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Nowell Smith, David 
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9840-2507
(2013)
'An interrupter, a collective': Sean Bonney's Lyric Outrage.
Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, 45.
Abstract
This article analyses the way that politically engaged lyric negotiates two opposing impulses—the expression of individual outrage, and a desire for collective praxis—through a reading of the contemporary British poet Sean Bonney’s ‘translations’ of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. First I situate Bonney within a tradition of radical avant-garde poetics for which poetry’s refusal of the instrumentalisation of language is crucial to its political content; what is often dismissed as ‘elitism’ is in fact the its emancipatory democratic moment. I then chart shifts in Bonney’s poetics alongside shifts in British politics over the last decade: the collective attains increasing importance in the wake of the financial crisis and the Conservative-led government, and in place of Baudelaire the observer of high capitalism Bonney turns to Rimbaud the poetic communard. Finally I claim that Bonney’s articulation of political collectivity takes place in language, as a synaesthetic dérèglement de tous les sens.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Faculty \ School: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing |
| UEA Research Groups: | Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Modern and Contemporary Writing Research Group |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Pure Connector |
| Date Deposited: | 27 Jan 2014 16:04 |
| Last Modified: | 24 Sep 2024 10:54 |
| URI: | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/47272 |
| DOI: | 10.4000/ebc.746 |
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