Sean Bonney
The militant and episoltary poetics of Sean Bonney; the latent fascism of Conceptual poetry
Sean Bonney, Letters Against the Firmament (2015)
Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament alternates between epistolary writing and poetry. The letters both bemoan an inability to write poetry within the historical context of the riot (“It’s difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances”) and operate as discrete poems in themselves, moving between observations Marxist theory to speculation on the radical potential within harmony to anecdotes regarding the background music played in both supermarkets and the Job Center.
It is rightfully difficult to situate Sean Bonney within a discrete poetic movement. He decries the institutional centrist of Conceptualist poetry: “Poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd . . . What if all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs – certainly you get that in official poetry, be it Kenny Goldsmith, or, well, anyone.” The work is arguably avant-garde, yet Bonney has disputed this term in reference to his work. (Avant-gardism can still be fascist: Bonney is less interested in situating himself in a literary genealogy than a political one.) In one essay, Bonney suggests the term “militant poetics” as a possible label: “Poetry doesn’t talk about the world, nor does it create meaning, but rather aims at meanings not yet articulated, meanings not catered to in the currently available aesthetic and social networks.” It is important to acknowledge that Bonney is primarily interested in poetry’s capacity to do: his work is never purely aesthetic, and rather uses the aesthetic to enact material change (or, at least, determine whether such a feat is possible).
Letters Against Firmament’s lineated poems are resolutely polyvocal. Bonney blends his own incendiary prose with quotations from figures such as Blanqui to Hölderlin, creating a work saturated with repetition and refrain as avant-garde technique is combined with the call-and-response protest chant: “for ‘I love you’ say fuck the police, for / ‘the fires of heaven’ say fuck the police, don’t say / ‘recruitment’ don’t say ‘trostky’ say fuck the police.” Bonney’s is itself a call-and-response: a provocation to the reader to act upon his words, divest ourselves from the language of capital. It is a form of communal lyric, in which the authorial voice is melded with citation and slogan: the reader as the recipient of each letter.
Bonney’s work is, lastly, deeply invested in uncovering both fascist and utopian capacities of sound. The Job Centre’s ambient music is one such example. “All of the latest chart hits, converted into a high, circular whine, and in the center of that whine is an all too audible vocabulary. Money Sanctions. Etc.” Bonney writes, “. . . You move in slow motion. You feel like you’ve been injected with 300 mg of burning dog. Grammar and syntax can no longer be controlled.” Sound becomes a means of controlling a populace: think of the carefully curated background jingles we encounter in commercial settings, tools used to regulate the mood of the consumer, render them more pliable, more likely to exert their spending power.
Regardless, sound is also a space of possibility. In the very next letter, as Bonney describes his daily trip to the supermarket: “Anyway, I was walking round there the other day wondering what it would be like if they played Leadbelly’s ‘The Gallis Pole’ on their radio. I mean, obviously nothing would happen. But, I dunno, let’s pretend . . . All known popular songs would be seen flickering and burning like distant petrol towers in some imaginary desert, the phase velocity of the entire culture as a static sequence of rings, pianos, precious stones and prisons.” The commercial space of the supermarket, in this imagined scenario, is transformed into a place of radical inquiry by merit of the music playing through the speaker. We might take something hopeful from this, and perhaps a link to Bonney’s own preoccupation with rhyme and rhythm that underwrites his syntax. Sound can control, but it can also enact. We are moved to action by what we hear, in the same manner that a song might cause a leg to tap on the floor, the urge to dance.