Stephen Collis: Maybe I can begin with some generalities, and you can comment. We have both produced poetry that is an exploration of past and present social struggles, and we have both published books with the title The Commons — books which, one assumes, have some sort of relationship to the historical fact of commoning as an alternative form of social relations. Indeed, I’d hazard that our Commons have less to do with land, land use, and material reproduction than they do with the evocation of the voices, attitudes, and rebellious spirits of commoners throughout time. Poetry as seance. Poetry as ventriloquism, as a raising of the dead (“yesterday I was still dead,” you write in the opening poem of The Commons). But this would be a very particular dead being raised — those who have had no voice, at last coming to voice. “Here we are,” the Zapatistas proclaimed, twenty years ago this January, “here we are, the dead of all times, dying once again, but this time in order to live.”
In part, I guess what I have in mind here is that the commoning we engage in through poetry — a commoning of words and voices — is a commoning of kinds of social relations, and thus of a kind of subjectivity in history. Silvia Federici writes that “if commoning has any meaning, it must be the production of ourselves as a common subject.”1 How does this resonate with your sense of your poetics?
Sean Bonney: I’ve always been interested in subjectivity, at first because certainly in the London avant-poetry scene, when I first showed up, lyric expression was a real no-no — the whole scene seemed to have very rigid rules. And anyway, dogmas against the lyric subject in poetry — from Olson on — always assume that we’re talking about a middle-class, usually male, usually white subject, as if the only people who could be interested in the “avant-garde” would be white posh men. It is easy to deny subjectivity when yours is the dominant. There’s no need to assert it because it permeates the entire atmosphere of social reality.
In my earlier work this was simply a gripe with an avant-poetry world that I was beginning to think, still do in fact, was extraordinarily conservative. It became politicized during the brief period of insurgent struggle that took place in the UK between 2010 and 2011. I started thinking about the lyric subject as a collective. I was on the student demo that ended with us storming the Tory Party HQ, and in that moment I felt a solidarity so intense that I no longer felt like an individual at all — or rather, that my individuality was part of a collective whole. I was working on my Rimbaud book at the time, and so the experience of solidarity in struggle fed into my thinking about “Je est un autre.”
It had been going on in my work before then, I just hadn’t given it much thought, or at least hadn’t made a connection with the social realities, or politics. The Commons is a huge collage of voices, a collectivity spanning time, but one rooted in folk traditions. The opening line comes from “The Coo-coo Song,” as recorded by Clarence Ashley. A cuckoo song, as I’m sure you know, is a folk form where the lyrics are pulled from any number of songs from the tradition collaged together with new lyrics and so on, to create an improvisation on and extension of various traditions, with the result being that while the singer is dealing with her own subjectivity, it is also one that is shared, across time. As the work went on I felt I was dealing with a pack of ghosts, or rather, the spectre of communism as a collectivity that was alive, that had always been alive, but had been made invisible.
And so, yes, definitely a seance. Whether it’s the avant-garde writing subjectivity out of poetry, or international capitalism denying realities that exist outside of their version of reality, it’s to be resisted, a very important part of the “struggle.” If we think about solidarity and struggle emerging from where we are, where we work, then our poetry becomes that site of struggle. There are voices to be conducted, to be brought into play. It’s not a case of “let the dead bury the dead,” but “let the dead dig up the dead.” Class struggle in poetry.
SC: I wonder if that denial, or at least that attempt to “reduce” the “interference” of the subject, was actually a reaction to the dominance of an unexamined (and as you say, middle-class) subjectivity, housed in the confessional lyric. Olson certainly couldn’t get rid of its interference — it bloody well takes over at times. However that may be, I agree with you about the necessity of subjective interference. It’s one reason I find myself dissatisfied with conceptualism, which seems to fall into this same trap: the stakes are yet again about eliminating the subject, which leaves in place a particular unexamined subjectivity — the one which, say, decides to copy out the New York Times, and chooses a particular issue, and then spends a good deal of time denying it has any of the qualities of subjectivity (creativity, agency, authority, etc.).
You reveal something very interesting in your comments on solidarity and Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre.” My reaction to the many attacks on “expression” has always been, isn’t there something else, something wider and more social, that gets expressed in what any individual may say or do? We are driven by our attachments to and our engagements with others. We give expression to social desires, social affects, again and again. Rimbaud’s statement isn’t (only) about alienation: it can be about solidarity too. I is another because I is a member of an oppressed yet resisting class, others with whom I identify, others whose welfare is my welfare too.
