‘I labour upwards into

futurity’  1 1 William Blake, Blake Books, rev. ed. G. E. Bentley Jr (Oxford, 1977), 176.




Marx’s famous remark from ‘The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ (1852), that ‘the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future’, gives many collections on radical poetry their name and their theoretical orientation. Marx castigates these revolutions for ‘drugging themselves’ with history, and quotes Scripture advising: ‘let the dead bury their dead.’ 2 2 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trad. Saul K. Padover (Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999): marxists.org. But the dead have a stake in the poetry of the living which is hard to ignore. This chapter aims to introduce Sean Bonney’s communist poetics, by examining how his gothic imagination – filled with ghosts, zombies, and vampires – infuses the urban landscape of London with the revenant energies of past suffering. Bonney’s poetry attempts to channel the noises made by the dead, using its ‘split voice’ to explore the splits and cracks in history which are revealed in moments of struggle.

These cracks began to appear early in Bonney’s work, but they expanded significantly in the context of events in 2010 and 2011, which had powerful formal as well as political consequences for his poetics. Those events led not to an apocalyptic unveiling of solidarity and justice, but to the reinforcement of the police state and the strengthening of the Tory government. Bonney therefore turns to Blanqui and other moments of retrenchment – the Restoration, the Paris Commune, the deaths of the Red Army Faction, and the incarceration of George Jackson – to understand how and why poetry might persist in spite of defeat. This makes his poems themselves into revenants, whose prosody resists but is also dictated by the rhythms of police violence. Bonney constantly anticipates the recuperation of the poetries of the future and the radical temporalities those poetries initiate by capital, advertising and the obscure metaphysics of zero-hour contracts.

The radical temporality proposed by Bonney’s poetry is grounded, if somewhat uncomfortably, in the contexts for the production of Black art and Black life. Like the African-American artists he admires including John Coltrane, David Henderson, and Amiri Baraka, Bonney is working in the wake of particular histories of social death to channel the past and survive the present, but also to plant the ‘precious but tasteless seed’ of resistance which might only be accessible in an inconceivable future. 3 3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trad. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-264 (263).

        Many historians have argued that the invention of ‘abstract time’, which is divisible into commensurable, equal and interchangeable segments, was related to the emerging need to measure productive activity and coordinate the working time of large numbers of labourers. 4 4 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). Lukács describes time under capitalism as shedding ‘its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable “things”;…in short, it becomes space’. 5 5 György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trad. Rodney Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 90. In modernity, time is no longer determined by events, subjective or communal; it has become regular, uniform and spatialised. For these reasons, Walter Benjamin rejects Marx’s argument from the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’ in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, which contend that revolutionary classes owe debts to the dead and must protect them from the future, by projecting themselves in the famous ‘tiger’s leap’ into the open air of history (261).

In the thirteenth thesis, Benjamin argues that ‘the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time’ (261). Marx highlights the homogenisation of time under capital in his accounts of labour power, in which individual labour-power is averaged and amassed to constitute the socially necessary total labour power of society. 6 6 Capital 1:129; see Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trad. Matteo Mandarini (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 24. Benjamin’s theses are an attempt to imagine how a revolutionary class could overcome the homogenisation of time by capital and its bourgeois historicism, and in the process introduce new relations to the dead which are based on active redemption rather than veneration or indifference.

As Jürgen Habermas reflects, Benjamin ‘twists the radical future-orientedness that is characteristic of modern times in general so far back around the axis of now-time that it gets transposed into a yet more radical orientation toward the past.’ 7 7 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trad. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 12. Habermas follows Benjamin in arguing against a Marxian historical consciousness that recognises the past only as the prehistory of the present, rather than as ‘a horizon of unfulfilled expectations’ (14) which the present must redeem through an active anamnesis of that history.

        Benjamin’s empathy for the past and radical reversion of temporality, as well as Marx’s account of the homogenisation of time by capital, are brutally reflected in Bonney’s poetry. Bonney cites Marx’s remark about the ‘poetry of the future’, connecting it to ‘the slogan Greek anarchists were using a couple of winters ago: we are smashing up the present because we come from the future’. 8 8 Sean Bonney, ‘Second Letter on Harmony’, Letters Against the Firmament (London: Enitharmon, 2015), 34. Though he feels the attraction that such a slogan inspires, he describes it as ‘just so much mysticism’, based in a revolutionary optimism which current conditions of political defeat and ecological crisis do little to support.

His poetry longs for a revolutionary temporality which enables us to return to subjective time, time whose measure is not quantifiable units of production but lived experience. The revolution is a temporal rupture – shooting at clocks, instituting new calendars – and an echo of past epochs which shows the continuities of domination and resistance. In his ‘Letter on Harmony and Crisis’, Bonney observes that ‘time contracts in struggle, did you know that? The expansion the corporate hour needs in order to bleed us to scurvy, it snaps back, like some kind of medieval alignment of the planets’ (Letters 44). Following the riot, however, that corporate hour ‘snaps back’ with a vengeance.

        Bonney’s pessimism about the possibility of revolution (and the limited ability of artists to contribute to it) is reflected in his dialectical analysis of the function of the artwork under capitalism. He describes poetic thought as ‘something that moves counter-clockwise to bourgeois anti-communication’ – opposing the capitalist poetics of advertising, zero-hour contracts and Workfare with its clockwise contrary motion. Poetry, in Bonney’s view, is an edge-form, the record of a countertradition always under pressure from its historical contexts and at risk either of self-destruction or obliteration. But those pressures are also what keep the apparently dead forms of poetry (and music) alive.

As he puts it in Baudelaire in English, paraphrasing the opening sentence of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, ‘Poetry continues because the chance for its realisation was missed’: poetry is not the expression of defeat, but a repository where revolutionary energies are stored until the moment arrives when they can be realised in struggle. 9 9 Sean Bonney, Baudelaire in English (London: Veer Books, 2008), 88. Bonney looks not to the poetry of the future but of the past, which he reads as a ‘countermap’ to the contemporary time and space particularly of London. He regularly cites a popular and revolutionary English ‘countertradition’, which reaches back from Maggie O’Sullivan, Barry MacSweeney, and Basil Bunting, to William Blake, Percy Shelley, and John Clare. Bonney’s citations suggest that this countertradition was particularly active in the seventeenth century, when it included Giordano Bruno, Tom O’Bedlam (the hero of an anonymous broadside), women on trial for witchcraft, and the Ranter Abiezer Coppe. 10 10 Tim Allen et Andrew Duncan, Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), 40.

