“A poetry that only the enemy could understand”:
Silence, Speech, and Ambivalence in Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament

by Scout Katherine Turkel

It would be simpler if the enemy to common survival and collective liberation was someone who knew nothing about us. If the problem at the root of subjugation were, as liberalism makes it out to be, a lack of understanding, one reasonably addressed through the production of "better" and more comprehensive kinds of representation. A more detailed story, a longer survey. Under these contemporary logics, representation is assumed to be both always beneficial, and also, always possible. Sean Bonney's Letters Against the Firmament (Enitharmon Editions, 2015) intervenes on, among other things, this responsive gesture in political history: what does it mean, for the poet, to attempt to produce understanding? What happens to the representations we put forward, poetically or otherwise? What does such art "do" in the world, and how can we approach, with the appropriate nuance, its complicated position in revolutionary life?

Bonney's epistolary poetry makes primary the constant exchange — the interplay between people and forces — underpinning all attempts at achieving social understanding. Representing ourselves (or our imaginations, our politics, our fears, the lyric "I") through poetic speech is not a unilateral declaration, concretizing and clarifying who we are and what we want without question. Instead, the information we offer-up to the world in writing is actively received. In other words, we are read. In Letters Against the Firmament, who or what does this "reading" matters, constituting a various and non-neutral group of actors. Yes, our friends read our books and talk with us, listening to our attempts at political speech. But our enemies listen, too. "Obviously they read books in hell," writes Bonney (52). 

In Letters Against the Firmament, the kind of understanding made possible by representations of one's self and interests in writing is not a tool of inherent social good, but instead becomes, against our wishes, a possible vehicle for continued violence. "Understanding" might here exemplify a site of political indexation rather than freedom. Enemies remain close by, having "pressed their mouths on us" (Bonney 12). It is through this constant, incessant proximity — not distance nor confusion — that power maintains its grip. 

This is a complicated place to land. As a person who lived not only as a poet, but as a staunch participant in the fight against "those dogs of hell, those vampires of capital," Bonney's legacy is notably tangled-up in the difficulties and necessities of revolutionary speech.¹And yet, this problem is not new. Other thinkers and writers have too intervened on this particular mode of cultural dissonance, one that has largely formed history as we know it. Foucault seems to offer the clearest explanation of this phenomenon via his "Repressive Hypothesis": while we've been taught that cultural repression always results in censorship and therefore, silence, it is actually the case that repression instigates an explosion of discourse. Here, Foucault points in particular to the intensification of repression around sexual activity in Europe, a centuries-spanning cultural shift that, in his analysis, gave rise not to silence, but to "an institutional incitement to speak about [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail" (Foucault 18). These offered "detail[s]" — our often righteous-seeming response to domination — have led to the increased criminalization and surveillance of sexual behavior (18). Rarely has repression successfully stifled speech, instead soliciting speech of another kind. Knowledge is power. And power has never been our friend. 

Of this fact, Bonney's poetics appears painfully aware. While beyond Foucault's immediate framework, the poet-anarchist, a producer and wielder of language, finds themselves in a particularly tight bind regarding the issue of public speech. “But who is speaking here, / such archaic pleasantry / & insolent noise making / is mere freakish difficulty: / history is those who sit / inside their prepared vocab, / the comfortable ones…” (Bonney 63). "History" and its subsequent oppressions are not determined nor produced by the successful suppression of information, but instead are controlled by "prepared vocab," the loud "noises that waken us" with constant, productive articulation (63, 80). "Police violence," writes Bonney, "is the content of all officially sanctioned art. How could it be otherwise, buried as it is so deeply within the gate systems of our culture" (12). Under such conditions, even articulations of cultural violence risk reinstating said violence, further accumulating detail for "agencies of power" (Foucault 18). Such efforts, for Bonney, constitute "conformist yelps" — a kind of art that gets us nowhere, reifying the oppressive reality of the way things are (Bonney 12).   

And so, representation cannot save us. Representation is what landed us here in the first place. If dominant systems of power propel themselves through indexation — taking-in, writing-up, pathologizing, cataloging — how can poetry produce insurgent knowledge without naturalizing the violent process of knowledge production as we know it? How might we participate in a discourse while scorning (upending, transforming) its available terms? 

For Bonney, writing poetry is not, on its own, an inherently deviant or radical exercise. Of course it isn't. Instead, poetry must resist the will to merely “cough up” the oppressor's alphabet (Bonney 68). “This is my silence,” writes Bonney, opening-up the possibility of a poetics of negative refusal, as opposed to one of productive representation (69). Bonney's negation seems to pressure poetry to adhere to that rare, technical definition of revolution: to become an act that genuinely pulls-back, resisting history’s noisy cooptation by pervasive enemy powers. “This is me revolving” (69).²A revolutionary poetics might borrow from the logics of silence. Not by failing to speak at all, but by gesturing toward a yet-uncovered mode of communication, one that knows where the enemy's "mouth" is, and refuses its terms (12). 

