Sean Bonney in Conversation About Our Death

While we were away last week we missed this fantastic interview by Jeffrey Grunthaner, in conversation with Sean Bonney. Bonney passed away last month, and his loss has been felt deeply throughout the poetry community. Grunthaner introduces the interview, writing: "I only got to talk with Sean Bonney once before he passed. This fall, we met up at a little bar in Neukölln, Berlin. After interviewing him about his great new book, Our Death (Commune Editions), we ended up drinking and talking for hours." Their conversation begins with a discussion of the lead-up to the writing of Our Death. From the top:

Jeffrey Grunthaner We’ve already established that you’ve been in Berlin for about four years. Did you write Our Death primarily here?

Sean Bonney Primarily. The section “Our Death” started off as a continuation of the book that I’d written before, Letters Against the Firmament, which was a collection of open letters to the poetry community about the political situation in Britain at the time. They were definitely in the same kind of voice, which is not quite me—it kind of was me, but, you know, an embellished literary guise. Very quickly it became clear that the pieces I was writing were no longer letters. They were much more classically prose poems. I had done some very rough versions the summer before I moved, but it’s mainly purely Berlin.

JG And what attracts you to the epistolary poem?

SB It’s something I just fell into. I discovered eventually that it wasn’t without precedent. You’ve got it in, say, Hölderlin’s Hyperion and so on. But it seemed new to me. You remember the riots in 2011? I was out in those. I can remember going home and thinking to myself: It seems a bit hokey to go home and write a poem after being involved in something like this. So I wrote a letter which was, in my mind, written to one or two poets I know about how I couldn’t write a poem.

That’s really peculiar because now say, ten years after the fact, they’re in my Selected Poems. They are definitely prose poems. So it’s strange how a literary form will change. But it kind of grew. It became a really interesting way in which to write, in that I could just jump about. And I could also use my subjectivity. In avant-garde poetry it’s still very much a no-no to naively use your subjectivity. But suddenly I could throw in lines that were just trivial details about my autobiography, next to speculations about Pythagorean harmony. It worked for me really well for about five, six years. That was the main way I wrote. I still don’t know too many other poets who use that form. 

This is one to read in full, so head to BOMB now!