Coppe’s fiery antinomianism is particularly attractive to Bonney (he refers to an anecdote about Coppe standing in a London pulpit and swearing nonstop for an hour as a ‘lost avant-garde classic’) in part because it combines imaginative violence against the state and its institutions with the promise of apocalyptic convulsion. 11 11 Sean Bonney, ‘Confessional Poetry’, Blade Pitch Control Unit (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), 45. Coppe’s visions collapsed historical and millennial temporalities into one continuum, in which the apocalypse was not an event to come, but an ongoing process. 12 12 Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge UP, 1996), 77, 80. The millennialism of the Ranters, Levellers and other nonconformists was rewarded by the spectacular execution of Charles I in 1649. Later that year, Coppe’s A fiery flying roll declared [Ardent décret divin] :

we (holily) scorne to fight for any thing; we had as live be dead drunk every day of the weeke, and lye with whores i’th market place, and account these as good actions as taking the poore abused, enslaved ploughmans money from him. 13 13 Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to All the Great Ones of the Earth (London: 1649, 1650), 5.

Coppe defends outrageous behaviour as a recrimination of bourgeois morality: drunkenness and lust are nothing compared to the profanity of exploitation. He is the original poète maudit, mixing prophecy with pranks (dumbness, trance, fasting, intoxication) and coupling his demands for the revolutionary overthrow of the property-owning classes with an Erasmian posture of wise folly.

Sean Bonney’s translation of Baudelaire’s “Spleen”



        Bonney’s poetic persona imitates Coppe’s pranks and participates in the ‘derangement of the senses’ urged by Rimbaud, or the ‘artificial paradise’ of intoxication celebrated by Baudelaire. Bonney attempts to reconnect these deliria to the consciousness of the revolutionary classes: Rimbaud’s dictum can be read as a ‘recipe for personal excess’

only from the perspective of police reality. Like, I just took some speed, then smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not why I writing this and it’s not what it’s about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world, where none of us know anything except how to kill, that you have to point simple shit like that out. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. (Letters 140)

Following Kristin Ross, Bonney understands Rimbaud’s famous declaration that ‘I is an other’ not as the alienation of poetic subjectivity in which autonomous art is rooted, but a desire to destroy the bourgeois social senses which is called up in the context of the Paris Commune. 14 14 Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; London: Verso, 2008). However, Bonney also recognises that while Rimbaud’s poetry voices ‘the destruction of capitalism,’ it is also an expression of defeat – the liquidation of the Commune, the massacre of 25,000 Communards, and Rimbaud’s own flight into ‘the silence of colonialism, free trade and capitalist vampirism’. 15 15 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

If every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism, even the poetic countertradition is potentially complicit in ‘the fascism that is always lurking at capital’s centre.’ These antagonistic temporalities are a sign that ‘We are caught between two worlds, one which we do not recognise, and one which does not yet exist.’ 16 16 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. Bonney explores this condition of being caught between worlds through the figure of the fissure or crack.



A fissure in the alphabet

Starting in the early 2000s, Bonney began to frame a radical version of psychogeography (a practice largely associated with the London wanderings of Iain Sinclair, Brian Catling, and Peter Ackroyd, and from which Bonney has distanced himself), through an attention to the fault lines of the city. He went looking for the incisions in the city’s texture and official history, as spaces where the alternative energies of the past could spill out. In Document, he wrote:

This is the evidence: the square has a black crack runs across it. No significance, he imagines it as a triangulation of memory, power and names, a mnemonic device for understanding the city as an activation of fixed identities: or how the triangle becomes a pyramid shaped by numbers, diamonds, and the powdered imaginations of three celebrities. … This is history, solidified. No one can explain it, but it's simple – we are terror, the crack is stamped into each one of us. 17 17 Sean Bonney, Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos July 7th 2005 – June 27th 2007 (London: Barque, 2009), 7.

This ‘black crack’ is a sign without significance, which can be interpreted by the poetic observer as a ‘mnemonic device’. The memories it encodes are both communal and individual; it introduces a fissure in the ‘fixed identities’ secured by (the) capital. Bonney reads this occult sign as a map, locating the ‘terror’ stamped into the individual and his surroundings. He sees it everywhere: ‘the crack’d pavestone on Brady St, E1… spells out precisely the Holborn streetmap: value gasps inside sleep’ (12), suturing London’s periphery (Brady Street in Whitechapel is in the heart of London’s Bangladeshi community, an area formerly inhabited by the Jewish community; Holborn is in central London, a soulless area of commerce and King’s College, formerly the site of the Bloomsbury set). By following this fissure, we can access a field of buried, hedonistic energies:

Brady St is shattered and sexuality is not a matter of design, its fault lines absorb all admissions of vulnerability as a crack runs from one side of his face to the other wrapped in grass and light. find in the burst pavement private details, orgy circuits, and follow every implication, but answer only in the abstract: yes, pretty. (19)

In this period, Bonney is still working within the frame offered by Benjamin’s ‘Surrealism’ essay, with its argument that

There [in Paris], too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day. It is the region from which the lyric poetry of Surrealism reports… For art’s sake was scarcely ever to be taken literally, it was almost always a flag under which sailed a cargo that could not be declared because it still lacked a name. This is the moment to embark on a work that would illuminate as has no other the crisis of the arts that we are witnessing: a history of esoteric poetry. 18 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, Reflections, trad. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 177-192 (183-4).

The undeclarable cargo of Surrealism, Bonney argues elsewhere, is the ‘latent content’ of hermetic poetry: ‘a secret that in being actually spoken could negate the secret of the commodity’: ‘the unspoken expression of the destruction of capitalism’ which is also the collective voice of the victims’ of its ideas (‘Notes on Militant Poetics’ 2.5/3). The work of poetry, he asserts (again quoting Benjamin), is to ‘perceive the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.’ Here, the ‘impenetrable’ is not a noumenal world of the unconscious, but ‘the invisible lives of migrant workers, benefit claimants etc., and the invisible workings of capital itself, only partially expressed in the lives of the very rich’, two sides of a mystery which must be grasped at the same time, so that their ‘destructive unity’ can be made visible. In this sense Bonney is trying to complete the work of Surrealism by sublating esoteric poetry with Marxist analysis of class structure.

Visual poem by Sean Bonney



        The ‘burst pavement’, cracks and fissures in Bonney’s poems are outwardly visible signs of these impenetrable worlds. As he writes in his ‘Letter on Poetics’, ‘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’ (Letters 142). The poems make the antagonisms obscured by ‘police realism’ apparent, like the rooms of abandoned buildings which Bonney photographed for Baudelaire in English:

the ‘invisible’ is not some other-worldly visionary realm, it is just these abject spots / these gaps in the safely constructed social text, tenuously analogous to ‘poems’, where nothing ‘useful’ can happen. (86)

The poems which interest Bonney are analogous to the ‘invisible’ because they are a gap in commerce, not useful, not making anything happen – unlike the verbal commodities of someone like Carol Anne Duffy, or the ‘modern poets’ who ‘oiled & flavoured, are left ‘out in the heat till entirely / dessicated, their works taken / off by the US military for / research purposes’. 19 19 Document 62-3. In a blogpost 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/. It is positioned in this crack, neither wholly emancipated within the field of orgiastic energy nor wholly part of the street furniture; it splits, and is split by, the antagonisms of capital. Bonney quotes Hölderlin’s “Notes on Oedipus”, which describes fate as that which “tragically removes us from our orbit of life, the very midpoint of inner life, to another world, tears us off into the eccentric orbit of the dead”. Bonney reads fate here as a synonym for prosody: Hölderlin is talking about

the fault-line that runs through the centre of that prosody, and how that fault-line is where the “poetic” will be found, if it’s going to be found anywhere. The moment of interruption, a “counter rhythmic interruption”, he calls it, where the language folds and stumbles for a second, like a cardiac splinter or a tectonic shake. (Letters 115-16)

Poetic prosody is the point of scission where state and institutional violence splits off from the ‘orbit of the dead’: it is neither resistance nor oppression, but the point where they intersect; ‘an abstraction or a counter-earth’. Prosody’s ‘counter-rhythmic interruption’ can refer at the same time to Black-Block rioters ‘ripping up Oxford St.’, and to ‘the sudden interruption inflicted by a cop’s baton, a police cell and the malevolent syntax of a judge’s sentence. We live in these cracks, these fault-lines’ (Letters 116).

