Sean Bonney’s Life Work

—Thanks to Frances Kruk, Jeff Hilson, and Justin Katko for comments on drafts and for providing essential information.

 

Sean Bonney’s final book was called Our Death, but in this essay I want to emphasize the life his work held, the vitality with which it can still imbue our struggles. Sean’s was one of the few bodies of work that could comfortably fit within political contexts—picket lines, anarchist papers, communisation journals—without the connection seeming forced, yet he was also deeply concerned with the things that poetry can do that other forms of language or action cannot, and we should not forget this. Sean devoted his life not only to the abolition of the present state of things, but also to poetry, and for him the political and the poetic were inseparable.

Sean Bonney was 10 when Margaret Thatcher came to power, and, aside from the New Labour period of 1997 to 2010, in which the ‘centre left’ incorporated right wing politics as its own, he lived most of his life under Tory regimes of increasing brutality. Throughout, his poetry charts resistance to nationalism, racism, war, and ecocide both nationally and globally. Bonney was early a member of UK Anti-Fa. “We’d find out where the fascists, who were still a small group, were holding their meetings, and we’d make it impossible for them to hold meetings,” he notes. Equally important were the 1990 Poll Tax Riots, which precipitated the end of Thatcher’s decade-plus regime. Then living in Nottingham, Bonney organised numerous community strategy meetings in ordinary neighbours’ living rooms, something he always remained proud of doing. Emerging socially from the anarchist, anti-fascist, punk and rave scenes of the 1980s and early 1990s, Bonney’s early poetry was influenced primarily by the Beats and Surrealists. His first two pamphlets, Marijuana in the Breadbin (1992) and Now that all the Popstars are Dead (1996)—whose cover collage includes a Bogle L’Ouverture catalogue—chart a world of music festivals, drugs, hitching, and activism. The two early poems seen below date back to 1994. The first, from the Freedom Books anthology Visions of Poesy, in which Bonney appears alongside everyone from John Cage to Crass, depicts CND protests at radar base and early warning system RAF Flyingdales; the second, an extract from “Pyramid” published in the magazine Ramraid Extraodinaire, finds cops smashing up raves.

Bonney’s poetry really began to transform, however, when he moved to London for a (subsequently-abandoned) PhD on the work of Charles Olson. Attending Writers Forum—the workshop and reading series run by Bob Cobbing since the 1960s—the SubVoicive readings run by Lawrence Upton, and Hugh Metcalf’s the Klinker—Bonney “found [him]self in a community, befriending poets that I could respect, and look up to, and learn from […] the way in which I understood the possibilties of writing was transformed.” With Jeff Hilson, who he’d met as a fellow PhD student, Bonney produced the single-issue magazine Cul de qui?, and with Hilson and David Miller, organised reading series Xing the Line. Around the same time, he discovered Maggie O’Sullivan’s poem “Pre-Text” in the anthology Conductors of Chaos; O’Sullivan’s combination of formal experimentation and political radicalism was a key influence on Bonney’s early work.

Bonney published two pamphlets, Astrophil and Stella and From the Book of Living or Dying, with Writers Forum in 1999, but his work really came into its own with the pamphlets collected in Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005): The Domestic Poem (2000), The Rose (2000),  Notes on Heresy (2000-2001), Poisons, Their Antidotes (2001-2003), Filth Screed (2003-4), Burnt Nickle (2004-5) and Document (2005). Notes on Heresy (2001) picks up on language preserved in the coercive forms of legal testimony—trial records, confessions, condemnations: the voices of those burned as witches and heretics; of the ‘mad,’ religious dissenters, executed revolutionaries; voices sliced out of official language, yet remaining as “the shadow in the meaning,” calling through in the very language that seeks to erase them. Such voices include Ann Bait of Morpeth, accused in 1673 of witchcraft, the Ranter Abiezer Coppe, the 13th-century Child Ballad “Thomas the Rhymer,” and the anonymous 17th-century lyric “Tom O’Bedlam.” As Bonney puts it, these poems inhabit the spaces where “those who wanted to live outside the laws of the city dwelt: Gnostics, witches, heretics,” seeking to reclaim “marginal experience — valuing those who are inferiorized.” Other poems chart London cityscapes: Bonney’s streets, like the squats inhabited by Anna Mendelssohn, Lee Harwood’s Cable Street or Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Brixton, are sites of political action, resistance, and organisation. The reclamation of suppressed traditions is not “marginalia” in the pages of history, but an invasion of the centre from the periphery.

