‘As Simple as Music’: Kinds of Noise in Sean Bonney’s Poetry

‘As Simple as Music’: Kinds of Noise in Sean Bonney’s Poetry

Blog Article

This article considers Sean Bonney’s texts Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (2011), Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Our Death (2019) and antimatter (2019).I write about each of these texts in terms of Bonney’s representation within them of music and noise.Rather than discussing this from a musicological perspective, or in relation to particular musical works, I address the Face Covers metaphorical use that Bonney makes of figures of music and noise in general.I argue that in each case, the way in which Bonney conceives of music is indicative of a wider perspective on political and social reality and its capacity to be transformed by collective action.

The article begins by elaborating the relationship between music and noise as I understand it to exist in Bonney’s writing.Following this, I elaborate the conditions of economic austerity under which Bonney lived during the writing of Happiness and Letters Against the Firmament.The article then aims to elaborate the relationship between a thinking of music and a thinking of community in Happiness before considering how harmony functions as a metaphor for class-domination in Bonney’s prose poetry.The article ends with a consideration of antimatter as a work whose use of rhyme and Queen Comforter Set song-like structures is indicative of a specific ontology of catastrophe developed in Our Death.