        But Bonney cannot affirm the prosody of struggle, or the struggle of prosody, without ambivalence. In a letter written in August 2011, he quotes a witness to the violent arrest of Jacob Michael, who later died in police custody, as a ‘small thesis on the nature of rhythm’ which provides a counterpoint to these other claims about the counter-rhythms introduced by the riot:

(1) They had banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2) He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him. (3) He was shouting, “Help me, help me”. (4) He wasn’t coherent. (5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three hours later and told her “your son’s died”. 20 20 Bonney is here quoting Michael’s neighbour Ann Blease, who witnessed Michael being beaten and peppersprayed by eleven 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

Opposing the self-aggrandising certainty that ‘poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd’ with the suggestion that ‘What if all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs’, Bonney hears those whacks become ‘the dense hideous silence we’re living inside right now’, the strangulating silence of ‘officially sanctioned art’. Repudiating the privileged poetic practitioners and critics who can rent ‘a room right at the centre of those official bullets’ where they ‘spend so much time gazing into your mirror, talking endlessly about prosody’, Bonney argues: ‘There is no prosody, there is only a scraped wound – we live inside it like fossilised, vivisected mice. Turned inside out, tormented beyond recognition.’ To escape this condition, ‘we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal Set to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t’ (Letters 8).

        In search of this new prosody, Bonney keeps returning to this metaphor of the split or crack traced on the city. In Happiness, his series of poems ‘after Rimbaud’, Bonney writes: ‘So rent me a gap in the earth, a fissure in the alphabet’ (45). The fissure is relocated from the city’s geography to the alphabet, following Rimbaud’s poem ‘Les Voyelles’. The alphabet is cracked, and so is the voice, which he repeatedly represents as split or forked; the poetic speaker is one of London’s ‘noises’, ‘eating the voices / the interval cracks / the crossroads’ (80). In print and in performance, his language is formally broken; but the cracked interval between speech and understanding which fractures communication is also a breathing space, in which a different form of understanding might become possible:

you reach a fork in the voice, the gaps between the lines widen / like a mountain range or those secret rooms where the law goes to scream have your say, o burnt decibel (69)

In a world where only the judge’s sentence can remain unbroken and ‘sound’, the ‘fork in the voice’ is a space where we can choose which direction to follow; and knowing Bonney’s interest in African-American blues traditions, this is also the crossroads where the devil appears. The forked voice also recalls the forked tongue of the serpent; so the gaps between the lines of the poem are spaces of relative emancipation but also of temptation and fear. The poet can insert himself into this space, but so can anything:

a voice / slipped through mine, a tone control, silent & fearsome extracts each decade, at playback, requires no adjustment, a voice / forks into mine, ahem clearly heard / coarse & distorted (71)



The living and the dead

Throughout Bonney’s work, the sound that becomes audible in those occult cracks in the city landscape is the voice of the dead:

those noises that waken us roaring & absurdly whistling & it frightens us there’s so many of them curled around us, inaudible the ages, history, entire galaxies they are eating us citizens of raided spheres 21 21 Sean Bonney, The Commons (London: Openned 2011), 56.

The dead surround us, inaudible but noisy and roaring; consuming us, but depending on us for their transmission. Much of Bonney’s revolutionary poetics seems to be driven by the belief, with Benjamin, that ‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins’ (‘Theses’ 255). The dead infuse Bonney’s city, his poetics, their noises channelled through the poem which recognises that none are safe from the murderous predations of capital, not even the past. Bonney repeatedly invokes the dead, zombies and spectres of past ages, asserting that

ghosts are necessary a chart of / a collective inarticulate harmony (The Commons, 62)

It’s notable that the present and the past blend in an ‘inarticulate harmony’, mixing music with a confused speech, and I will return to this figure at the end of this chapter.

from Bonney’s blog, 19.08.2016 : Things are stirring dangerously around us, we who want to explode our darkness - Ernst Bloch



        Bonney’s gothic mode of representing the affiliations between present and past class struggles is grounded in the decadent writers of the late nineteenth century – Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. But it also recalls Marx’s contention that the labourer selling his or her labour power is not free, and that ‘the vampire will not lose its hold on him “so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited’. 22 22 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. He describes London as ‘an unreal hole with ghost-noises & military sections’ (Document 60) where ‘spectres shriek like starlings in the streets of our devastated cities’ (‘Lamentations’, Letters 21); ‘Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep’ (‘Letter Against Ritual’, Letters 99). These ghost-noises are the echoes of London’s history of oppression, which continue to reverberate in its present: ‘This history passes through us like ghosts’ (20). The noises, shrieks and cries make consciousness intolerable. But they are also hard to interpret:

who here can speak the language of the dead what they meant to say I wanna be your dog THE RADIO IS LEAKING they know they’re dead yeh / & they’re not scared chewing up the language (The Commons 56)

The spectral voices leaking from the radio ‘chew up’ the language which is the poet’s material, producing the interruptions and formal fragmentation recognisable as Bonney’s late modernist style. Citing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, Bonney even suggests that ‘There is class struggle among the dead as well’:

The “tradition of dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living” cuts both ways… It is not merely that capital is dead labour, but that the networks of monuments that define and lock the official city – its cognitive aspects – are systems and accumulations of dead exploitation. 23 23 ‘Further Notes on Militant Poetics’, Abandoned Buildings blog, posted on 27 September 2013: http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/further-notes-on-militant-poetics.html.

He compares the city’s monuments (as symbols of the dead labour congealed in the commodity) to the hold of the slave ship, which Cedric Robinson describes as a repository of African beliefs and material culture as well as a monument to the dead humans transformed into commodities by chattel slavery. The city’s monuments and architecture memorialise histories of exploitation, and are haunted by the resistant energies of the people who made them.

        Everywhere he looks, Bonney finds bondage built directly into the architecture of the city. From the origins of Newgate to the founding of modern British policing by Robert Peel, the city’s history is melted into a single pane of oppressive institutions.