Tony Blair had come to power in 1997, proceeding to dismantle from inside any pretence at socialism in favour of neoliberal policies. The poems in Blade Pitch sardonically react to Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’: Britpop, ASBOs (anti-social behaviour order), rising rents, an optimistic despair, a cruel optimism that only prefigured and laid the ground for worse. Against such polite despair, these poems refuse to work and refuse to pay. As Bonney writes in “pop stars on Holloway road” from The Rose (2000): “walk out, recall / you’ve done nothing wrong […] ha. Now you can eat […] meet me on Oxford St / we’ll go into Borders // steal everything.” Yet traces of resistance remain fleeting: “interrupting noise,” “in scraps and little and scratches,” emerging as enigmatic rants, messages scrawled between the lines. It was the mass protest against Tony Blair’s support for the illegal invasion of Iraq that really energised and lifted this work. At a time when both ‘mainstream’ and ‘avant-garde’ writers argued for war, Bonney emphatically refused conservative myths of political ‘neutrality.’ In 2003, Bonney and Hilson produced two anti-Iraq War sheets called quic_lude with poems by Harry Gilonis, Peter Manson, the late Lawrence Upton, and others. Three years later, Bonney and Frances Kruk produced a ‘War Pigs’ issue of their yt communication bulletin to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11th World Trade Centre bombings and the ‘War on Terror’ they were cynically used to justify, the cover juxtaposing a bombed-out tower block with the flagship ‘Millennium Bridge’ leading from St Paul’s Cathedral. As the editorial—which Kruk recalls was likely written collectively by Bonney, Kruk, Sophie Robinson, and Jow (Lindsay) Walton—puts it: “national identity is for assholes anyway.” Or, as Bonney writes in Document: “I am working on a campaign to get London twinned with Fallujah. The voice in the poem is not your friend.”

In Poisons, their Antidotes (2003), “streetsounds of / Baghdad / emerge” out of London’s shopping matrix, along with slogans written for, and perhaps exceeding the forms of, street protest: “what we want is / Donald Rumsfeld Tommy Franks / their blood.” Against the “horrible silence” and “state of denial,” Bonney insists that when what passes for ‘truth’ (justifications for neoliberal policies and for war) is ‘translated’ to its true content, what emerges is a horrific haze of moralistic nonsense and terror. Poisons ends with “Tony Blair Speech,” in which Bonney literally took a razor to a speech Blair made justifying the war in the language of ‘human rights,’ “leaving the sliced words hanging there” so that “what they are really saying comes through.”

This piece was emblematic of the spirit of yt communication, the ‘micropress’ run by Bonney and his partner Frances Kruk. Its name taken from Khlebnikov, yt was punk zine, left comminiqué, street-corner broadside. Their covers photocopied, spray-painted, ink-spattered, yt produced three ‘bulletins,’ featuring Bonney and Kruk alongside Sophie Robinson, Jow Lindsay, and Justin Katko, and a number of pamphlets, including Bonney’s Document: Hexprogress and Blackwater, and ending with Kruk’s astonishing PIN and Dwarf Surge some years later. Around the same time, Bonney began posting virtually every poem he wrote on his blog, Abandoned Buildings. His attitude to poetry was open and generous. Though he would go on to publish full-length books with bigger presses, it was always in the crucible of the small press and the little magazine that this work was formed, refusing the hierarchical privileging of publication or reading institutions. Lest this work goes on to be recuperated by those who never cared for it when Sean was alive, we should not forget this.

