‘As Simple as Music’: Kinds of Noise in Sean Bonney’s Poetry

Abstract

This article considers Sean Bonney’s texts Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (2011), Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Our Death (2019) and antimatter (2019). I write about each of these texts in terms of Bonney’s representation within them of music and noise. Rather than discussing this from a musicological perspective, or in relation to particular musical works, I address the metaphorical use that Bonney makes of figures of music and noise in general. I argue that in each case, the way in which Bonney conceives of music is indicative of a wider perspective on political and social reality and its capacity to be transformed by collective action. The article begins by elaborating the relationship between music and noise as I understand it to exist in Bonney’s writing. Following this, I elaborate the conditions of economic austerity under which Bonney lived during the writing of Happiness and Letters Against the Firmament. The article then aims to elaborate the relationship between a thinking of music and a thinking of community in Happiness before considering how harmony functions as a metaphor for class-domination in Bonney’s prose poetry. The article ends with a consideration of antimatter as a work whose use of rhyme and song-like structures is indicative of a specific ontology of catastrophe developed in Our Death.