Of course, an important irony of Bonney's work, and of the political reality he describes, is located in the typical truth regarding how both poetry and riots get made: through sound. Bonney's "silence" is the silence of protest, of folk song, and of many kinds of rage (69). This quiet is unmistakably loud. In "Set Three," Bonney writes: "I'm one of its noises / or rather, its noose. / nah, just kidding..." (80). In this way, Letters Against the Firmament is a work of true, political ambivalence. A painful and strenuous tug in two impossible directions. A noise and a noose. The poet must attempt to speak, and also, must resist damaging modes of speaking. And all of them are. Damaged. Under the totalizing principle of capitalism, all language has been unmistakably infiltrated.

It would be easy to dismiss Bonney's ambivalence as nihilism. Easy, and likely, a mistake. Letters Against the Firmament is a riotous work, engaging in the same critical struggle Bonney himself critiques. The argument at the core of his poetics is not that speech cannot be radical, nor that speech is not an essential component of revolutionary action. And yet, Bonney refuses any panacea, forcing us to grapple with the constant surveillance of even — yes, even — the lyric. This is neither sedentary nor pessimistic verse, inscribing some doomsday version of historical reality. But it isn't utopic verse, either. The way out is worth finding. In fact, trying to find it might be, for Bonney, the poet's ultimate obligation. But the means of transformation will not come from any familiar, already-legible way of doing things.

Bonney writes, "I'm still here. I wrote you this letter, but I probably won't send it. If I do, do not answer it" (104). Here, the epistolary nature of the poem-form is willfully troubled. "Do not answer"— it's a request that reifies a real politics of action (Bonney 104). One that tell us, the readerly recipient of Bonney's now posthumous note: please, do not write back. This is a difficult request to receive. And it's one that risks figuration as a condemnation of poetic correspondence. Rather, I want to read Bonney as reminding us of something much more generous, though perhaps just as difficult to swallow. There is no quick escape from language's surveilling trap. This is long and difficult work, a creative process that cannot be achieved by simply proliferating the poetry we (and our enemies) already understand. In Bonney's pamphlet Filth Screed (2003-4), collected in Blade Pitch Control Unit (Salt Publishing, 2005), he writes, "No-one has yet spoken a language which is not the language of those who establish, enforce, and benefit from the facts. Language is conservative" (87). As we all might be wise to learn from, Bonney's broad "we" doesn't only or mostly attempt to capture the everyone else out there, but instead seems to serve the purpose of including, with important humility, his own speech. No one is safe from the ironic and painful failures of discourse. Even in our most vital, brave, and incendiary forms, we tend to give away our secrets.  

And so. Where to go from here: Letters Against the Firmament, like Bonney's poetic contributions more broadly, refuses to offer any answer that effectively reconciles us. To do so would be counterintuitive to the work. Bonney's is an anxious, ambivalent poetics, a curious and dedicated mode of facing the suffering inherent in political struggle. "But then again, you are right to worry that I'm making a fetish of the riot form... Seriously, if we're not setting fire to cars we're nowhere" (Bonney 8). Our commitment to this "form" is required, while also hazarding a fetishization of the form itself (8). And, of its adjacent horrors. We cannot find reconciliation in poetry because poetry has yet to be reconciled.

I appreciate Bonney's unsatisfying answer. We cannot save poetry. And that doesn't mean we won't use it. "A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means... we're in need of a new prosody" (Bonney 8). I include this line not because it's hopeful, but because it's affectionate. Bonney's verse doesn't demand that "we need" a new prosody, but instead declares: "we're in need" of it (8).³ The line fails to plea for productivity, serving instead as a status-report on the condition of the poetry we do have. A poetry that is sorely in need. In need of new rhythms, forms of scansion, ways of describing the world without merely affirming it through representation. An essential, imaginative, and painful state of needing. In "Letter on Silence," Bonney writes: "There is no prosody, there is only a scraped wound — we live inside it like fossilized, vivisected mice. Turned inside out, tormented beyond recognition. So difficult to think about poems right now" (13). I agree. It is so difficult to think about poems right now. Which is maybe why we do it in the first place. I'm interested in a poetry that is not external to the complicated and "tormented" history Bonney describes, but that is inextricably mixed-up in it (13). Writing into this ambivalent nexus, making, as Bonney does, the paradoxes of language and liberation a central feature of poetic work. Perhaps there is no pure prosody. And in this negative, retractive silence, "poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd" (12). A noisy/quiet voice. No single phrase discernable. No need to represent the wound, which is already apparent, constituting the tricky ways we hurt in isolation, from within our shared condition. Like the lyric does.

Notes

¹ As described by Bonney in Letters Against the Firmament's acknowledgements' section. 

² My emphasis.

³ My emphasis.

Works Cited

Bonney, Sean. Blade Pitch Control Unit. Salt Publishing, 2005. 

Bonney, Sean. Letters against the Firmament. Enitharmon Press, 2015. 

Foucault, Michel. ​The History of Sexuality​. Translated by Robert J. Hurley, vol. 1, Vintage Books, 1990.

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