Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry

The author of numerous pamphlets and full-length collections, including Our Death (2019), Letters against the Firmament (2015), Happiness (2011), The Commons (2011), Document (2008), Baudelaire in English (2007) and Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005), Sean Bonney was a crucial part of contemporary poetry communities in the UK and internationally. Formatively shaped by the influences of Maggie O’Sullivan and Anna Mendelssohn and by Bob Cobbing’s Writers Forum workshops, Bonney’s work drew from the aesthetic practices of the British Poetry Revival, and from Left-wing political and aesthetic radicalism, including the Angry Brigade, the Black Radical Tradition, Punk, the Situationists, Surrealism and Revolutionary Marxism and Anarchism. Predominantly based in London, but also in Liverpool and Nottingham and, in his final years, Berlin, Bonney’s work was in dialogue with a much wider range of international poetries past and present. With Frances Kruk, Bonney ran the small press yt communication, and he was an active publisher and organiser, committed to an aesthetic drawn from Punk and DIY traditions, as well as the legacy of the Mimeo revolution, samizdat publishing and radical pamphleteering. A critic and scholar as well as a poet, his critical work challenged the boundaries of academic writing, as he aimed at conceptualising what he called a ‘militant poetics’, in doctoral work on Amiri Baraka and in essays on Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Anna Mendelssohn and Sun Ra among others. His work in poetry, poetics and critical prose was extraordinarily wide-ranging in its field of influences, and in turn exerted a powerful influence on those poets around him. We hope that this feature will give a sense of the full richness of his career in poetry in its many different phases and dimensions, as well as taking into account Bonney’s unswerving commitment to political activism and to thinking through the relation of politics and aesthetics.

Co-edited by David Grundy and Jeff Hilson

Editorial

‘No Simple Explanations’

David Grundy and Jeff Hilson

Editorial

‘No Simple Explanations’

Bibliography

Sean Bonney: A Selected Bibliography

Articles

‘As Simple as Music’: Kinds of Noise in Sean Bonney’s Poetry

The Involution of the Storm Corner: Sean Bonney’s Occult

Speaking with the voices of the dead: Sean Bonney, Arthur Rimbaud, Amiri Baraka and revolutionary poetics

The State is a Murderous Life-Support Machine: A Conversation about Death

A preliminary reading of Sean Bonney’s ‘What Teargas is For’

Notes Towards a Commentary on Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament

Bonney’s Militant Poetics: Revolutionary Aesthetics, Politics and Black Poetics

'This Face of Glee...This Terrifying Sound': Sean Bonney Through the Soundhole, Where Bonney IS

Essay

Time Negatives of Variable Universe: On Sun Ra and Amiri Baraka

Comets & Barricades: Insurrectionary Imagination in Exile

Notes on Militant Poetics

‘Minds do exist to agitate and provoke / this is the reason I do not conform’—Anna Mendelssohn

Bouleversed Baudelairizing: On Poetics and Terror

Sean Bonney’s Social Space

The Poetics of Despair: Listening to Sean Bonney in Charlottesville, Virginia

Special Issues