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 was part of Anti-Fascist Action in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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.

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

In 2019, Bonney was collaborating with Greek poets on translating works by Katerina Gogou into English.

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.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney described the period in which he wrote Baudelaire in English as characterised by the end of a relationship and a return to authors he had read as a teenager.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney described the poems as simultaneously concrete poems and love poems.

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).

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

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".

Eltringham notes that the poem's extensive allusions can be understood in part by the appendix entitled "Selected Resources", but argues that "doing so is not ... really the point of packing the sequence with so many and varied allusions."

Eltringham argues that Bonney's use of the sonnet sequence form is connected to "the militant potential inherent in its lineated organisation", its lines resembling figures on a picket line.

Eltringham argues that Bonney makes use of material from folk songs in The Commons because such songs "represent a form of expression relatively untouched by capital", and so are "valuable for articulating a linguistic commons."

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".

Nowell Smith argues that Bonney uses the sonnet sequence form in The Commons "to demystify the myths of capital, and offer an alternative mythic imaginary".

Nowell Smith argues that orality is central to the construction of a collective subject in the poem, and that multiple voices interact in his poems without cohering as speakers. This polyphony, Nowell Smith argues, contributes to the political weight of the poem insofar as it allows a lyric "I" to give way to a collective "we" comprising voices from throughout history. "Bonney’s collectivisation of subjectivity", Nowell Smith argues, takes place not through flattening of the diverse vocal attitudes and lines that work with and against one another, but rather a continual double movement of fragmentation and coherence."

Nowell Smith also argues that voice plays a central role in the aspiration to use the transformation of language to achieve freedom.

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

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".

James Day's reading of The Commons foregrounds the role of eating in the sonnet sequence, noting that "axes, the slave, the economy, zombies, the room, the voices, the passerby, [and] us" are "eaten" at various points.

Day also draws attention to Bonney's unusual grammatical choices in The Commons, including speech marks that are opened but never closed, and the absence of question marks following apparent inquiries.

Day suggests that, in The Commons, Bonney simultaneously makes reference to the "language of the barricades" and of street protest, and argues for the insufficiency of language.

Parts of The Commons were later included in Bonney's Letters Against the Firmament (2015).

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.

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 2009 killing of Ian Tomlinson during the 2009 G20 London summit protests, 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."

The back cover of Happiness contains a warning that the poems contained therein are not translations of Rimbaud's work.

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.

Reviewing Happiness in Overland, Alison Croggon suggests that the subject of the poem is "the poet in a city (specifically London), and perhaps the city itself, lurching towards the explosiveness of action." Croggon argues that, rather than accepting dominant accounts of Rimbaud as a poet concerned with subjectivity or interiority, Bonney's reading of Rimbaud "relocates the individual self in social action." Croggon argues that Bonney's warning that the poems are not translations is misleading insofar as "they take from Rimbaud the performative qualities that make his poetry so compelling and recreate them now." The poems, Croggon proposes, "are not variations on Rimbaud’s formal shapings, but an attempt to enact and extend in the present the radical spaces they open up."

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

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.

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

"Letter on Poetics" (2011)

"Letter on Poetics" was first published on Bonney's blog and later appeared in Happiness (Poems After Rimbaud) and Four Letters Four Comments (both 2011).

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

In "Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)", 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.

In "Letter on Poetics", Bonney reflects on the experience of reading poetry at a student occupation.

Jennifer Cooke argues that Bonney uses the experience of reading poetry at a student occupation to issue "a call for art to more effectively mirror experience; for a new poetic form; for better slogans or something better than slogans; for poems not to be feeble; for poetry and protest to move beyond one rant or a singular act of property destruction" and to reject "the illusion that small acts of dissent, protest and denunciation are as effective as they are passionate."

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.

Letters Against the Firmament (2015)

In Letters Against the Firmament, which responds to the austerity programme of the Cameron–Clegg coalition and its effects on the welfare state, Bonney refers to Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith as a "talking claw".

Letters Against the Firmament, published by Enitharmon Press, is primarily composed of prose "letters", alongside poems previously published in pamphlet form and long extracts from The Commons and Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud.

The "letters" are written from the perspective of a politically-active poet who may or may not be the author, and are addressed to a friend or relative with similar, though more moderate, political views.

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.

Several of the "letters" appeared on Bonney's blog prior to publication in Letters Against the Firmament.

The "letters" and verse poems share certain thematic and language patterns.