The yt aesthetic lies behind Bonney’s next two books, Baudelaire in English (2008) and its “companion and commentary” Document (2009, written 2005-2007). Bonney’s loose Baudelaire ‘translations’ see typewritten lines enter the page at different angles, blurring over each other, rendering particular words or phrases unreadable. As Bonney put it, the poems are ‘in English,’ but only ‘barely.’ “Legitimate ruins like the lyric I” split into a kind of Frankensteined collectivity that nonetheless remains trapped in its garret, the city’s steeples and skyscrapers “like an enormous jail.” These poems represent multiple cities—Baudelaire’s Paris, as shaded by the 1871 Commune, Khlebenikov’s mobile cities, and 21st-century London, an alleged “smooth-surface postmodern city / safe for faux-bohemian yuppies,” whose citizens are “photographed 500 times a day.” A parallel series of collages drip with bright pinks, oranges and yellows, cut-ups of letters, demands for money and slices of poems showing through the splatter. Baudelaire’s famous swan becomes automaton and index of ecological destruction, arriving in a “yellow reflective DIN,” “his feathers in oil,” “his mechanik madness” “like a trapped myth.” Speech-like directness exists alongside visual distortion, registering the rupture between poetic language and lived experience. These poems are dominated by an unholy trinity: “commodity, / mystery, / ****absurdity.” In this world, “even death will / con us / && still we’ll go to work, / & flay the pointless land / with lime-crust hands && teeth.” The conditions of labour or joblessness which Baudelaire named—the rag-picker, the old woman, the hard-working skeleton—find their corollary in modern-day London in a system of global domination that works by simultaneous flattening and separation: “the OLD CITY has DISSoLVED,” “London will change / us, we;ll hate it just the same.” In Document, Khlebnikov’s utopian Futurism—new languages and new conceptions of social space, modelled in the context of the Soviet Revolution—has been replaced by the new skyscrapers of Finance Capital. Registering the early stages of gentrification in Hackney, this work depicts a “city circuitry” in which city and body are drawn up and divided, mapped and surveilled, racialised and classed. “Hackney is occupied territory,” “weird and warm and at war with you.” But not just Hackney: “As it currently stands, every city on the surface of the planet is occupied territory.” Here, “the social is also private,” parcelled up into units of private property, while spaces of safety or privacy are opened up to the invasive surveillance and demands of landlords, bailiffs, neighbours, cops.

If the ‘poems, diagrams, manifestos’ of Document were in some senses diagnostic, Bonney’s next major sequence, The Commons, a series of fourteen-line poems written between April 2008 and January 2010, moved towards a collective imaginary: “voices from contemporary uprisings” blending with those of historical revolutions, “supernatural bandits //// all clambering up from their hidden places in history, getting ready to storm the Cities of the Rich.” Jumping off description of Clarence Ashley’s song “The Coo Coo Bird,” Bonney wrote through a vast range of sources, thieving and re-ordering to “create a tapestry or collage in which the ‘lyric I’ loses its privatized being, and instead becomes a collective, an oppositional collective, spreading backwards and forward through known and unknown time.” A number of lines serve as refrains—“wake up dead man,” “the cuckoo is a […],” “he was a big freak”—along with slogans of the poet’s own, notably “slaughter the fascist BNP.” Seeing Bonney read these poems—particularly when accompanied by musicians such as bassist Dominic Lash and guitarist David Stent—was totally electrifying and changed my sense of what poetry was or could do: a sense of live thought, at electrifying speed. The poems are a series of contained explosions, American funk, folk song, work song and jazz colliding with Theodor Adorno, B-movie zombies, political slogans, Clarence Ashley running into Betty Davis:

The cuckoo is a
BANG -
he was a big freak
weirds have wrappt his
hail & gunnery,
his pronouns and minds

These poems are work songs, too—the work of precarity, of tertiary labour, of outsourcing and the ghosts of factory labour that get displaced to the Global South. By the end, the collective voice feels won-through, justified, a collective fragile and barely discernible yet still an interrupting noise, ghostly yet vitally alive.

