On 13 November 2019 we lost Sean Bonney, whose writing and scholarship and friendship mattered so much to so many of us. The furious invective and the revelatory, shattering power in his poetry was, and still is, like nothing else; and those few notorious moments which went almost viral barely scratched the surface of its dark magic, the depths of its secret languages.
Will Rowe wrote this obituary, which was flatly refused by every single one of the English national newspapers. It was Tuesday afternoon when Verity Spott asked me if she could ring, because there was some awful news.
HORSEPLAY, the decade-old but still essential poetry night run by Verity, and by Ben Graham, downstairs at The Black Dove, would be happening on Thursday. It was soon decided that that week’s HORSEPLAY would be entirely dedicated to Sean and his work, and it was for that event that I wrote this. It was an incredible evening. Collective grief convulsed us and was spun to something indescribable. At the end, we got a copy of Sean’s book The Commons, and passed it around the tiny, dark, packed room, so that every single person present took part in a reading from it.
I used to wonder whether perhaps what’s below should have never left that room. After four years, I now think that anxiety was just a scramble of grief and embarrassment. It is what it is, and it’s an absolute state, and that’s the point; and it is a privilege that it was published a year later by Earthbound Press, with cover art by Mel Bonney.
Ian Heames made a gentle but firm case in favour of retaining the asterisks I had used, in Notepad for emphasis, even though we were adding italics elsewhere. He was right: it does go on about stars, so it’s right that it should be flecked with them. Somehow, for this, I’d turned a number upside-down in my head: Frances Kruk told me Sean’s flat was actually on the 6th floor, not the 9th. So that’s corrected here.
Sean’s funeral was on Friday 13th, the morning of that Tory landslide: the most insane day possible. I still miss him loads, we all do. Solidarity, always. My love to Frances, and to everyone.
Tx
Letter for Sean
Chapter 10 begins: ‘There is a type of social organisation characterized by a form of aggression that we have not yet encountered: the collective aggression of one community against another. I will try to show how the misfunctioning of this social form of intra-specific aggression constitutes ‘evil’ in the real sense of the word.’
Those two sentences are from a book I’m reading. Those two sentences are actually about rats; the chapter title is ‘Rats’. Twinkle, twinkle. The only thing it is possible or okay to do right now is begin the task of gathering.
The five-hundred-thousandth rhyme for the word ‘star’ is a pattern of optimism shattering out of a layer of shifting clouds; it is all those bright edges. I think perhaps it is there in actual neon, I guess somehow we will find out. Behaviour among the smaller numbers is so irregular and the patterns though vivid so illusory that those brown and yellow leaves we noticed are in a different pile when somehow we loop past them again in freezing November drizzle, and a different pile again.
Recently in the dictionary I discovered that a braid formed of the idea of starlight and the idea of desire is still flickering at the glowing core of the word ‘consider’—as if *thinking* is the desire to assemble stars, as if an idea is a constellation alighting suddenly in the absurd circumstance of a single human soul, is the sunlight shimmering off a shivering spider-web, is a poem, I mean, all of that—and for some reason I felt cold, like stony stairwells, like going *outside* for a cigarette. The speed of light is a nursery rhyme.
That’s where this started. I had to try somehow to tell you about a conversation Sean and I once had about nursery rhymes: their perfection, their impossibility, their electrical storms of inscrutable human feeling, the immense history tumbling through a wooden frame which is things happening one after another in the rhythm of the playground—and when something rhymes it breaks through feeble concrete like a mushroom. It’s nice I suppose that people associate spring with new growth, but it doesn’t cover nearly enough. Before that conversation we had been crying so much together. After that conversation it was about 5am and for reasons best left to the ghosts we found a small pair of scissors and I gave Sean Bonney a haircut.
Ghosts, I knew they’d happen. I wanted to bring something for you, made of shoes and socks absolutely soaked by the damp ghosts of the climbing pavement. It can be whatever kind of autumn it wants to be, pinecones, the weather, the canal, but it is edged by great queues of excitable ghosts, and it is extremely dangerous, and I am telling you now that it has every fucking right to be. Ghosts.
