The Poetics of Despair: Listening to Sean Bonney in Charlottesville, Virginia

Abstract

This short piece recounts the experience of listening to recordings of Sean Bonney’s work in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the years preceding and following the white supremacist rally held there in 2017. It argues that Bonney’s poetry provides a poetics of despair that resists complacency and paradoxically offers comfort.