- a kind of glow remains -
- a kind of dignified singing -
- blank - […]
we are your border
- bright -
- inaudible -

Bonney’s poetic reclamation of the marginalised parallels his scholarly work. In 2012 he completed a PhD thesis on Amiri Baraka at Birkbeck College, supervised by his friend and colleague William Rowe. Also in 2012, he co-organised the “Poetry and Revolution” conference, combining papers with readings by the likes of Tom Leonard, Maggie O’Sullivan, and Mark Nowak; this event is named in the thesis introduction. Bonney saw the PhD as part of the project of ‘militant poetics’ subsequently developed in “Notes On Militant Poetics” (2012-2013) and “Notes on Baraka” (2019), which drew together figures as diverse as Baraka, Genet, Di Prima, Artaud, George Jackson, Fanon, Angela Davis, Thomas Müntzer, and Abiezer Coppe. While aware of his compromised position as a white man writing on the Black Radical Tradition, and the dangers of fetishizing past artefacts, he insisted that poetry provided a valuable counter-history to the official record, enabling the unthought to express itself.

Bonney’s writing on politics and poetry was crucially shaped by the events happening around him. Happiness: Poems after Rimbaud (2011) emerged from resistance to the UK Coalition government elected in 2010. Dominated by the Conservatives, the government proposed to lift the cap on already-unpopular university tuition fees introduced by Tony Blair in 1998 and to scrap the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) which provided vital support for lower-income students. From October 2010—when a group of activists occupied Tory party headquarters at Millbank Tower—to spring 2011, when the government’s education policy, along with ever-more brutal ‘austerity measures,’ passed into law, a series of protests in central London saw police beat protestors with batons, drag them from wheelchairs, and ‘kettle’ them for hours without access to water or sanitary facilities. Bonney was on these protests; as he notes, “you can’t get ridden down on by police horses, or watch the cops breaking people’s heads, without it getting into the work.” 2010 marked the beginning of an increasing upsurge of rampant nationalism and far-right politics, from the nationalist spectacles of the 2012 Royal Wedding and London Olympics, to the ‘hostile environment’ fostered under Theresa May, leading to endless deportations and to horrific ‘detention centres’ such as Yarl’s Wood. The context of this poetry, too was, international: the 2008 financial crash, the worldwide Occupy movement, the events of the Arab Spring.

In an email, Bonney wrote: “The central point of my ‘Happiness’ book is the transformation of internalised violence into social violence, to the point where its voices can reject their victim-hood, and claim some degree of social strength.” In November 2010, Bonney wrote:

When you meet a Tory on the street, cut his throat
It will bring out the best in you.
It is as simple as music or drunken speech.
There will be flashes of obsolete light.
You will notice the weather only when it starts to die.

Bonney is not telling anyone to go out on the street and attack people with a knife—the logic of terrorism as flipside to revolutionary action, or “the terrorist as a damaged utopian.” Arguments against the poem’s ‘anger’ already start off on the wrong foot, summoning more outrage at this theoretical violence than at the daily violence of capital, and one of the things such writing does is to reveal the fault-lines in liberal discourse. Another poem from this time ends: “back now to our studies. negation of the negation. we will raise the dead.” Will Rowe had spontaneously chanted the final phrase into a megaphone on a march the day before. Self-consciously absurd, yet consciously utopian, the full chant went, “Tories, Tories, you can’t stop us / We will raise the dead.” (The same group of poets also adapted Nikita Krushchev’s “We will bury you”—the ludic element of these chants should not go underestimated—subsequently borrowed for the name of a book by Verity Spott.) The three, short sentences of Bonney’s line—a sarcastic response to the government’s attempt to put students in their proper place, a familiar Marxist philosophical tenet, and a kind of utopian threat—are a kind of credo for what Sean made us feel poetry could do.

