Speaking with the voices of the dead: Sean Bonney, Arthur Rimbaud, Amiri Baraka and revolutionary poetics

Abstract

The essay considers Sean Bonney's work in the period 2008-2014. It focuses on his PhD thesis on Amiri Baraka (completed in 2013) and the publications Baudelaire in English (2008) and Letters Against the Firmament (2015). The thesis explored tensions between aesthetic and political commitment in Baraka's work during the 1960s, a period of particular importance in Baraka's development, as it marked his shift from 'beatnik' bohemianism to black nationalism. The essay uses the thesis to examine Bonney's own exploration of the possibilities of a revolutionary poetics in this period. in the context of the political events of the time. It traces his attempts to dissolve bourgeois subjectivity and the transformation of the individual subject into a collective subjectivity through his engagement with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and his arrival at a militant poetics which aims to express 'complex, multiple ideas ... with a singular directness'.