For example, take Newgate. Built 1188, directly into the walls, London’s eastern gate. Beat Two. We don’t recognise ourselves there. Beat Three. The debtor’s jail, the throat the muzzle of the city. July 10th, 1790, burned. Robert Peel built cops from the ashes. Beat Four. Debt is bone. Versions of bone…. Those nobility who entered the city from the east would pass through a wall packed with the tortured, the scraped and wheezing dead. London a cursed city, is beautiful in the smouldering spring. (Letters 27)

If as Lukács argued homogenised time freezes and becomes space, this history of oppression is inscribed spatially and temporally into contemporary London. Bonney describes how ‘1829, Robert Peel invented 1000 pigs to circle the city as walls or gates as cordons. This happened. Those 1000 pigs as calendar, the working day a pyramid as razor the police recuperation of the sun’ (28). State violence produces its own time, a ‘buckling’ in the continuity of history that allows past violence to float in the midst of the present:

Robert Peel still peers down from Broadgate wall and is a blockade, Newgate torched. Police move in smashed heads in countertime, a silent musical fixture separates a human being from a cop. It is vital to recognise, to insist on that difference, that fixture – to locate with precision where that separation first appears in the “continuum” where the entire pack of errors, superstitions and blood-stained bullets ram the solar throat of every cop in this town with vile psychic music and we live there, have organised noise. (Letters 28)

Here again is Bonney’s dialectical pessimism about the potential of a revolutionary countertradition, or ‘countertime’ of esoteric prosody: the police also form a temporal and musical opposition which governs the time in which we live, and in which we must attempt to ‘organise noise’, to turn the shrieking of the dead into something like physical and psychic resistance, while acknowledging ‘the horrific quantity of force we will need to continue even to live’ (Happiness 36).



Poetry, Struggle, and Defeat

If the dead haunt London’s contemporary space and time, they also make evident that previous revolutionary struggles are not past moments but continuously inhabited histories:

Anyway, here in in 1917 we’re having a right laugh no point in waking you… For some reason, it was 1649, we were trapped inside it, clutching our most reasonable point of view. …Maybe it was 2003, or something, I don’t remember, my favourite laws were just a system of false brains I recognise that / splintered & oblique social utterance flaming malevolence magnetic, would soon go dancing etc (The Commons 62, 68)

Millbank student protest, source : The New York Times



Elsewhere, Bonney quotes C. L. R. James: ‘the violent conflicts of our age enable our practised vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than before’ (Letters 35). The presence of 1649, 1871, 1917, and 1974 represents a wishful suturing together of revolutionary epochs, but also is a consequence of specific political turbulence in 2010-11. In November 2010, violent conflict erupted when university tuition fees were raised to £9000 and the Education Maintenance Allowance was withdrawn for low-income students in England. Students protesting these changes took over Millbank, a building in central London which housed the Conservative campaign headquarters; at another demonstration in December, protesters were kettled, and Alfie Meadows required emergency brain surgery after being beaten by riot police. He and Zak King were subsequently tried twice for violent disorder and eventually exonerated; 17 other protestors were charged with the same offence, all but one of whom were acquitted.

        Then in August 2011, Mark Duggan was murdered by police. In protest against the police’s violence and ongoing harassment of the Black community, five days of rioting began in Duggan’s north London neighbourhood of Tottenham and spread across London and the UK. Writing in this moment, Bonney says: ‘It’d be too much to say the city’s geometry has changed, but it’s getting into some fairly wild buckling. It’s gained in dimension, certain things are impossible to recognise, others are all too clear’ (Letters 12). His poetry gained ‘a sense of urgency, of welcoming the fact that it feels necessary to put in statements and so forth, that from some angle might wreck the poem’ or ‘crack’ it. 24 24 Kit Toda, Dan Eltringham et Annie McDermott, ‘Interview with Sean Bonney’, The Literateur (10 February 2011) http://literateur.com/interview-with-sean-bonney/ He described his book Happiness as tracing an arc

from the students’ trashing Tory Party HQ on November 10th 2010, through the resurgence of the working class movement, the appearance of UK Uncut, the reappearance of the Black Bloc, and ends just before the riots of August 2011. The sequence of “Letters,” which I’ve been writing since then, continues that through the post-riot collapse of whatever movement may have been developing, the growth of the far right, and consolidation of Tory power. …I’ve been trying to work out a poetics that can speak directly, but without sacrificing any of its complexity, or its structural radicalism. Perhaps the dialectic between silence and the political slogan—the “whose streets our streets”— is where the poetry actually is. 25 25 Sean Bonney & 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

Peaceful protest in Tottenham two days after Mark Duggan was killed, before the riots began, source : Huck Mag



The student protests and the north London riots focussed Bonney’s gothic energies into a newly complex theorisation of temporality, prosody and sound in relation to capital and the commodity which is the focus of this chapter. These events also provoked a powerful formal shift in Bonney’s poetry, from the hexes, spells and curses of his earliest ranting poetry to the explicit and direct address particularly of the series of prose ‘Letters’. As he admits in the opening pages of Letters Against the Firmament, ‘Anyway, I’ve totally changed my method’; I’m considering the ‘possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand’ (8). This moment seemed to call for ‘direct speech’, an engagement of poetry with the struggle in the street. The slogans (which he calls the ‘battle-cries of the dead’, Letters 34) of that struggle made their way into poetry, but the poetry is also offered as a repertoire which can be used in the voicing of the struggle – Bonney once claimed facetiously that ‘the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems’ (Letters 134).

        Nonetheless, Bonney acknowledges the dangers of fetishising ‘the riot form’ – which ‘all too easily …flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime’ (Letters 8-9). However generative this moment was politically and aesthetically, it also finished in defeat. Afterwards, Bonney recalled that in that ‘arc of struggle’, he felt

that something really was happening, that we were kicking off big style. And while I didn’t think there was going to be a revolution or anything like that, I really did think we had a chance of forcing the Tory government out. It didn’t happen. We lost. So, what happens to those energies, those emotions—and our poetry—in the context of that defeat? We can’t fold back into ourselves and return to where we were before, return to normal. And if you’re not going to just fall back into despair or reconciliation, then it opens up questions of where does the poetry go from there. Like a comet, it disappears. And then it returns. 26 26 Ibid.

The comparison to a comet reflects the influence on Bonney of Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars. Bonney disputes Benjamin’s interpretation of Eternity by the Stars as an expression of Blanqui’s ‘resignation and despair’. 27 27 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. Instead, he reads this strange astronomical treatise as a poetic fantasy: ‘a huge vision of the cosmos itself as an expression of class struggle, with comets as the international proletariat fighting against the forces of gravity’. 28 28 Bonney and Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’. The influence of Blanqui’s satiric astrology can be heard, perhaps, in Bonney’s characterisation 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). For Bonney, Eternity by the Stars provides weird guidance for surviving political defeat. Blanqui’s example proves that ‘poetry continues because the chance for its realisation was missed’, in part because he exposes an alternate temporality that resists the judicially-imposed time of his sentence.