Happiness ends with a “Letter on Poetics” written the following summer, perhaps the key statement of this period. Building on Kristin Ross and adapting Rimbaud’s famous “Lettres du Voyant,” written the month of the Paris Commune, Bonney places Rimbaud’s famous dictum “I is another” and call for the “prolonged and rational derangement of the senses” in the context of a “rapid collectivising of subjectivity” wherein “the lyric I – yeh, that thing” can become “(1) an interrupter and (2) a collective,” rather than “a simple recipe for personal excess.” But after political defeat, this collectivised I is left alone again. As Rimbaud famously writes, “It’s nothing! I’m here! I’m still here!” For Bonney, without sinking into “the romanticism of failure, and the poete maudite, that kinda gross conformity,” we can read Rimbaud’s Illuminations as subjective reflections of objective defeat, “accounts of the painful return to capitalist business-as-usual after the intensity of social upheaval.”

Rather than turning to “despair or reconciliation,” poetry thus serves as a kind of container for those hopes that cannot currently manifest in social life, and for the ‘bad feelings’ attendant on defeat: a place of convalescence, but also a place from which fresh attacks can be launched. Following the “Letter on Poetics,” Bonney wrote a series of letters to a fictional, unnamed addressee, ultimately collected in Letters Against the Firmament (2015). In August 2011, Mark Duggan was shot by police in an incident hard to see anything other than racially motivated: riots spread from Tottenham across the country before being suppressed, leading to Conservative and Liberal panic alike. The riots revealed the limits, not only of an obviously racist and classist Conservative discourse, but of a liberal discourse that revealed its true conservatism at such moments, as Jackie Wang argues in Carceral Capitalism (2018). Bonney wrote three letters that month: “Letter on Riots and Doubt,” “Letters against Spectres,” and “Letter on Silence.” The third letter begins, “It’s difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances,” and sketches out a “thesis on the nature of rhythm” which is in fact a description of the police beating which led to the death of Jacob Michael the same month. Poetry here seems compromised, irrelevant. At readings, Bonney would say that he wasn’t even sure these texts were poems. But prose ultimately became the way out of poetic impasse. Since his move to London, Bonney had deliberately avoided the naïve, uncritical first person of his earliest work. Now, however, he saw poetry as “a place where subjectivity can go into a political discourse.”

This was above all a question of scale. Prose poetry enabled Bonney to “throw in lines that were just trivial details about my autobiography, next to speculations about Pythagorean harmony.” In the Letters, society as a whole comes to seem a carceral system, inhabited by isolated subjects who suffer the effects of mental illness, precarious employment, anxieties about having enough money to eat, who feel powerless and afraid. The letters emerge from a kind of negative collective, the underclass fostered by governmental policy—the ranks of the unemployed, the paranoid, the afraid—precisely through their recording of isolation.

I think I’m becoming slightly unwell. [...] A while ago I told you I rarely leave the house, now I can’t [...] I keep the curtains closed. Don’t answer the phone. Panic when the mail’s delivered. I don’t know if this is normal behaviour, if anyone else feels the city as a network of claws and teeth, an idiot’s hospital, a system of closed cameras and traffic.

