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Sean Bonney

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Sean Noel Bonney (May 21, 1969 – November 13, 2019) was an English poet born in Brighton and brought up in the north of England. He lived in London and, from 2015 up until the time of his death, in Berlin. He was married to the poet Frances Kruk.

His publications include Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005), Baudelaire in English (2008), Document (2009), The Commons (2011), Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (2011), Letters Against the Firmament (2015), and Our Death (2019). His work also appeared widely in print and online magazines associated with small press poetry and political activism, both in the UK and internationally (his work was frequently translated into other languages). The American critic and poet Keith Tuma declared that "he deserves to be the most popular poet in Britain", and Bonney's work was widely-respected amongst groups of poets, activists and artists in the UK, America, Germany, Greece and elsewhere.

Life and work

Together with other UK-based poets, Bonney's work marks a progression and continuance of the British Poetry Revival, combining with his abiding interest in left-wing radical movements such as British punk, the Angry Brigade, the Red Army Faktion, the American Black Power movement, Surrealism and revolutionary art in general. Living at various points in Hackney, Hastings and Walthamstow, he was a regular attendee at the Bob Cobbing-led Writers Forum workshop, co-founding the reading series Xing the Line with Jeff Hilson, and co-editing the press Yt Communication with Frances Kruk. Bonney's earlier work in particular showed the influence of Cobbing's concrete poetry aesthetic, most notably in the typewriter-based work in Baudelaire in English; he was also a visual artist, producing collages which often appeared on his blog, Abandoned Buildings, and in his books. Bonney's first full-length book, Blade Pitch Control Unit, collected a number of earlier chapbooks; it was followed by the Baudelaire "translations" and by Document, which collected a series of poems, manifestos and other prose texts written in the preceding years. Informed for much of his career by the changing urban environment of London, and attendant problems of gentrification and social violence and exclusion, this work dealt in part with the British Left's opposition to the Iraq War under Tony Blair, as well as being influenced by the work of the Situationists and by Russian Futurists such as Khlebnikov.

Bonney's next major project was his major sequence of 14 line poems, The Commons, originally subtitled "A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle', which combined contemporary uprisings with the voices of the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the english Civil War and "the cracked melodies of ancient folk songs". Like most of his writing since 2006, the poems-in-progress appeared on his blog, Abandoned Buildings; they were first circulated as PDF by Bonney, and then published as a book by Openned in 2011. The same year, Unkant published Bonney's Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud, a book emerging from his study of Rimbaud's relation to the Paris Commune and his participation in the UK student movement of 2010–2011, which immediately followed the election of a coalition government earlier in 2010. Following a series of "Letters on Poetics", departing from Rimbaud's famous letters to Georges Izambard, Bonney increasingly turned to the letter form: his "Letters on Harmony" and "Letters Against the Firmament", addressed to an unknown, middle-class interlocutor, were eventually collected, along with the newer sequences "Corpus Hermeticum" and "Lamentation", in Letters Against the Firmament (2015).

A scholar of revolutionary poetry, particularly that of the Black Radical Tradition, Bonney undertook a PhD in English at Birkbeck, University of London on the work of Amiri Baraka, supervised by William Rowe. (Elements of this work appear at his blog 'Round Midnight: Notes on Baraka.) In Autumn 2006, he was a guest lecturer at the University of Roehampton. In Autumn 2011 he ran a seminar on Poetry and Revolution at the University of Cambridge. Bonney also played a key role in organising the 2012 Poetry and Revolution conference that took place at Birkbeck, and participated in the 2014 Amiri Baraka conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His critical work includes articles on Baraka, Anna Mendelssohn (Grace Lake), and a series of "Notes on Militant Poetics" addressing the work of writers, militants and revolutionaries such as Jean Genet, Ulrike Meinhof, and George Jackson. Another abiding concern was the relation of politics to music, particularly free jazz and other forms of African-American music, as well as the work of Bob Dylan.

Following the completion of his PhD, from 2015 to 2019 Bonney was a postdoctoral researcher at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, conducting a project examining the work of Diane di Prima. His poetry during this time was concentrated in two major projects: the sequence Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou, a series of poems after the Greek anarchist poet, actor and activist Katerina Gogou, and Our Death, a series of prose poems which included poems after Charles Baudelaire, Miyo Vistrini and others. Excerpts of these sequences appeared in the pamphlets Cancer (2016) and Ghosts (2017), and were collected in the book Our Death (2019), published shortly before Bonney's passing. Bonney's final poems, posted at his blog, Abandoned Buildings, included the series of anti-fascist poems, Antimatter, reactions to the rise of the Far Right across Europe and America, "Heroes" and "Confession".

Books

External links

Critical writing

Editorial Work

  • Live from Occupied Lady Mitchell Hall... Exclusions Imminent / Off with their Heads (Cambridge, November 2011)
  • the poetry is not in the pity, edited with Frances Kruk (London: yt communication, 2009)
  • Sporangiophores: Works by Harry Godwin, Nat Raha, Michael Zand, and SL Mendoza, edited with Frances Kruk (London: yt communication, 2009)
  • war pigs: yt communication bulletin: Sept 11 2006, edited with Frances Kruk (Hackney: yt communication, 2006)
  • hick moth: yt communication bulletin: 2nd July 2006, edited with Frances Kruk (Hackney: yt communication, 2006)
  • hex map: yt communication bulletin: May 31 2006, edited with Frances Kruk (Hackney: yt communication, 2006)

Interviews and Conversations

Audio Recordings & Films

Magazine publications

Poetry readings

Talks & Lectures

Further reading

References

  1. Staff, Harriet. "RIP Sean Bonney (1969–2019)". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 22 November 2019.
  2. "Sean Bonney". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved 7 January 2020.
  3. Tuma, Keith. "Sean Bonney (January 2007)". Meshworks: the Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance. Retrieved 2019-12-28.
  4. "Yt Communication blog". web.archive.org. 2012-06-26. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
  5. "Openned - Print - The Commons - Sean Bonney". www.openned.com. Retrieved 2019-12-06.
  6. "Sean Bonney". www.jfki.fu-berlin.de (in German). 2016-03-31. Retrieved 2019-12-06.

See also


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