Let’s say for the sake of getting through the day that all that is a nursery rhyme. Point in your hat and coat in the direction of: the lichen on the bark of slate- grey trees is a nursery rhyme. That the trees are the same colour as the city they are ornate skeletons of, that is a nursery rhyme, and the silverfish mice who scuttle across the tracks of the U-bahn teach it to their children, who are eloquent and hungry, and move like beads of rain on a bus window because they are eloquent and hungry. The seasons are a nursery rhyme, making a list is a nursery rhyme, traffic is a nursery rhyme, foxes are a nursery rhyme, I love you is a nursery rhyme, fuck the police is a nursery rhyme, this hurts is a nursery rhyme, and on top of all that: a pulse, any pulse, is a drumbeat, is an emergency, is a night and a day, and in the playground of collective speech a rhyme is an equinox is a social moment, is intensive care, is two identical vowels that lasso together all the plagues and monsters and gardens and sanctuaries of this immense chaotic nursery rhyme. And, it’s a ghost. I don’t know why we even have to remind people of that.
Half a pound of treacle sounds like a lot of treacle. There was a truly terrifying time when Sean and I stood staring out of his sixth-floor window as dawn happened, over Berlin. We avoided the balcony, because of a brief conversation on the topic of jumping from it, which, in the final analysis, Sean Bonney sagaciously advised me not to do. Don’t do *that*, he said, as if someone had suggested putting diesel in a petrol engine without first making sure that the car belonged to the police. There had just been an election in America. We truly felt as if this was the end of everything. It was all ruined. A hot air balloon floated over Berlin every morning by the newspaper DIE WELT refused to rotate so that we just stood there as it screamed at us the word ‘DIE’, in letters as big as the flat, which had at that moment no food in it.
I’ve been doing this for what, an hour and twenty minutes, and I’ve only just realised that it won’t be the only one I do. It was stupid of me not to have known that from the start. It’s a MESS. What the fuck is going on, and I am sorry but why should any of us actually have to cope with this at all. Imagine the answer to that question. Imagine wearing it, like webbing, or chain mail, or anger. I forgot that earlier I thought it crucial to appeal to the image of a great concrete shell extending across all that is knowable, blocking out the sun. Good. I was wrong.
‘In their behaviour towards members of their own community the animals here to be described are models of social virtue; but they change into horrible brutes as soon as they encounter members of any other society of their own species.’ That’s from the same page of that book. For Tories, really actually do say rats. But never the other way around. I noticed while writing this letter that rats is star written backwards, but rats and stars can’t help that. Fascists are the reverse of living and it’s their own fucking fault.
Sometimes by the end of them the ghosts in his poems were whirling round so much it was like a wizard just calling forth the sea to do an entire castle of washing-up—and drowning the king, incidentally. But my favourite line by Sean for a while now has been: ‘I love you all so fucking much.’ There it is. That night, he said to me that next, what he wanted to write was nursery rhymes. And actually he made one up right away, only one. A joke that absolutely wasn’t a joke. It was two lines about Frances.
In this timeline is there anything to say. It feels so facile, but, here goes—cutting a Tory’s throat because it will bring out the best in you *is* ‘pop goes the weasel’, ‘for I love you say fuck the police’ *is* ‘up above the world so high’: the playground injunction of the annihilation of these murderers is precisely the truth of injustice interacting with the overriding truth of a better universe, it is the truth of the cow jumping over the moon, it makes the exact same sense, and somewhere in language, there are schoolkids maintaining that truth. I hope we remain those schoolkids. We do not forget those rhymes.
There is a really good bit in Twinkle, twinkle, little star—and if you stay up all night, re-angle the pronouns, make an equinox of it, and let it breathe, so that it reflects the early morning light a little differently, it goes: How we wonder / what we are.
i.m. Sean Bonney (1969–2019)