Here, resistance to capital has become—impossibly—resistance to the entire heavenly sphere: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The original title to the sequence, “Letters Against Enchantment,” proposes capitalist realism as magical spell. Ultimately, however, Bonney plumps neither for a straightforward, rationalist critique of magical thinking, nor a reactionary occultism or theology. In the sequence called “Corpus Hermeticum” (2015), Tory politicians roam the streets like the monsters they are: “Remember Theresa May, that guillotine / Unemployed families were slaughtered.” Naming politicians as criminals and murderers is to refuse to accept or ignore the deaths of those killed by police or ‘security guards,’ those whose benefits were cut without explanation or recourse. And in naming current conditions as Hell, “lived as a process and a system,” quasi-supernatural mystification is dispelled. As Bonney writes with reference to Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, “Hell is active, so is made, and can be used.” To get out of hell, one has to recognize that it is there in the first place. Bonney’s curses may take the forms of Biblical prophecy, but they are not theological: they are quite material descriptions of evil, resisted through riots, strikes, and militant support of the unemployed (“victory to dole scroungers”), immigrants, and all those othered, excluded and terrorised by State, church and capital.

The sequence ends with perhaps Bonney’s most famous poem, a version of a version of a poem by Miguel James:

for ‘I love you’ say fuck the police, for
‘the fires of heaven’ say fuck the police, don’t say
‘recruitment’ don’t say ‘trotsky’ say fuck the police […]
for ‘make it new’ say fuck the police [...]

The “fuck the police” poem has been so popular partly because it offers a moment of group togetherness in performance (or in reading’s displacement of performance), of collective formation through negative definition, through joyous rage. Anger and anguish are the balancing points of this work. In 2015, Bonney’s work appeared in an anthology edited by Arts Against Cuts called Bad Feelings—“negation, negativity, and a bottomless catalogue of negative emotions”—and his last work fully inhabits the affective reality of such feelings. Though this work names a number of key political events and figures—right-wing politicians, along with a counter-pantheon of revolutionaries and revolutionary poets—this is not what makes it truly political. Instead, as Bonney said of Vallejo, it offers “an account of capitalist alienation that is more fearsome, more intimate than anything else you can find,” precisely because it charts the affective dimensions of such alienation.

In Fall 2015, Bonney moved to Berlin to undertake post-doctoral work on Diane Di Prima, long an influence on his work. That summer, he had discovered the work of Katerina Gogou—actor, poet, anarchist—and begun to produce versions of Gogou’s work. Bonney’s versions filter Gogou’s address to military dictatorship, Communist party factionalism, anarchist dissidence and drug addiction—sardonic and despairing, yet resistance-infused—offering a canvas in which the stakes are life and death—gendered and racialized violence, political assassinations, the sacrificial death of refugees.

loneliness is not white
loneliness is up for sale. loneliness will clean your toilet with her fucking tongue.
oh god I’m swearing again.
loneliness turns up drowned on the front pages as refugee porn and is three years old
loneliness queues up politely for a boot in the face for black eggs and poisoned ham

Indices of abjection morph into ambiguous tools of power: the desperation born of a backs-to-the-wall attitude, a diagnosis of shared abjection that might lead to resistance—even if this remains revanchist fantasy: “loneliness            a sharpened axe / wants nothing / no demands / revenge.” Absent or impossible demands are sometimes the only stance that these poems can take. “We will raise the dead” occurs more sardonically as: “Fuck it. Next time they shoot us, we’ll refuse to die. Its raining again. Give me a cigarette.”

In Berlin, Bonney also began a prose sequence, initially entitled “Letters on Turmoil,” and subsequently “Our Death,” the two sequences forming the basis for his final book, Our Death (2019). As Will Rowe writes: “the poems range from expressions of intense grief, to cries of pain […] but also include the body shaken by love […] alongside hatred for the people responsible for what capital is doing to the world.” The earlier Letters were addressed to the kind of bourgeois liberal, academic poet whose real commitments are tested in times of political crisis as their friends go under; here, the implicit ‘you’ is someone who, however distant, is a companion, friend, comrade. “Letter against the Language” ends: “Hope you don’t mind that I haven’t been in touch for so long. We are not completely defenceless. We have not yet been consumed in fire.”