Letters Against the Firmament responds to the protests and riots of 2010–12 in the United Kingdom. The first three letters respond directly to the 2011 London riots.

The poems use alchemy as a metaphor and connects the image of the firmament to forms of surveillance in the 21st century, and engage with the work of Friedrich Hölderlin, C. L. R. James, Karl Marx and Arthur Rimbaud.

The poem uses language drawn both from physics and from political rhetoric.

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.

In his study The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017), critic Jasper Bernes argues that Letters Against the Firmament is primarily a response to the austerity programme of the Cameron–Clegg coalition and its effects on the welfare state, especially during the tenure of Iain Duncan Smith, who Bonney refers to as a "talking claw", as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. Bernes argues that Bonney's engagement with phenomena such as workfare policies and zero-hours contracts indicate his intention to develop "a critique of both work and unwork" and an awareness that freedom from work may be uncomfortably proximate to denial of work.

Bonney also refers to then-Home Secretary Theresa May and then-Minister of State for Universities and Science David Willetts.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney described Letters Against the Firmament as "a collection of open letters to the poetry community about the political situation in Britain at the time." Bonney describes the narrator of the letters as "not quite" himself.

Reviewing the collection in 2019, Adam Piette suggests that, while its tone is confrontational, in it Bonney also develops "a strange theory of temporality": Bonney, Piette argues, distinguishes between a conventional bourgeois temporality, that seeks to maintain existing power relations, and a temporality associated with the commons, the two of which come into sharp conflict in riots and rebellions.

Reviewing the collection in Stride Magazine, Steve Spence argued that Letters Against the Firmament explores conflicting elements of Bonney's political thinking alongside contradictory elements of his views on poetry's relation to politics.

Spence argues that the recipient of the letters, with whom Bonney argues, can be understood as a representation of the poet himself.

Joseph Brendan Frances identifies Letters Against the Firmament as one of a number of poetic publications that emerged in response to protests and riots occurring in 2010–11, also including works by Keston Sutherland and Juliana Spahr.

Frances argues that the "letters" "deal directly with the difficult question of the efficacy of resistive action in the face of the seemingly intractable reproduction of the current state of things, and of poetry’s role in both this resistance and this reproduction."

Frances argues that the letters in Letters Against the Firmament are "hybrid forms," both works of poetry and works of political poetics.

Frances argues that Letters Against the Firmament engages with the persistence of ideology, the persistence of power structures, and the problems these phenomena pose for political resistance, resulting in a work that is ultimately pessimistic about the potential for protest to challenge systems of domination.

Frances notes that, in addition to his despondency about the power of protest, Bonney also adopts a pessimistic and suspicious stance towards poetry.

Frances argues that Bonney's concept of "police realism", which suggests a relationship between literary realism and state authority, is central to Letters Against the Firmament. In Frances' reading, Bonney sees the roles of writing and protest in combatting police realism as mutually reinforcing.

Frances argues that Letters Against the Firmament also develops a concept of "harmony", understood simultaneously in its musical sense and more broadly as any arrangement of parts that form a unified whole.

Frances identifies the following passage as a key statement in Letters Against the Firmament:

I’d like to write a poetry that could speed up a dialectical continuity in discontinuity & thus make visible whatever is forced into invisibility by police realism, where the lyric I – yeh, that thing – can be (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, where direct speech and incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that can bend ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism.

Frances reads this passage as an expression of a desire to intensify existing social fractures through poetry.

"Still: 7 Love Poems" (2017)

"Still: 7 Love Poems" takes the form of seven blocks of justified text. The poems refer to literary figures including Emmy Hennings, Gérard de Nerval, Miyó Vestrini.

Keston Sutherland argues that the Bonney's references to non-British figures such as Hennings, Nerval and Vestrini reflect "his anti-nationalist repugnance toward Anglophone literary culture".

Sutherland draws attention to Bonney's use of the phrase "blah blah", which he likens to the use of the French kif-kif by French anarchists including Émile Pouget.

Our Death (2019)

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

Our Death was written primarily while Bonney was living in Berlin.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney described Our Death as a continuation of Letters Against the Firmament.

Poems in Our Death respond to the work of Katerina Gogou. Bonney described the book as concerned with "insisting on Gogou’s work still being alive—unfinished business, as it were."

Abandoned Buildings

Bonney's writing was also published online on his blog Abandoned Buildings. The blog features poems later published in print and illustrations and prose passages that later appeared in Baudelaire in English.