        In his book Happiness, Bonney twice quotes Blanqui’s statement that ‘What I write at this moment in a cell at the Fort du Taureau I have written and shall write throughout all eternity – at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in circumstances like these.’ 29 29 Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (London: Unkant Publishing, 2011), 40. Off his face in the city of London on the night of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, Bonney thinks of Blanqui in his cell,

knowing full well that what he was writing he was going to be writing for ever, that he would always be wearing the clothes he was wearing, that he would always be sitting there, that his circumstances would never, ever change. How he couldn't tell the difference between his prison cell and the entire cluster of universes. How the stars were nothing but apocalypse routines, the constellations negative barricades. (‘Letter against Ritual’, Letters 98-9)

Like the riot, the prison cell is a place of ‘high temporal compression’, which transforms ‘traditional poetic impulse’ into ‘tense clarity, pure content’ (Notes on Militant Poetics) – the kind of clarity that Bonney says he himself was stretching towards in the work of 2010-11 and beyond. The cell is a spatialized dimension of time, where the prisoner is confined in a permanent present. The judge’s sentence

freezes the time of the captive, who now has to live within that sentence for months, years, a lifetime. Insofar as that lifetime is virtually erased, the judge’s sentence also travels back in time, taking possession of every second the captive has lived through. (Notes on Militant Poetics 2.5/3)

So it’s ‘October 2012: Blanqui is still in jail, and as the cosmological city plan becomes ever more compressed, each human body comes to resemble a conspiratorial cell’ (Letters 45). It is not only revolution which can collapse temporalities. The judge’s sentence also sutures together past, present and future, as he speaks in ‘the prosody of capital’s domination’.



The Countertime of Struggle

Bonney locates Blanqui in ‘a counter-universe, an anti-gravity, a negative magnetism that the thought of the bourgeoisie cannot enter, encompass or occupy’. 30 30 Bonney & Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’, n.p. He represents Blanqui’s thought as anti-matter, capable of annihilating the judicial sentence which fixes him in that carceral reality. Similarly, Bonney reads Jean Genet’s introduction to the volume Soledad Brother which collects George Jackson’s prison letters and essays as asserting that Jackson’s writing realises a revolutionary ‘counter-time’. This wishful thinking – that poetic thought can constitute a ‘counter-universe or anti-gravity’ which has the power to annihilate the judicial sentence, even in the moment of its political defeat – is explored, with significant ambivalence, throughout Bonney’s more recent work. In his first ‘Letter on Harmony’, Bonney segues from a story about a judge masturbating while a prostitute re-enacts the crimes of people he has sentenced to ‘thoughts I’ve been developing on the Pythagorean system of harmonics, and how it relies on a consciously fictional central point in order to keep its symmetrical force stable’ (Letters 32).

Thomas Wright, “A synopsis of the universe, or, the visible world epitomiz’d”, Plaque 2, 1742



This fictional central point, countertime or counterearth, is another elaboration of the ‘crack’ or fissure which holds in place the antagonistic forces of revolution and counterrevolution, another manifestation of the physics of matter and anti-matter. Elsewhere, Bonney describes the calendar as a ‘map’ which similarly ‘as been split down the middle’. Its two chronologies are locked in antagonism: on the one hand, ‘revolutionary time, the time of the dead, whatever, and its packed with unfinished events’ such as the Paris Commune: ‘counter-earths, clusters of ideas and energies and metaphors that refuse to die, but are alive precisely nowhere.’ On the other hand, there is standard time, ‘dead labour, capital’. When these two times are suddenly jolted into alignment, temporality buckles and ‘everything is up for grabs. Well, that’s the theory. Riot, plague, any number of un-used potentialities we can’t even begin to list’ (Letters 116-117).

The antagonism between the abstract, homogenising time of capital, with its real violence, and the revolutionary time of the dead, produces ‘counter-earths’ – zombie energies ‘that refuse to die’ and yet cannot live. Bonney connects these suppressed ideas, energies and metaphors to the identities of those who live or die under state violence. These counter-earths become visible when events such as a riot produce a ‘buckling’ in the continuum of ‘dead labour’ and capital. In those moments, poetics should be ready to provide ‘a map, a counter-map, actually, a chart of the spatio-temporal rhythm of the riot-form, its prosody and signal-frequency. A map that could show the paths not taken. And where to find them, those paths, those antidotes, those counter-plagues.’

        This notion of poetic countertime is developed most fully in Bonney’s extraordinary ‘Second Letter on Harmony’ (Letters 33), which draws on Lenin’s Notes on Hegel to offer a secondhand account of Pythagorean thought. As Bonney summarises it, the harmony of the spheres is imagined as a justification of earthly hierarchies, but it depends on ‘a fictional body’: the antichthon, or counter-earth. Thus, those hierarchies are based on ‘an untruth with the power to kill.’ But this murderous fiction is also ‘the site, magnetic as all hell, of contention and repulsion, which can transgress its own limits until something quite different, namely, crime, or impossibility, appears.’ Poetry, anciently, is also a lie; and Bonney has reaffirmed this Platonic proposition, repeatedly declaring that it is necessary to lie in the enemy’s language. So, ‘poetic realities’ can also act ‘as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance in which we can see and act on what had previously been kept invisible etc. Ourselves, for one thing.’ However, Bonney also suggests this counterearth is not a productive negation of wrong life, but a mummified fiction which could transfix us in its negativity. The dominant prosody is the rhythm of police clubs; capital can also produce powerful contractions and dilations of time; the occult potential of poetry has always already been seized by capital, and not even Leadbelly’s ‘The Gallis Pole’ 31 31 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKj4B5GvLK4 could retain its antagonistic qualities when played in the supermarket (Letters 43).



In the Wake

Nonetheless, Bonney asserts that certain kinds of music – and even fewer forms of poetry – still harbour the ‘possibility of interruptions’, or contain images which are referred to redemption. He hopes that

in the claims made by music posterity is leaking, strangely tucked in minor constellations. (The Commons 58)

He cites the 1965 recording of John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Donald Garrett, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones, Live in Seattle 32 32 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FDmhoAV0M as containing one of Benjamin’s ‘precious but tasteless seed[s]’:

It’s one of those examples of recorded music that still sounds absolutely present years after the fact, because it was one of the sonic receptacles of a revolutionary moment that was never realised: that is, it has become a Benjaminian monad, a cluster of still unused energies that still retain the chance of exploding into the present. (Letters 34-5).

The monad is what crystallises ‘when thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions’ and is shocked into an arrest which is simultaneously ‘a Messianic cessation of happening’ and ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (‘Theses’ 262-3). Such a monad emerges, in Bonney’s listening, during the track ‘Evolution’, when

someone – I don’t think it’s actually Coltrane – blows something through a horn that forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre: dialectical love, undeclared logic. …That horn sounds like a metal bone, a place where the dead and future generations meet up and are all on blue, electric fire.