The poet builds a chorus of living and dead—Artaud, Bachmann, Ball, Baudelaire, Berber, Di Prima, Genet, Gogou, Hölderlin, Pasolini, Vestrini—to carry with them through hell, while simultaneously providing a handbook for others to travel through its burning landscape. The way through that landscape is disrupted by earthquake and invisibility and silence and blindness, Tiresias stumbling over the body of a man lying dead in the street, in the impossibility of “just one soothing word,” apparently lost forever in a hellish void. Yet what I’ve increasingly came to realise, particularly in the painful moments since Sean’s death, is that these poems, which come out of such intense loneliness, offer ways out of that loneliness too. Via Gogou, Bonney imagines his friends as “blackbirds / screeching from rooftops / murdered by rising rents.” To live at all is a lottery—“we survive / at random. pissed out of our heads”—beaten to death in prison or dying through overdose and murder. The speaker insists “I love my friends / they are wires stretched from city to city […] interpreters commies thieves.” The friends become both blackbirds and wires, their fierce love promising to tighten round the oppressor’s throat: “lines and bombs and wires / tight around your hands. your necks / you fascist shits / my friends are wires are blackbirds.”

In 2014, Bonney told Paal Andersen:

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 […] is where the poetry actually is.

In the work written after Our Death, Bonney turned to what he called the most important task for poets writing today, that of producing a viable anti-fascist art, of which these late pieces—“Anti-Matter” “Heroes,” and two “Confessions”—provide some indication. These poems are unafraid to be direct, didactic, matter-of-fact, to state things simply and unadorned. Simply-stated problems can be the hardest to solve, and poems are not the place that they can be solved, but poems can be good places for framing language so that those questions sing out with both greater clarity and greater complexity than afforded in other circumstances.

As Sean’s friend Jacob Bard-Rosenberg writes:

Sean’s poetry was not really so complicated. He stated unambiguous truths that we all knew and understood. Just like Brecht’s dictum in praise of communism: “It’s reasonable, and everyone understands it, it’s easy […] it is the simplicity, that’s hard to achieve.”

Sean was fond of the anecdote which closes Brecht’s “Anxieties of the Regime”—a legend, apparently of Brecht’s own invention—in which a single true word spoken inside the palace causes the whole palace to collapse to dust. Such clarity of naming takes on a specific valency in the debates around Fascism and language emergent in recent years, as a number of figures associated with left communities have endorsed or defended Fascist hate speech under the guise of ‘free speech.’ When ‘free speech’ becomes the watchword, the latest weapon in the hands of the alt-right, Fascist hate speech comes more and more into the open under the guise of irony, or under no guise at all. Likewise, condemnations of fascism are hypocritically criticised as ‘snowflake’ over-sensitivity or as authoritarian policing. ‘Anti-Matter’ reminds us that if “we are no longer allowed to use that word fascist,” we write out of our history the murdered, suicided, unmourned corpses of Sophie Scholl and Walter Benjamin: a cruel reversal of all human values in which words like ‘kindness,’ ‘cleanliness,’ ‘nobility,’ and ‘spirit’ sit alongside “hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure.” When faced with fascism, fighting back, rather than doing nothing, is the true act of love.

vengeance is a pretty word
fight them back

“Vengeance is a pretty word” because it’s not adequate to the politics it would name. But these lines are also a vital lesson about love for one’s comrades, and hatred for one’s enemies. Our Death may chart collective, mortal defeat—“But oh my friends we have lost our lives”—yet “our word for death is not their word for death.” Shortly before his own passing in 2016, Tom Raworth left a comment on Bonney’s blog. “Sean: your ‘Letters in Turmoil’ are among the very few things I can currently read without regret that I am literate.” In a poem left out of Our Death, but providing the title to a freely-distributed selected poems, Sean offers one of those pieces of advice, one of those texts that makes us grateful we can read it, to carry us through without sentimentality, without illusions, but with whatever can pass in such a climate as hope. This is work to take to and beyond the grave, in and out of hell again.

Rest in power.