‘No Simple Explanations’

Abstract

This editorial essay introduces the Sean Bonney special issue of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry. We begin by setting Bonney’s writing on plague and temporality in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which in some ways it seemed to anticipate, arguing that ‘in 2020, reality, its landscapes, both internal and external, seemed to become a Sean Bonney poem’. We then outline the content of the special issue in more detail, offering summaries of the essays that follow, as well as the critical writing by Bonney and the bibliography of his work reprinted as part of the issue. A concluding section entitled ‘No Simple Explanations’ suggests the range of Bonney’s artistic and political interests and concerns, arguing that ‘[Bonney’s] work consistently challenged the borders and boundaries of what poetry might mean, whether in his late prose poems, or in his critical work’, and offering a comparative reading of Jayne Cortez’s poem ‘No Simple Explanations’, which, we argue, offers a mode of poetics that ‘draws out a genuinely social realism’. We end by suggesting that Bonney and Cortez ‘help us to think of a poetry that moves through grief, despair, and sorrow into new forms, new ways to think through the temporal urgency of this and any moment’.