The horn blasts ‘a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history’ (‘Theses’ 263). It is a musical incision in time, a note which creates the fissure where the past and the present can address each other. But Bonney’s assertion that Black music, at once more abstracted and more communal than poetry, is the art form which achieves this temporal conjunction, is also a somewhat predictable and even Romantic idealisation of music as the end of language, the condition to which poetry aspires. Jacques Rancière argues that for the Romantics, music claims ‘to dismiss the mute and loquacious letter in order to enthrone the pure kingdom of spirit become sensuous’; ‘the imageless and thoughtless ideality of music with its direct communication between artist and listener through the medium of a vanishing materiality’ is the end of art as pure temporality, while its ‘lack of meaning—its inability to speak—make it the supreme realization of the spiritual world’. 33 33 Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 136, 138.

Bonney fantasises about a similarly direct transfiguration of the spiritual and the sensual, the souls of the dead and the bodies of the living, through Black music, which serves his utopian idealism also by virtue of his separation as a white British poet from the conditions of that music’s production.

        It’s not surprising that Bonney cites Coltrane as the artisan of this counterearth. He repeatedly draws on Black artists and writers, particularly Amiri Baraka, whose ‘magic words’ – ‘up against the wall motherfucker’ – he cites as the epitome of the poetic image realised in times of social struggle. These frames of reference also provide a contrast to the ‘now’ which Bonney’s poems inhabit, as a fissure in the city and its monumental materiality, or as a crossroads where past and present interpenetrate. Bonney’s melancholic utopianism and in some regards distinctly British poetry mirror some aspects of what Christina Sharpe has described as ‘the wake’ – the continual extension of Black death, from chattel slavery through mass incarceration and homicidal policing. But this contrast, in many ways, draws out the idealism of Bonney’s poetics. I’ve argued that Bonney’s poems are filled with the voices of the dead. These are the dead that Bonney’s occult imagination conjures up from the history of the city, but their resurrection is a distinctly literary fable. In comparison, for African Americans living in the ‘now-time’ of slavery, the Africans ‘thrown, jumped, dumped overboard in the Middle Passage’, and the survivors who existed in a state of ‘social death’, are ‘with us still, in the time of the wake, known as residence time’.  34 34 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 19.

        This comparison can be developed further with attention to two writers discussed by Sharpe: Trinidadian-Canadian poet Dionne Brand, and Tobagan-Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip. I’ll return to Philip in a moment. Both writers reflect formally and thematically on the gaps, silences, and erasures which mark the African place in the history of the Americas. Brand represents slavery and diaspora as the ‘Door of No Return’, a portal of horror, but also a romance of origin which structures the impossible fantasy of return that she is also willing to critique. Brand writes that

The door exists as an absence. A thing in fact which we do not know about, a place which we do not know. Yet it exists as the ground we walk. Every gesture our bodies make somehow gestures toward this door…. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives. 35 35 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 25.

For Brand, the door inscribes itself on the Black body as a site of captivity, on the repertoire of Black gestures, and on Black consciousness. The door is an emblem of the presence of the past, the haunting of diasporic potentiality by the dead: ‘In the Diaspora, as in bad dreams, you are constantly overwhelmed by the persistence of the spectre of captivity’ (A Map 29). Brand’s work testifies to what Stephanie Smallwood has described as the ‘indeterminate passage’ between ‘the African past and the American present’ which prohibits ‘full narrative closure’. 36 36 Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 207.

Jacob Lawrence, “Shipping Out” [1947]



        In another book, the speaker reflects on a painting by Jacob Lawrence (‘Shipping Out’, from his 1947 War Series), and observes:

who could not see this like the passage’s continuum, the upsided down-ness, the cramp, the eyes compressed

to diamonds, as if we could exhume ourselves from these mass graves, of ships, newly dressed

if we could return through this war, any war, as if it were we who needed redemption, instead of this big world, our ossuary

so brightly clad, almost heroic, almost dead, the celebratory waiting, the waiting, the smell of wounds

the raw red compartments, and the sharecropping, city-soothed hands, big to kill something else 37 37 Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010), 81-2.

The Middle Passage is a continuum which consigns ‘us’ to mass graves, the anonymity of unmemorialised death. ‘We’ are made responsible for our own exhumation, our return to life as fully human. But Brand argues that it is not ‘we’ who require vivification, but the world: it is an ‘ossuary’, charnel house, purgatorial repository where the bones which have been cleaned and picked over – stripped of the contagion and vestigial humanity of the rotting corpse – can be stored, indifferently. The violence with which Brand’s poem concludes is both a revolutionary violence required to win ‘this war, any war’ against white supremacy, and the extended historical violence of white supremacy itself, or both.

        Bonney’s work also proposes a reorientation of historical temporality which reveals how the present is haunted by the past, and the consequent difficulty of framing a future within that spectral gaze. But where Bonney’s reading of Blanqui leads to an insistence that carcerality initiates a looping of time, that reading emerges from an isolated genius figure, the mad revolutionary locked up on his own, spinning cosmological visions from his imagination. By contrast, ‘wake work’ is a collective experience of the continuity of slavery and the Middle Passage, continually lived by Black people as the immanence and imminence of Black death. The door and wake also signal the irrecoverability of a history of those who were annihilated by slavery. Bonney suggests that the crack in the landscape of the city can be called up wilfully to represent the rupturing of abstract or homogeneous time and the continual haunting presence of the past, that it is the poet’s imagination (in anticipation of a revolution which the skirmishes of students and workers in London that he describes can only meagrely approximate) that does the calling.

        Bonney would undoubtedly declare both the influence on his thinking and practice of Black poetry and music, while also resisting the implication that his occult temporalities are privileged imitations of the lived, collective and continuous experience of Black death. At times, however, his admiration seems to motivate Bonney to produce formal or semantic approximations of Black arts despite the glaring discrepancies in their conditions of production. He quotes Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse, where Glissant argues that ‘Din is discourse’:

Since speech was forbidden, slaves camouflaged the word under the provocative intensity of the scream. No one could translate the meaning of what seemed to be nothing but a shout. It was taken to be nothing but the call of a wild animal. This is how the dispossessed organised their speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of pure noise. 38 38 Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trad. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 123; quoted in Happiness 55.

At the start of this essay, I suggested a comparison between Bonney and Abiezer Coppe, as writers whose ranting performances attacked class distinctions and bourgeois morality. Coppe walked the streets of London, his ears ‘filled brim full with cryes of poore prisoners, Newgate, Ludgate cryes’ (6). Channelling Coppe, and his receptivity to those noises, Bonney ‘would cackle and roar at your jewellery and riches / (you bourgeois sons of bitches’ (Blade Pitch 49). Like Coppe, Bonney channels the noises, curses, hexes and hissing of the city, its ‘complex moans and fierce scratching’ (Document 63). He notes that George Jackson uses the word ‘pandemonium’ to describe San Quentin, and cites book ten of Paradise Lost: when

Satan and the rest of Pandemonium’s citizenry are transformed into serpents that transformation is registered primarily by the loss of language, communication and thought: “dreadful was the din / of hissing through the hall, thick swarming now with complicated monsters” – the rebel angels are forced into a “maddening intensity” of noise, where thought and speech become impossible. Attempts to deal with the necessities of speech and cognition from within a place where they are made impossible is a defining theme throughout revolutionary poetics, from Milton through Blake and Shelley, and via Marx into the radical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century.

