Sean Bonney

by David Grundy

Sean was one of those people to whom almost anyone you could name had a personal and close and shared and unique relationship, a totally rare gift for acting as if hierarchies didn’t exist, an absolute generosity. Sitting up all night in the flat that he and Frances Kruk shared just down the road from the William Morris museum, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, Dylan, Coltrane and Ayler, Nina Simone and Exuma blaring out the stereo (almost as if they were all blaring out at once), books spread all over the kitchen tabletop; reading poems, talking, talking, talking, totally and passionately and sceptically believing in poetry and its absolute vital importance and how it can and does change lives; at readings, stumbling the streets, clocking the fakers; on marches, at Millbank, in Parliament Square, chanting out the government; Sean’s blog, Abandoned Buildings, poems appearing like fresh marvels every other day; Sean, one of those presences that should always be there and it always seems like they will.
For years, I don’t think a day has gone by when a line or more of Sean’s poetry doesn’t come into my head and match whatever’s going on in the fucked-up, “so-called world” we’re all living in; to match it, not as despair, acceptance or passivity, but like a slice of truth, a brick through a window, a fist in the air, a diagnostic razor blade. How bleak those poems in Ghosts and Our Death; how bleak our times; but Sean was a dialectical thinker and he was always aware of those pitfalls of total negativity and he faced them head on, looking it in his eyes and calling it what it was. “Let’s not chat about despair.”
Poets are stronger than the world, they tell us how to go out in it and to survive. Poets are weaker than the world, they’re better than it and they don’t always survive it. But their poems still survive the world, survive in the world, help us left behind to survive it. That quote from African-American anarchist organizer Lucy Parsons that appears in Our Death: “We are not completely defenceless. We have not yet been consumed in fire.”
Sean’s work: the barometer, the seismograph, that which anticipated and predicted and commented on, better than any live-stream, the political realities we were facing in the UK and, internationalist to the core, elsewhere, always manifesting an immense solidarity across not only space but time: the ensemble of the dead, the discarded, the ruined, the apparently obliterated. You would read the new poems, you would go to a reading, would hear lines that cut through like breaths of fresh air or sudden intakes of breath; Sean, it sometimes seemed, wrote our slogans, but he also knew that poetry takes us to another dimension than that of the slogan of the moment; he knew about the dialectical relation between history and memory and individual and collective and loss and survival and life and death.
In his poem ‘From Deep Darkness’, a poem that emerged from the bleak summer of 2016, that summer of Brexit and on the Trump precipice, Sean writes, “The ghost dimension I leave to my dearest friends”; thinking of his penultimate book, Ghosts, and of the times when he would point out a ghost he’d seen but no one else had, but you could believe it was there, and the ghost ensemble of friends and comrades known and unknown, named and unnamed, that saturated the collective I of his work, thinking of how Sean helped to build an entry-point into that rich and wonderful dimension that is one of the places that poetry lives, one of the homes that it builds in conditions of homelessness and abysmal unmooring, thinking of all that, and knowing that now that Sean is a ghost we can still visit him, still be visited by him, in Blake’s “Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”, we also know that Sean was right when he wrote, “Our word for Death is not their word for Death.”
Sean Bonney lives.

Originally posted at Streams of Expression, November 2019