Sean Bonney could appear in two
places in my current critical project on form (may still), under the
translation chapter (The Petrarch Boys, Caroline Bergvall, Erin Moure, and
Simon Perril so far), and under the one on politics as form. This
last issue is addressed in my poetics-poetry prose piece, or ‘manyfesto’, ‘Bad
Poems for Bad People’, which I wrote after the September 2011 conference in Edinburgh on politics and
form (and after the riots of August 2011). It can be read here, as it appears
on Intercapillary Space, and I ask
readers to pause to consider it.
(Pause.)
(It is the opening poem of the unpublished
work Unfinish.) The piece I gave on
Politics and Form I promised to post on Pages at the time, but haven’t yet.
(Apologies at least to Nat Raha on that front). I will. I don’t think I will
feature Sean’s work there (though I will reference it, I’m sure). It is the
most openly impassioned political work since Barry MacSweeney’s state of the
nation addresses at the height of the Thatcherite madness. That fact, it is
worth stressing, is not automatically praise-worthy; they are both excellent
writers because of the level of formal investigation encountered in the works.
(See my own reference to Thatcher’s demise here.)
I want to turn to Happiness. This book had not yet
appeared at the time of the Edinburgh
conference, though Sean was speaking from it (and from his postgraduate work on
the late Amiri Baraka, which I had the pleasure of reading later in a
professional capacity). I asked a few difficult questions about form and Sean
seemed to dodge them; I think he said he was really only interested in the
improvisatory action of writing the pieces. Of course, my work is as much
interested in acts of forming as form as a structure or frame or elements of
poetic artifice, but perhaps I couldn’t communicate this – and was probably why
I found myself writing my piece to Sean. (It addresses him in the earlier
drafts, something I’ve revised from the still-revising – I should say ‘still
forming’, shouldn’t I? – text.) Sean suspected the term ‘form’ meant
‘structure’.
The warning to my project, which
wants to read Happiness: Poems After
Rimabud as a book of translations, is printed on the stiff hard covers of
this Ukant publication (that make it feel like a Ladybird book: a lovely
incongruence). The warning is clear about these poems: ‘If you think they’re
translations you’re an idiot.’ (Bonney 2012: cover) Two things. This sentence
is then followed by Bonney’s version of the Cretan liar: ‘In the enemy language
it is necessary to lie,’ which suggests both a political strategy (perhaps
derived from his study of Baraka) and an approach to Rimbaud. Don’t tell them they are translations. Secondly,
the condition of being ‘stupid’ or an ‘idiot’, in both Rimbaud and Bonney, is
not unequivocally negative. If Rimbaud was an idiot then it is not idiocy to
regard these as translations. By this point in the chapter I’m writing it will
be clear that the transformative practices I call ‘translations’ are not just
those of the jobbing word-for-word translator but feature attempts to transform
alien materials into new contemporary poems. ‘Poetry is the investigation of
complex contemporary realities through the means (meanings) of form,’ is the
axiom I keep returning to.
Previously Bonney had transformed
Baudelaire’s poems into English language visual poems. Why Rimbaud? Teenage
Barry MacSweeney wrote of ‘The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother’:
‘A drunken hug is worth a revolution,’ and Rimbaud joins Chatterton as figures
of the poete maudit reappearing
throughout his work. (MacSweeney 1968: 35)
(The possible influence of MacSweeney’s last book of poems, Horses in Boiling Blood (2004), a
‘collaboration’ with Apollinaire, on Happiness
is a point worth churning over another day.) Bonney is clear who HIS
Rimbaud isn’t. In his ‘Letter on Poetics’ with which the volume ends, he notes:
‘I’d been to a talk at Marx House and was amazed that people could still only
talk through all the myths: Verlaine etc nasty-assed punk bitch etc gun
running, colonialism, etc. Slightly less about that one.’ (Bonney 2012: 63) The
final sardonic remark alerts us to Bonney’s politics and to his preferred
focus, which is on the work itself, though this is not a simple formalist plea
to turn away from biography to the an engaged reading of the texts, though it
involves a sense of form, and says so:
As if there was
nothing to say about what it was in Rimbaud’s work – or in avant-garde poetry
in general – that could be read as the subjective counterpart to the objective
upheavals of any revolutionary moment. How could what we were experiencing, I asked
myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it.
The form would be monstrous.’ (Bonney 2012: 63)
This passage stands well for the
way that the poems themselves effortlessly slide from Rimbaud’s writings and
his socio-political context to Bonney’s writings and contexts (as you might
expect from a ‘Letter on Poetics’; I nearly treated ‘I asked myself’ to a
scholarly elision but it seems a germane remark strictly in tune with poetics
as a speculative, writerly discourse). However, I want to stay with Rimbaud’s
work for a moment. The way to read Rimbaud, according to Bonney, is ‘as the
subjective counterpart to the objective upheavals of’ his particular
‘revolutionary moment’, the events of the Paris Commune (events that are
glossed in Bonney’s opening section ‘Revolutionary Legends’). True, Rimbaud
wasn’t in Paris; he was at home with his mother
in Charleville in the Ardennes. (But he was
only 15 so that is not too surprising; the myths that surround Rimbaud glorify
his youth but also forget that he was a child.) But he is writing, poems and
letters (the latter expressing his desire to get to Paris.) On May 15th 1871, he
writes his famous Lettre du Voyant, a
quite extraordinary poetics document for a boy of 15, and in the letter is the
poem ‘Parisian War Cry’. It is explicit in its contempt for the government and
the military and its statement of solidarity with the workers against the
bourgeoisie:
Never, never now will we move back
From our barricades, our pile of
stone;
Beneath their clubs our blond
skulls crack
In a dawn that was meant for us
alone. (Rimbaud : 63).
