Sean Bonney’s Happiness

Sean Bonney is a London  poet, a revolutionary socialist, and “punk rocker”. He blogs at abandonedbuildings.blogspot.net, and does regular poetry readings in London pubs. Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud is his latest collection, published by the Association of Musical Marxists’ publishing arm, Unkant, set up by Ben Watson and Andy Wilson. Unkant blogs at www.unkant.com, where you can find videos of the launch night, with a reading by Bonney, the book, however, is available on amazon.

I haven’t read Rimbaud, but as the blurb declares: “these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot.” (Before adding: “In the enemy language it is necessary to lie.”) This is a Marxified Rimbaud (but is there any other?), this is poetry as commentary and commentary as poetry; divisions break down; Bonney knows that Rimbaud’s ‘I is an other’ quip can apply just as well  to the ecstasy of groupthink during a protest, when things “kick off” and something new seems to be dawning.  Cf. Occupy London’s Stock Exchange.

This may not be a manual for student protest and change but it is embroiled in them. The two ‘Revolutionary Legends’ sections are constellations of quotations from various sources, and the second of these sections seems to me a commentary on the Tottenham riots and their relationship to student (and other) protests – the protests as rational comprehendible shout vs. riots as irrational animalistic scream, a binary which Bonney rejects, for obvious reasons. But the ‘Letter on Poetics’ is the most impressive section. Here Bonney soars and you feel it, there’s a clarity and concreteness about it that’s quite something. He reflects on his poetry-reading in the occupied SOAS during the student protests, with a kind of painful self-laceration that can only increase one’s respect for his poetry, and poetry in general. The kind of critical reflection sorely wanting in our politicians. To describe poetry, Bonney offers us a detournement of a sentence of Adorno’s : “Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.”

I remember hearing an anecdote once about a sound poet, or just a poet, being cornered or the equivalent in an alleyway by thugs or teens. For some reason, at the spur of the moment, he started reciting a sound poem at them, Scwhitters’ Ursonate or something, I dunno. The point is that they ran away. Perhaps out of guilt for threatening a gibbering idiot or cultural savant, perhaps out of fear and cowardice. Anyway, if you’re cornered by the bourgeoisie, these poems may just save your life. Even better, if a group of you corner a bourgeois, these may tip them over the edge.

(This review previosuly published online at unkant.com)