Our Death: p13 – Untitled https://preludemag.com/posts/untitled-477/
This is a very difficult blogpost to write, as the poetry I’ve selected here as an example of the body of work isn’t one of Sean’s best known, nor is it an example of his work that I love the most. I thought it might be the best way to introduce you to his work if you haven’t read or heard it before though. Sean was a huge influence on me, personally, and on the development of my writing.
You can’t find a lot of Bonney’s poetry on commercial book outlets, and there are so many different and changing versions of his works, re-imagined and redeveloped into new entities, that it is hard to claim anything is definitive and final. You can find lots of versions and developing works on his blog at http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/, or in his various small press and self-published outputs, and it’s worth reading through some of these to track the evolution of poems and themes. Sean’s public persona is that of a protest poet, a performance poet, an anarchist and Dionysian, which is perhaps ironic given his deep understanding of complex structure, and his constant evolution.
It’s a fascinating journey to follow through Sean’s work chronologically, with his early teenage stream of consciousness outpourings (with illustrations, a theme that never went away) moving into more formal verse forms, then to concrete and sound poetry, onto prose poems, and all of them slightly less on the page, as they were written to be performed, by the poet himself, in his own voice. But whichever poetic stage he was at, Sean had a tendency to disavow what he’d done previously, living, writing and performing in the moment, each phase and poem a frozen moment of thought. Here’s a snapshot that gives you flavour of the range of his work. I won’t make reference to the specific works I love the most, simply because I want you to find your own.
You can find Sean’s most well-known poems elsewhere if you want to, but I’m like the guitar shop owner who wants to stop you from quoting his Stairway to Heaven to prove your own credentials, invariably getting the time signature wrong as you do. Forget the headline and move onto the meat and real wonder which lies elsewhere in his writing. Taken out of context, Bonney’s words can be used as a cheap shot, and that diminishes them. For me, his poetry was all about intelligent provocation, not blind incitement, and that’s a very significant difference which can be dangerous in lesser hands.
At University, it was Sean who first made me take part in the oral aspect of poetry (I was never a natural performer like him) and for a short while we acted as foils, each daring the other to push boundaries even more which culminated in works on either side on the theme ‘Fistfucking Cripples’ (you can see his influence on me in my Selected Poems in places). The content was never condescending or hurtful, but the shock tactics to get attention for a more subtle and important message developed there. Of course, he went on to be a proper poet and my path (and talents) lay elsewhere, though my friend typically disagreed with that sentiment. The one time I mentioned my view of how we differed to him, he quite succinctly summarised his opinion in two words, the second of which was ‘off’. He was a gentle and humble anarchist.
I only realised fairly recently that Man in the Bath is as much inspired by Sean’s story as it is mine, and we were corresponding at the time I first wrote it. Due to his tragic early death, he was also heavily in my mind at the time of redraft. Don’t misunderstand, the novel itself is nothing to do with his life or motivations, except for the fact they tell of a man who discovers a method of delivering his thoughts, that he viscerally needed to express, and finding that persona takes on a life of its own, probably at the expense of his original vision and ability to control it, with a tragic ending.
The Raven Sound likewise features ghosts of Sean, both in the locations we used to haunt together in the 90’s, and in the image and intensity of one of the spectres who haunts the protagonist. I suspect he also played a major part in the main character exploring the love and bond with his lost best friend.
This is a little more personal than any other post when I’m talking about influence, due to the history we shared, but I want to introduce new people to Sean Bonney’s corpus too, as his life and work touched many people, and even a brief googling will reveal to you his influence on the modern poetry scene, and also on poets and non-poets alike. I miss him.
Rest in Power hippy.
Stay safe,
Kit