I will turn to the famous poetics soundbites
extracted from the letter in a moment, but dwell first on what both poets have
to say about form. Bonney’s ‘The form would be monstrous,’ (Bonney 2012: 63)
accords with Rimbaud’s assertions about the ‘visionary’ who ‘attains the unknown’ and uncovers something
monstrous and possibly self-destructive: ‘So what if he is destroyed in his
ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable; other horrible workers
will come,’ and the use of the word ‘workers’ a page on from ‘Parisian War Cry’
is telling. (Rimbaud 2008: 116) The visionary writer discovers in himself,
subjectively, monstrous form, ‘something
new – ideas and forms’. (Rimbaud 117) ‘He is responsible for humanity, for animals even; he will have to make sure
his visions can be smelled, fondled, listened to; if what he brings back from beyond has form, he gives it form; if it
has none, he gives it none. A language must be found.’ (Rimbaud 2008: 117) This
looks like the conjectural poetics that will facilitate A Season in Hell, where prose is felt to be the appropriate poetic
form for a visionary confession (though it also reads as a renunciation of the
strategies of the earlier letter). The visionary aspect of this, the monstrous
sensual intoxication and dangerous encounter with otherness, is balanced
against a civic sense that I have certainly never seen quoted before, or
emphasised: ‘This eternal art will be functional, since poets are citizens,’ and
the contemporary notion of Parisian citizens is that they await ‘a dawn that
was meant for us.’ (Rimbaud 2008: 117)
I
think it’s a long way from spotting these references to the revolutionary
moment presented by the Paris Commune, to Bonney’s assertion: ‘But, still, it
is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en
Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s
Capital.’ (Bonney 2012: 63) The ‘fully grasped’ and ‘understood the whole’
gesture towards an absolute understanding only open to a political reading, the
objective supplementing the subjectivity of poetry. I am excluded from this
virtual study group – and baulk at the badgering tone, until I recall that much
of my work on poetics acknowledges the conjecturality, the manifestic
overstatement and the sheer energising contentiousness of much poetics. It’s a
damn slight better than telling us that Rimbaud was a proto-Surrealist,
proto-Beat, proto-hippie, proto-postmodernist! Bonney, of course, is not, and
need not be, forthcoming on why a reading of Marx has this effect, though he
hints at it in tackling the two most often-cited poetics statements from the
Letter. Rimbaud wrote (famously as the hideous adverb has it): ‘A Poet makes
himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses’ Rimbaud
2008: 116), a page or so after announcing that ‘I is another.’ (Rimbaud
115) These are interpreted afresh by Bonney, within the context of Rimbaud’s
particular revolutionary moment:
Rimbaud hammered
out his poetic programme in May 1871, the week before the Paris Communards were
slaughtered. He wanted to be there, he kept saying it. The ‘long systematic
derangement of the senses’, the ‘I is an other’, he’s talking about the
destruction of bourgeois subjectivity, yeh? That’s his claim for the poetic
imagination, that’s his idea of what poetic labour is… 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. (Bonney 2012: 64)
There is certainly evidence for
this in the letter (and the poem), as I’ve argued and shown above. Bonney is
keen is develop the ‘lyric I’ as ‘an interrupter and … a collective’ in
accordance with this politicised Marxist reading (Bonney 2012: 65). Whether it
is right or wrong as a reading of Rimbaud is not the issue here; what matters
is how this relates to Bonney’s poetics and to his choice of Rimbaud (and to
‘avant-garde poetry in general’, as he puts it). They are intimately related.
Bonney asked of the ‘revolutionary
moment. How could what we were experiencing … be delineated in such a way that
we could recognise ourselves in it.’ (Bonney 2102: 63) Jennifer Cooke
identifies what Bonney regards as his contemporary ‘revolutionary moment’, and
comments on Bonney’s demand that protest and poetry as part of the ‘moment’
might escalate into lasting revolution:
This is a high
demand. It would be a lot to ask from protest actions, indeed, which should be
doing it and often seem to fail or run out of steam, to effervesce, bubble
over, and then subside, like the quiet diffusion of energy after the surprise
of the student dissent at Millbank, November 2010, or the confused, smoky hush
that descended in the shocked wake of the London riots in August 2011. (Cooke
2012: 27)
Happiness
was written before the 2011 riots that spread out from the volatile
epicentre in Hackney with the police shooting of Mark Duggan, around London, and across England,
and even to Liverpool, where delayed action
had the air of a tribute riot, political energy replaced by muted but
directionless violence. (That’s enacted in the italicised ‘sonnet’ in ‘Bad
Poetry for Bad People’, by the way.) But the poems respond directly to the
events of the November 2010 student protests against the scrapping of the
student loan system which was met with police violence, mass kettling of
demonstrators and the death of newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson (who is mentioned
in Happiness). Bonney’s poetics seem
ready for that revolutionary moment ‘when it all kicks off’ (64). The poetry
will almost inevitably be (like Rimbaud’s letter and poem) after the event.
(This is a dilemma in Baraka’s poetry which I know Bonney has wrestled with.) But
as Cooke notes of the prescience of another ‘Letter’ by Bonney also written
before the riots: ‘Uncanny, this Sean Bonney, this urban poet-seer’, thus
bestowing the Rimbaudian accolade on his best contemporary disciple. (Cooke
2012: 28).
The next post considers the poems themselves. Read it here. Also read a great interview with
Bonney here. Check out links to all the related posts to my The Meaning of Form project here.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
