Notes Towards a Commentary on Sean Bonney’s Letters Against the Firmament

Bonney takes the romantic and surrealist traditions (Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Césaire) to a point where they meet their impossibility, not by subjective diminishment but through encounter with the political as it currently exists. The inner life of the poetic subject is unprotected; this multiplies difficulties. The singular energy of Bonney's Letters finds itself at this conjuncture. Speed and compression of the work grapples with those same qualities as they exist inside political oppression. Poetry, for Bonney 'a specific method of thought', carries out the work of creating form as definition by means of thought thinking, dialectically, against itself. This article seeks, overall, to consider the means by which the Letters sustain their energy within current political conditions.