Sean Bonney isn’t dead,
He walks the Earth,
Like those who came before.
The act of sublimation to capital for the spectacle has been expounded on at length previously, I will not be here to discuss what this means, but how it was done. How the essay “The Bard of Capitalist Realism” seeks to turn the living Sean Bonney, once again, as with all great revolutionaries, into a puppet, a prop for capital to stand on, and to drive the revolutionary and aesthetic will of Sean Bonney into nothing.
His heart beats with mine,
And in timing of every call,
The sound is still the same⸻ Dare!
To define the actions and art of a man, so clearly relevant to, and defined by, his time and place as a falsehood, as is so clearly done, is the work of what can only be explained in one way, the psychial efforts of a continuation of Operation Mockingbird. They claim that his poetry, his implications of the death of kings, is relevant in light of Brexit, but, on the contrary, the work of Sean Bonney has always been relevant. It has that special quality, the one that Walter Benjamin would call, authentic. Bonney wasn’t irreverent or radical as a bit, his understanding of the world was not prophetic but instead informed and dialectical. He saw the world as struggle, as a constant effort of the working class to not just exist, but to usurp the established order. He was more Marat than Malachi, and he was certainly more Marx than either.
I still hear the words,
Echo out of my mouth,
“Terror. I want to hear it.”
Bonney was not defined by his poetry, poetry is an aspect of the man who Sean Bonney was, he was a radical, a communist, a supporter of the efforts of the New Left Militants, and a student of Amiri Baraka. Of course it makes sense that when he struck out, his blows struck true more often than not, because like Baraka, his poems were not of or for the academy. Perhaps this is the only piece of Ed Simon’s essay that is true, perhaps, in that one moment of brief, shimmering clarity, Ed Simon saw something, and wanted to acknowledge it. The claim, is so boldly made, that there is something distinctly English of all things about Bonney’s atheistic Christianity. As if birthed by the bourgeois dictatorship that defines English culture, the aristocratic holdovers just waiting for the day when the British working class decides that these extraneous holdovers of the 17th century no longer need to exist.
More Marat than Malachi
And we make no excuses
Live without Dead Time
Poetry is in the streets, the graffiti of the May 68 protestors echoes back to an earlier time, 1917, when the Proletkult poets stood at the forefront of revolutionary poets. It may be that Sean Bonney was a throwback, a remnant of an earlier time, of a time when poetry didn’t mean the absolute sanitization of everything artistic. Of a time before the MFA, before the poetry foundation, of a time when poetry was of the factory floor. So, perhaps, Sean Bonney should stand out more clearly in our minds, he wasn’t the last of an old line, he’s a hinge.
Sean Bonney lives
Like the four murdered
Members of the RAF
Sean Bonney was not prophetic because he didn’t try to be, he was a student, a scholar and a man who knew the truth. It’s not hard, when you choose to take his words, away from who he was, to turn Sean Bonney into a puppet for your own whacked out theological processing in your mind. But, where Sean Bonney was religious, it was not the religion of the ruling class, it was the religion of Gorky and Dietzgen. It was the religion of the priests in Chile, killed by Pinochet, and abandoned by the church after their death. It was the religion of the working class, the religion of god on Earth, the mover of history. So, while you choose to say that “Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for Death. I hate the word “kill.” Will continue to use it,” means that in some way Sean Bonney was, as you so boldly call him, a “cracked prophet” the reality is that he was not. This is not an ecclesiology, but a statement of intent. It is the logical system that governs the whole of society. That the spectacle that you reify will not last. That the working class will rise. We will eventually stop being able to be able to say, as the protagonist of Mother (Gorky, Maxim) heard, “That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.”
I looked for the ghost of Sean,
In every place I could,
But he wasn't there.
The prophet-king is dead, and Sean Bonney lives, because it’s easy to be right when history is on your side. It’s not prophetic when every data point lines up, and it’s not capitalist realism when you exist in the tradition of the worker-poets. Hughes was not a prophet of capitalist realism, nor Gerassimov, nor Mayakovsky. It’s easy to be right when you already know that all that history demands of you, as worker-poet is as Baraka said to create art which will, “function like an incendiary pencil planted inCurtis Lemay’s cap. So that when the final curtain goes down brains are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOS’s to Belgians with gold teeth.” He was not a prophet of capitalist realism because to be so means to be beleaguered by capitalism. He was not a prophet because he knew well enough what it meant to strike out in every direction and to smash all of the enemies of the people to dust. Sean Bonney gave us an outline in the modern era, and Sean Bonney never died.
You cant find a ghost,
For someone who never died,
Sean Bonney Lives.
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