A preliminary reading of Sean Bonney’s ‘What Teargas is For’

Abstract

This essay supplements Sean Bonney’s note-taking and note-playing practice by discussing the role of mysticism in his later work, roughly ranging from 2011 to 2019, in order to offer a preliminary reading of the poem ‘What Teargas is For’. I’m going to begin with a gloss on Bonney’s ‘Notes on Militant Poetics’ in order to explicate his understanding of ‘esoteric poetry’ and ‘poetic mysticism’. Those ‘Notes on Militant Poetics’ suggest that for Walter Benjamin the political crisis of the 1930s would ‘reveal the rational kernel of poetic mysticism’.  What is poetic mysticism, and how would crisis crack it open to reveal its kernel? Those forms of art which currently rally under no particular banner, but which have been variously termed ‘avant-garde’ and ‘innovative’, have often had terms like mysticism and esotericism and degeneration and decadence and nonsense applied to them as slurs. I am interested in how these terms of denigration, with all their baggage, become raw material for Bonney’s thinking. Changing the valence and meaning of words and phrases and sentences is a frequent topic as well as tactic in Bonney’s work, and this is dramatized in the poem ‘What Teargas is For’ through references to the mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing, as well as the work of Lou Reed, Arthur Rimbaud, and William Blake. ‘What Teargas is For’ and ‘Further Notes on Teargas’ invoke mysticism in order to explore the relationship between protests, how protests are policed, and the continued privileging of the rich and powerful in the contemporary era. I want to highlight a wider dynamic in Bonney’s work which goes beyond ‘What Teargas if For’, a dynamic in which words and their definitions are shown to be sites of conflict. In doing so, I also want to illustrate how mysticism and esotericism are extremely important to Bonney’s poetic and critical vocabulary.