He cites Blake’s Four Zoas and Shelley’s Revolt of Islam as other examples of how poetry channels the language of the dead which is ‘the voice of dead labour, capital itself.’ And yet unlike the disintegration of language into ghosted-out phonemes and particles in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Bonney’s poetry does not devolve into a din, noise or holler (apart from some limited lexical experiments with a Tony Blair speech, for example). Instead, he has returned through racialized privilege to the safety of clear enunciation. Where Philip seeks access to obliterated historical truths – the names of the dead – Bonney has decided it is necessary to ‘lie’ in the enemy’s language.

        Bonney’s citation of Glissant reminds us that the ‘shout’ was not just a form of poetic experimentation that poetry – whether Bonney’s or Milton’s – can describe without reproducing. It was a specific genre of African and African-American expression. Dena Epstein cites Frederick Law Olmsted’s description of the ‘shout’ or field-holler he heard when travelling in South Carolina in 1854-5:

Suddenly one raised such a sound as I never heard before: a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto, his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle-call. As he finished, the melody was caught up by another, and then, another, and then, by several in chorus. 39 39 Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 182.

The shout is initiated by one singer, and passed among the collective, binding them together in and against their exploitative work. Steven Carl Tracy describes the ‘field holler’, ‘arwhoolie’, ‘field cry’, ‘field blues’, or ‘over and over’ as a work song without instrumental accompaniment. Loosely structured, highly embellished, and rhythmically free, it often consists of ‘falsetto whooping and hollering with no words or a very minimal text’ and is closely related to West African praise songs and men’s songs. 40 40 Steven Carl Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues (University of Illinois Press, 1988, 2001), 70. Like the door of no return, the holler is diachronic, reflecting the conditions of its production – the repression of African-American speech under chattel slavery – and harking back to its collective origins in African song.

        The shout is a noise whose meaning resists interpretation by slave owners but is meaningful for those who share the singer’s experience of oppression. Drawing on Glissant’s important notion of opacity, Saidiya Hartman relates the ‘veiled character of slave song’ to ‘the dominative imposition of transparency and the degrading hyper-visibility of the enslaved’; concealment in such circumstances is a form of resistance. 41 41 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35. Dennis Childs develops Hartman’s account to apply to the neoslavery regimes of contemporary mass incarceration, and distinguishes between such veiled song and the coerced performance of ‘happiness’ in which slaves and convicts were forced to simulate consent to bondage through song and dance. 42 42 Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015), 99. M. NourbeSe Philip cites Lindon Barrett (Blackness and Value), who describes the shout as the ‘principal context in which black creativity occurred’; and describes how in her book Zong!

the African, transformed into a thing by the law, is re-transformed, miraculously, back into human. Through oath and through moan, through mutter, chant and babble, through babble and curse, through chortle and ululation to not-tell the story…. 43 43 M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 2011), 196.

Philip ‘crumps’ words, overcoming her distrust for language’s rationality by breaking words ‘into sound, return to their initial and originary phonic sound – grunts, plosives, labials’ (205); and as a result, ‘for the very first time since writing chose me, I feel that I do have a language – this language of grunt and groan, of moan and stutter – this language of pure sound fragmented and broken by history’ (205). The shout reaches past the door of no return, to collective but also infantile origins, through a fragmentary and emancipatory practice of noise-making.

        The passage from Glissant is also cited by Fred Moten, who reads it as a recognition that ‘the temporal condensation and acceleration of the trajectory of black performances, which is to say black history, is a real problem and a real chance for the philosophy of history’. 44 44 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7-8. The temporal condensation emerging from Black art is likewise both a chance and a problem for Bonney’s idealisation of the revolutionary modalities of the poetic image:

One of the implications of blackness, if it is set to work in and on such philosophy, is that those manifestations of the future in the degraded present that C. L. R. James described can never be understood as simply illusory. The knowledge of the future in the present is bound up with what is given in something Marx could only subjunctively imagine: the commodity who speaks.

This leads Moten to a discussion of Marx’s conjecture – which Bonney also cites (Happiness 33) – ‘if commodities could speak’. 45 45 ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ (Capital vol. 1) Moten notes that Marx ventriloquises an imaginary, personified commodity, without recognising that slavery had produced exactly such an object: the commodity that speaks (9). And yet,

the truth about the value of the commodity is tied precisely to the impossibility of its speaking, for if the commodity could speak it would have intrinsic value, it would be infused with a certain spirit, a certain value given not from the outside, and would, therefore, contradict the thesis on value—that it is not intrinsic—that Marx assigns it. (13)

For Moten, the speaking commodity violates the assumption that exchange value is arbitrary; instead, speech proposes an antagonistic and opposing form of value which is ‘spiritual’ and ‘intrinsic’, a humanistic value consistent with doctrines of universal rights. However, later Moten asserts that

If the commodity could speak it would say that its value is not inherent; it would say, ultimately, that it cannot speak. But commodities speak and scream, opening tonal and grammatical fissures that mark the space of …globe-girdling, nationalist-under-erasure political agency… The richly differentiated commodity screams poetically, musically, politically, theoretically; the commodity screams and sings in labour. (213, 215).

Moten’s emphasis on the maternal in materiality signals that this ‘labour’ is both work, and reproductive work (childbirth). The speaking, screaming commodity which is the slave, whose progeny is a tradition of Black radical art-making and thought, has the power to open up a ‘fissure’ in universalising accounts of human value, including Marx’s own.

        Bonney’s work is in dialogue with Moten’s, in their theorisation of the ‘break’ or cut, their attention to the way that Black performance revolutionises the conceptualisation and experience of time, and in their interest in Amiri Baraka, whose work of the 1960s expresses for Moten the tragic aspects of the Black radical tradition. Bonney quotes ‘an early fiction’ by Baraka to describe the zones of non-being in the city, places inimical to life, what Baraka refers to as “the place music goes when we don’t hear it no more … the silence at the top of our screams.” For Bonney, ‘the secret of that silence is the secret mutterings of the commodity fetish in its human form, the “screaming commodity” of slavery.’

Bonney recognises these secret mutterings and the undeclared, unnameable ‘cargo’ of esoteric poetry in Benjamin’s account not as universal and abstracted phenomena, but as the specific history of slavery. This specificity rescues his gnostic theories on temporality and Gothic hauntologies from decadence, but only just. Because it is still esoteric poetry, ghostly signals and analogies, poetry as ‘mnemonic device’ and Rimbaudian and Baudelairean derangement, which is Bonney’s medium; those living in the continuous present of slavery do not need mnemonic devices, or the poetic injunction to recognise that ‘the crack is stamped into each one of us’, to access this history, which is neither secret nor silent.

