth; Murphet, Julian (eds.). Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 131–159.
• Clay, Jon. "'A New Geography of Delight': Communist Poetics and Politics in Sean Bonney's The Commons". Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. 7 (1): 1–26. doi:10.16995/biip.2.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
• Day, James (2016). "The Edible Book in the Era of Riots". Third Text. 30 (3–4): 238–252. doi:10.1080/09528822.2017.1319610.
• Edmond, Jacob (2019). Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media. Columbia University Press.
• Eltringham, Daniel (2022). Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure. Liverpool University Press.
• Hilson, Jeff (23 March 2010). "Blade Pitch Control Unit – old review". Canary Woof.
• Jackson, Mark (2008). "The Poetry of Sean Bonney: Form and Content in Poisons, their Antidotes". Readings (3). Archived from the original on 25 March 2010.
• Leslie, Esther (2013). "Crowds, Clouds, Politics and Aesthetics, Flipping Again". The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. 23 (44–45): 8–27. doi:10.7146/nja.v23i44-45.8178.
• Nowell Smith, David (2013). "'An Interrupter, a Collective': Sean Bonney's Lyric Outrage". Études britanniques contemporaines (45). doi:10.4000/ebc.746.
• Perril, Simon (2015). "'Kinked Up Like It Wants to Bark': Contemporary British Poetry at the Tomb of the Poète Maudit". In Lang, Abigail; Nowell Smith, David (eds.). Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 95–108.
• Robinson, Sophie (2013). "Bonney, Sean". In Noel-Tod, Jeremy; Hamilton, Ian (eds.). The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. Oxford University Press. p. 61.
• Rowe, William (7 February 2020). "Sean Bonney, 1969–2019". Jacket 2.
• Toda, Kit; Eltringham, Dan; McDermott, Annie (10 February 2011). "Interview with Sean Bonney". The Literateur. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015.

The Commons (2011)

• David Nowell Smith, On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
• Dan Eltringham, 'its 11.58 in London’: Sean Bonney's Urban Commons (The Occupied Times, July 2013)
• Steve Spence, Intriguing Minimalism & Anarchist Tendencies (Stride Magazine, March 2012), review of The Commons
• John Bloomberg-Rissman, Review of The Commons (Galatea Resurrects 17, December 2011)
• Richard Owens, Prison-House of Commons: Sean Bonney Vis-à-Vis Thom Donovan (The Poetry Project Newsletter 225, Dec/Jan 2010/11)
• Frances Kruk, "Betrayal and the Maligned Sound of the Cuckoo: A text/music Spin on Collaboration" (Pores, 2009) (on Kruk and Bonney's collaboration on a performance of The Commons)
• James Day, The Edible Book in the Era of Riots (Third Text 30:3-4, 2016)

Happiness (Poems After Rimbaud) (2011)

• Robert Sheppard, Thoughts i.m. Sean Bonney (Pages, November 2019)
• Luke Roberts, Stephen Willey, Anna Strong Safford, and Al Filreis, 'Insurrection is Value': Poem Talk 122 (Jacket2, March 2018), discussing Happiness
• Robert Sheppard, The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
• Steve Willey, On Performing Sean Bonney's Poetry (March 2015)
• Jennifer Cooke, "Public Disorder" and Poetry, 2010-2011 (Revolution and/or Poetry, August 2013); updated as The Poet in British Protest (2010-2013) (Tripwire 7, 2014), pp. 109-122
• Alison Croggon, Poetry: After Rimbaud, Overland, March 2012
• Robin Purves, Review of Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (Hi Zero 11, February 2012)
• Robert Sheppard, "Translation as Occupation: Simon Perril and Sean Bonney"
• James Day, The Edible Book in the Era of Riots (Third Text 30:3-4, 2016)
• Robert Sheppard, "Sean Bonney's Letter on Poetics" (Pages, 2014)

Letters Against the Firmament (2015)

• Adam Piette, Review of various (Blackbox Manifold 23, Winter 2019), includes a review of Letters Against the Firmament
• Daniel Eltringham, Commoning Nostalgia" Making "Romantic Sensibility Sustainable" in Contemporary Poetry (2019)
• Ed Luker, Naming and the Riotous: The Socio-Poetics of Sean Bonney's Letters Against the Firmament
• Arul Benito Gerard, Review of Letters Against the Firmament (Hix Eros 8, March 2018)
• Adam Learmonth, Review of Letters Against the Firmament (Dundee University Review of the Arts, April 2017)
• Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017)
• Max Porter, Best Book of 2015: Letters Against the Firmament (Granta, December 2016)
• Woody Haut, Inside the Outside/Outside the Inside: Letters Against the Firmament by Sean Bonney, Poetical Works 1999-2015 by Keston Sutherland (April 2016)
• Steve Spence, Uncompromising (Stride Magazine, February 2016), Review of Letters Against the Firmament
• Murphet, "Wide as Targes Let Them Be"
• Frances, A Poetics of Subjective Resistance

"Still: 7 Love Poems" (2017)

• Keston Sutherland, Sean Bonney's Hate Poems (Post45 2, July 2019)

Our Death (2019)

• Jeffrey Grunthaner, Their Own Pantheon: Sean Bonney Interviewed Bomb magazine, December 2019)
• Ed Simon, The Bard of Capitalist Realism: On Sean Bonney's Poetic Wrath (Poetry Foundation, 13 January 2020)
• Woody Haut, The Poem as an Incendiary Device: Our Death by Sean Bonney (23 November 2019)
• Fitch, "Our Death"
• John Bloomberg-Rissman, Review of Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou (Galatea Resurrects 27, December 2016)
• David Grundy, Sean Bonney (1969-2019) (Streams of Expression, November 2019)
• https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/review-our-death-by-sean-bonney/

????

• Interview in Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets, eds. Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan (Salt: 2007)
• Walt Hunter, Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization (Fordham University Press, 2019)
• Walt Hunter, A Global “We”? Poetic Exhortations in a Time of Precarious Life (Cultural Critique 98, Winter 2018), pp. 72-94
• Simon Perril, "High Late-Modernists or Postmodernists? Vanguard and Linguistically Innovative Poetries since 1960", in The Cambridge Companion to British Poetry, 1945-2010, ed. Edward Larrissey (Cambridge University Press, 2016)
• Ian Davidson and Jo L. Walton, Political Poetry
• Steve Willey, Pedagogy and Influence in the Work of Bob Cobbing (July 2015)
• Zoë Skoulding, "Misremembered Lyric and Orphaned Music", in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Esther Leslie, Bouleversed Baudelairizing: On Poetics and Terror (Essays on Bonney and Anna Mendelssohn) (Veer Books, 2011)
• Ian Davidson, Radical Spaces of Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
• Eltringham, Poetry & Commons
• Hayward, Wound Building
• Kit Toda, Dan Eltringham and Annie McDermott, Interview with Sean Bonney (The Literateur, February 2011)
• Anderson & Bonney, You'd Be a Pig Not to Answer, http://www.audiatur.no/festival/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2-Sean-Bonney.pdf
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2020/03/sean-bonneys-life-work
• https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/9253/

Further reading

• Tuma, Keith (2007). "Some Younger British Poets" (PDF). Chicago Review. 53 (11): 213–220. JSTOR 40784167. Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 February 2008.

External links

• https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/9252/galley/22289/download/

RX

• David Kennedy, Landscapes and Emblems (PN Review 156:30:4, March-April 2004), Review of several books including Poisons, their Antidotes
• Ben Watson, Review of Poisons, their Antidotes (Poetry Review 93:4, Winter 2003-04)
• Clive Scott, Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge University Press, 2012)