Abstract
This chapter examines some of the gothic tropes in the work of British poet Sean Bonney, alongside his allusions to folk song, Ranter rhetoric, the Rimbaud of the Commune, and the submerged histories of London. These ‘countertraditions’ contribute to Bonney’s poetics of revolutionary temporality, a radical orientation toward both the past and the future which is opposed to capitalism’s ‘abstract time’. The chapter considers Bonney’s theorization of prosody, and his debt to Black music and poetries. It suggests that some of the limitations of Bonney’s revolutionary poetics become clear in comparison to the temporal legacies of slavery, what Christina Sharpe has called ‘wake time’, and the artworks that have emerged from it, particularly the poetries of Dionne Brand and M. NourbeSe Philip.
I labour upwards into futurity
—William Blake, Blake Books, rev. ed. G. E. Bentley Jr. (Oxford, 1977), 176
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. Saul K. Padover (Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999): marxists.org
- 2.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–264 (263).
- 3.
See, for example, E. P. Thompson’s famous article ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97; also Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. 200–216; Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); Aaron Gurevich, ‘Time as a Problem of Cultural History’, Cultures and Time, ed. L. Gardet et al. (Paris: UNESCO Press, 1976), 229–245; and David S. Landes, Revolution in Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
- 4.
György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 90.
- 5.
Capital 1:129; see Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 24.
- 6.
Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 12.
- 7.
Sean Bonney, ‘Second Letter on Harmony’, Letters Against the Firmament (London: Enitharmon, 2015), 34.
- 8.
Sean Bonney, Baudelaire in English (London: Veer Books, 2008), 88.
- 9.
Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan, Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), 40.
- 10.
Sean Bonney, ‘Confessional Poetry’, Blade Pitch Control Unit (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), 45.
- 11.
Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge UP, 1996), 77, 80.
- 12.
Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to All the Great Ones of the Earth (London: 1649 [1650]), 5.
- 13.
Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; London: Verso, 2008).
- 14.
Sean Bonney, ‘Notes on Militant Poetics 2.5/3’, Abandoned Buildings, 14 April 2012: http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/notes-on-miltant-poetics-25-3.html
- 15.
I have not been able to locate the source of this quotation, which Bonney provides under the heading ‘Quotations for the time being/To be put into action immediately’, on his blog Abandoned Buildings, posted 4 April 2010: https://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/quotations-for-time-being-to-be-put.html?m=0
- 16.
Sean Bonney, Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos July 7th 2005–June 27th 2007 (London: Barque, 2009), 7.
- 17.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 177–192 (183–4).
- 18.
Document 62–3. In a blog post on abandoned buildings, this verse is topped with a picture of Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, who are described as ‘the king and queen of Official Verse Culture being entertained by the public murder of Saddam Hussein’ (16 February 2007): http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/
- 19.
Bonney is here quoting Michael’s neighbor Ann Blease, who witnessed Michael being beaten and pepper-sprayed by 11 officers. Michael later died. Rob Cooper, ‘Inquiry as rugby league player, 25, dies after he was pepper-sprayed and arrested by “ELEVEN officers”’, Daily Mail 24 August 2011: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029173/Jacob-Michael-dies-pepper-sprayed-arrested-ELEVEN-officers.html
- 20.
Sean Bonney, The Commons (London: Openned 2011), 56.
- 21.
Capital 1:301–2. On Marx’s occult imagination, see David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), esp. 140–1.
- 22.
‘Further Notes on Militant Poetics’, Abandoned Buildings blog, posted 27 September 2013: http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/further-notes-on-militant-poetics.html
- 23.
Kit Toda, Dan Eltringham and Annie McDermott, ‘Interview with Sean Bonney’, The Literateur (10 February 2011) http://literateur.com/interview-with-sean-bonney/
- 24.
Sean Bonney and Paal Bjelke Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig not to answer: a conversation’ http://www.audiatur.no/festival/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2-Sean-Bonney.pdf
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
These are Bonney’s terms. Benjamin describes Blanqui’s ‘infernal vision’ in Eternity by the Stars as ‘an unconditional surrender, but it is simultaneously the most terrible indictment of a society that projects this image of the cosmos-understood as an image of itself-across the heavens’. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 112.
- 27.
Bonney and Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’. The influence of Blanqui’s satiric astrology can be heard, perhaps, in Bonney’s characterization of Margaret Thatcher not as a ‘frail old woman’ but as ‘a temporal seizure whose magnetosphere may well be growing more unstable and unpredictable, and so demonstrably more cruel, but whose radio signature is by no means showing any signs of decreasing in intensity any time soon’ (Letters 37).
- 28.
Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (London: Unkant Publishing, 2011), 40.
- 29.
Bonney and Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’, n.p.
- 30.
Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 136, 138.
- 31.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 19.
- 32.
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 25.
- 33.
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 207.
- 34.
Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010), 81–2.
- 35.
Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 123; cited in Happiness 55.
- 36.
Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 182.
- 37.
Steven Carl Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues (University of Illinois Press, 1988, 2001), 70.
- 38.
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35.
- 39.
Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015), 99.
- 40.
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 2011), 196.
- 41.
Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7–8.
- 42.
‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ (Capital vol. 1).
- 43.
On the significance of pastoral and seventeenth- through nineteenth-century social movements against enclosure to Bonney’s Commons, see Dan Eltringham, ‘“its 11.58 in London”: Sean Bonney’s Urban Commons’, The Occupied Times 22 July 2013: https://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=11929
- 44.
I am developing this argument at length in my book Poetry and Bondage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brady, A. (2019). Sean Bonney: Poet Out of Time. In: Jennison, R., Murphet, J. (eds) Communism and Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17156-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17155-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17156-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)