From Bonney’s blog : Wednesday, July 26, 2006



        I’ve argued that Bonney is also allied to a specifically British countertradition whose emblem could be the cuckoo: herald of spring, of renewal; but also the hungry imposter in the nest, an outsider who takes food meant for legitimate offspring. The cuckoo – related both to the cuckold, and to madness – is a nonconformist, troublemaker, outsider. 46 46 On the significance of pastoral and 17th through 19th 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. In The Commons, Bonney quotes the folk song ‘The Cuckoo is a Pretty Bird’, and explains that in this song

the singer will intersperse their own lyrics alongside whatever fragments of other songs happen to come to mind, thus creating a tapestry or collage in which the “lyric I” loses its privatised being, and instead becomes a collective, an oppositional collective, spreading backwards and forward through known and unknown time. (Letters 144)

The cuckoo is thus a symbol of a folk collectivity of performance, of the improvisation which is key both to Bonney and Moten’s theories of the ‘break’ with domination, and of Rimbaud’s declaration that ‘I is an other’. But if every expression of countertime is also potentially an assertion of ‘the fascism that is always lurking at capital’s centre’, then Bonney’s relation to the traditions of Black thought and performance may also resemble that of the cuckoo, the intruder in the nest.

        Bonney’s poetry expresses the difficulty of enduring conditions of catastrophic political defeat, while listening for the momentary counter-rhythmic interruption, ‘where the language folds and stumbles for a second, like a cardiac splinter or a tectonic shake’. And while that moment may be only a temporary and fleeting one, like the riots of 2010-11, the poet can ensure that it remains in the memory. This is the ‘purpose of song’: not to recall the past in Wordsworthian tranquillity,

unless it is the kind of tranquillity that makes clear the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. A high metallic wire etc. The counter-earth rigged to such sonic stroboscopics that we, however temporarily, become the irruption into present time of the screams of the bones of history, tearing into the mind of the listener, unambiguously determining a new stance toward reality, a new ground outside of official harmony, from which to act. (Letters 35-6)

But in the catastrophe of the present, these screaming bones of history that we find in Bonney’s books can seem like decadent fictions, valorisations of the minuscule instances of riot or rebellion which interrupted London’s commerce for a day or two, rather than a new stance for reality and action. Reading his work in relation to Black music and poetry, it is Bonney’s distinctively bohemian lineage and set of British and European references that seem to condition his hope for ‘clarity and influence’ amidst the shrill screams of revolution. Amidst the temporal condensations and continuities represented by ‘wake time’ and the door of no return, it is the evolution of Zong! as a basis for collective, embodied performance which sounds to me like the poetry of the future. 47 47 I developed this argument at length in my book Poetry and Bondage (Cambridge University Press, 2021).



ANDREA BRADY is a poet and critic whose most recent monographs are Radical Tenderness: Poetry in Times of Catastrophe (Cambridge, 2024) and Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint (Cambridge, 2021). Her eight books of poetry include The Blue Split Compartments (Wesleyan, 2021), Desiring Machines (Boiler House, 2021), The Strong Room (Crater, 2016), Mutability: Scripts for Infancy (Seagull, 2012), and Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (Krupskaya, 2010). She is Professor of Poetry at Queen Mary University of London, where she founded the Centre for Poetry and the Archive of the Now.



Originally published as ‘Sean Bonney: Poet out of Time’, Writing against Capital: Communism and Poetics, ed. Julian Murphet and Ruth Jennison (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 131-160.

  1. William Blake, Blake Books, rev. ed. G. E. Bentley Jr (Oxford, 1977), 176.  []
  2. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trad. Saul K. Padover (Marx/Engels Internet Archive, 1995, 1999): marxists.org.  []
  3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trad. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-264 (263).  []
  4. 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).  []
  5. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trad. Rodney Livingstone (Boston: MIT Press, 1972), 90.  []
  6. Capital 1:129; see Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trad. Matteo Mandarini (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 24.  []
  7. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trad. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 12.  []
  8. Sean Bonney, ‘Second Letter on Harmony’, Letters Against the Firmament (London: Enitharmon, 2015), 34.  []
  9. Sean Bonney, Baudelaire in English (London: Veer Books, 2008), 88.  []
  10. Tim Allen et Andrew Duncan, Don’t Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), 40.  []
  11. Sean Bonney, ‘Confessional Poetry’, Blade Pitch Control Unit (Cambridge: Salt, 2005), 45.  []
  12. Clement Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge UP, 1996), 77, 80.  []
  13. Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll: A Word from the Lord to All the Great Ones of the Earth (London: 1649, 1650), 5.  []
  14. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; London: Verso, 2008).  []
  15. 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  []
  16. 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.  []
  17. Sean Bonney, Document: Poems, Diagrams, Manifestos July 7th 2005 – June 27th 2007 (London: Barque, 2009), 7.  []
  18. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, Reflections, trad. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 177-192 (183-4).  []
  19. Document 62-3. In a blogpost 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/.  []
  20. Bonney is here quoting Michael’s neighbour Ann Blease, who witnessed Michael being beaten and peppersprayed by eleven 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  []
  21. Sean Bonney, The Commons (London: Openned 2011), 56.  []
  22. 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.  []
  23. ‘Further Notes on Militant Poetics’, Abandoned Buildings blog, posted on 27 September 2013: http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/further-notes-on-militant-poetics.html.  []
  24. Kit Toda, Dan Eltringham et Annie McDermott, ‘Interview with Sean Bonney’, The Literateur (10 February 2011) http://literateur.com/interview-with-sean-bonney/  []
  25. Sean Bonney & 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  []
  26. Ibid.  []
  27. 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.  []
  28. Bonney and Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’. The influence of Blanqui’s satiric astrology can be heard, perhaps, in Bonney’s characterisation 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).  []
  29. Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (London: Unkant Publishing, 2011), 40.  []
  30. Bonney & Andersen, ‘You’d be a pig’, n.p.  []
  31. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKj4B5GvLK4  []
  32. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FDmhoAV0M  []
  33. Jacques Rancière, Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 136, 138.  []
  34. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 19.  []
  35. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 25.  []
  36. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 207.  []
  37. Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010), 81-2.  []
  38. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, trad. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 123; quoted in Happiness 55.  []
  39. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 182.  []
  40. Steven Carl Tracy, Langston Hughes and the Blues (University of Illinois Press, 1988, 2001), 70.  []
  41. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35.  []
  42. Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary (Minneapolis and London: University of Minneapolis Press, 2015), 99.  []
  43. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008, 2011), 196.  []
  44. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 7-8.  []
  45. ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret’ (Capital vol. 1)  []
  46. On the significance of pastoral and 17th through 19th 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.  []
  47. I developed this argument at length in my book Poetry and Bondage (Cambridge University Press, 2021).  []