Bonney used the blog to post a series of prose poems from 2011.

Jennifer Cooke argues that the prose poems posted on Abandoned Buildings reflect a desire for poetry to be politically efficacious, as indicated by the fact they are "intimate in their address to an unidentified interlocutor, passionate, hopeful, speculative, urban, angry, and even prophetic," while also being "semantically clear."

Richard Owens argues that Bonney's use of the Blogger platform to make his work publicly available reflects "a will ... toward devaluation".

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, Bob Dylan, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney identified himself as part of a poetic tradition including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, the Comte de Lautréamont and Antonin Artaud.

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.

Bonney identified Pier Paolo Pasolini as an influence, describing him as "an exemplary communist artist."

Bonney identified the Situationist International as an influence.

Bonney identified Tom Raworth as an influence, citing his use of short lines and energetic readings.

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.

Jennifer Cooke argues that Bonney's work as an example of poetry that "wants to matter socially and politically beyond the small world of ‘preaching to the choir’", and uses his lament at the absence of a poetic response to the the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Keston Sutherland argues that Bonney's work, similar to works by Sergei Nechaev and Mikhail Bakunin, views hatred as a necessity for revolutionary political orientations, with hatred informing the form, content and language of Bonney's works.

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"'.

In a 2019 interview, Bonney differentiated his work from protest writing, arguing that his work is not intended "to convince anybody to not like capitalism" and that his ideal audience would be one that "already hates cops."

Form

In a 2019 interview, Bonney identified the epistolary prose poem as the form he primarily wrote in for a period of several years.

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

• Bernes, Jasper (2017). The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. Stanford University Press.
• 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)
• Cooke, Jennifer (2014). "The Poet in British Protest (2010–2013)" (PDF). Tripwire (7): 109–122.
• Croggon, Alison (22 March 2012). "Poetry: After Rimbaud". Overland.
• 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 (22 July 2013). "'its 11.58 in London': Sean Bonney's Urban Commons". The Occupied Times. Retrieved 16 March 2025.
• 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.
• Frances, Joseph Brendan (2020). A Poetics of Subjective Resistance: The Non-recuperable in Contemporary British and North American Innovative Poetry (PhD thesis). University of Salford.
• Grunthaner, Jeffrey (11 December 2019). "Their Own Pantheon: Sean Bonney Interviewed". Bomb.
• 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.
• Nowell Smith, David (2015). On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Owens, Richard (2010–2011). "Prison-House of Commons: Sean Bonney vis-à-vis Thom Donovan" (PDF). Poetry Project Newsletter (225). Poetry Project: 14–17.
• 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.
• Piette, Adam (2019). "Issue 23: Adam Piette reviews John Wilkinson, Sean Bonney, Seedings issue 6, Eleanor Wilner". Blackbox Manifold (23).
• 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.
• Sheppard, Robert (2016). The Meaning of Form in Contemporary Innovative Poetry. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Spence, Steve (February 2016). "Uncompromising". Stride Magazine.
• Sutherland, Keston (2019). "Sean Bonney's Hate Poems". Post45 (2).
• Toda, Kit; Eltringham, Dan; McDermott, Annie (10 February 2011). "Interview with Sean Bonney". The Literateur. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015.

Our Death (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/
• Cooke, Jennifer. 2012. ‘Sean’s Four Letter’d Words’, Damn the Caesars (Crisis Inquiry) 2012 Summer: 27–28.
• De’Ath, A. & Wah, F. (Eds.) (2015) Toward. Some. Air.. Banff: Banff Centre Press (cited in Frances, Poetics of Subjective Resistance 46)

Further reading

• Robert Sheppard, Thoughts i.m. Sean Bonney (Pages, November 2019)
• 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/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6Czo8TIpHM

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)

Not useful/reliable

• 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)
• Luke Roberts, Stephen Willey, Anna Strong Safford, and Al Filreis, 'Insurrection is Value': Poem Talk 122 (Jacket2, March 2018), discussing Happiness
• Steve Willey, On Performing Sean Bonney's Poetry (March 2015)
• Robert Sheppard, "Sean Bonney's Letter on Poetics" (Pages, 2014)
• Daniel Eltringham, Commoning Nostalgia" Making "Romantic Sensibility Sustainable" in Contemporary Poetry (2019) – in Poetry and Commons
• 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)
• 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)
• Murphet, "Wide as Targes Let Them Be"

Probably not accessible

• Robin Purves, Review of Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (Hi Zero 11, February 2012)