Like you, events in the streets really drove this home for me. Occupy Vancouver was a crucible of solidarity, and interference — of difficult solidarities worked out through the interference of subjects in collective struggle. It ’tweren’t always pretty. But it seems utterly necessary now. Each time I write, now more than ever, I feel I’m mostly trying to be the medium for a collective movement, to capture and express collective desires (fear of ecological disaster, the desire to overthrow a system now more than ever capable of and hell-bent on destroying life’s reproductive capabilities, the feeling of solidarity with others similarly struggling, etc.). But I, as other and self, still “interfere” along the way!
That spectre of communism — I’m thinking and writing towards that more and more. It in part involves the permission to write “we.” Jodi Dean, in The Communist Horizon, claims she uses the “we” “hoping to enhance a partisan sense of collectivity,” and in response to “the loss of a left that says ‘we’ and ‘our’ and ‘us.’”2 I think my work has been involved in such a reclamation project from the get-go. But, here’s the difficulty again: my subjectivity is primed to be “invisible” in the sense that it goes unquestioned, and already occupies the place of the assumed and visible universal subject (white, male, middle class). So the challenge seems to be to work with a “we” that is contentious, not seamless, filled with interferences.
SB: Sure. I’m not proposing a return to a unproblematized lyric subjectivity, which would be impossible anyway. But perhaps it can be used as a critique of certain dogmas, of certain conformities that have crept in: we’ve all read poetics essays where it’s all, to pick a couple of random names, “as Olson said,” “as Bruce Andrews said,” and it just looks like careerism — I see myself as working more-or-less in that tradition, but the way to deal with the work of your forebears is to critique it, not lick its arse.
Conceptualism, post-humanism and so forth are radical in the same way that contemporary capitalism is radical. And, you know, that’s fine. I’m not going to slag off capitalist artists, I’m not particularly bothered about them. If I’ve got a choice between writing a polemic against Kenny Goldsmith or George Osborne, obviously I’m going to go after Osborne.
It’s interesting what you say about solidarity. Does internet utopianism propose a solidarity? Kinda does: a mass-produced subject whereby everyone is the same as everyone else. Corporate solidarity, yeah. To go after a really easy target; when Marjorie Perloff tries to say that the net has been a “leveller,” it’s really baffling. Can she really not see the difference between someone checking their emails in a mansion in Beverly Hills, and someone paying to use a clapped-out computer in a little shop on the Hackney Road? Never mind the people who have no net access at all. Or maybe she thinks they don’t matter. But, you know, I’m living in a social situation in the UK when people are being deliberately suicided by the government (that isn’t an exaggeration, you can check the statistics fairly easily). In the face of that I can’t be bothered with the fantasies of middle-class aesthetes.
I can’t speak for others, but I didn’t see how my writing could stay the same after 2008: the crisis, the Arab Spring, the “era of riots,” the rise of the non-subject. It extended a lot of questions I’d been asking myself already. What does a critique of subjectivity have to say about the subjectivity of surplus populations, for example? The subjectivity of an economic migrant, or that of a refugee, is already subject to absolute critique — annihilation — by capital. For me — if my poetry ignored that, it would have no claim on modernity at all, because the centre of any accurate definition of the world is not Wall Street; it’s all the shanty towns across the globe. I’m interested in poets, or in trying to make a poetry, that recognizes these processes. I’m interested in a poetry that wants to step outside of the poetry room. I have a lot more fun these days doing readings where the audience isn’t just a bunch of other poets. I like reading at occupations — I was asked to read at the London launch of Endnotes, and I was really happy about that. Because if you’re writing a political poetry, you want it to be heard by other political activists just as much as you want it to be heard by other poets. I feel I need both; I want to be read by other poets because, despite all the moaning I’m doing right now (and I’m sorry about that), I do still care passionately about poetry as an art form, but I also don’t want it to only be that. The complaint you get about political poetry — that there’s no point writing it because it doesn’t change anything — is ludicrous. It’s not a question of whether poetry by itself can change anything, obviously it can’t, but rather what it is that poetry specifically can contribute to already-existing radical projects and theoretical advances. Trouble with a lot of academic avant-gardism is that they’re still droning on as if it was the 1980s.
But, on the other hand, I worry about the idea of the poetry being a medium for those without a voice. If there’s a valid critique of leftist poetry, then that’s where it is. And, when I talk about the collective subject in my work, I’m aware of the pitfalls, and I don’t think I avoid them. Because I can go on about the solidarity we all felt at Millbank, but that doesn’t mean we all turned into the same person. Our own individualities probably became more disparate, more clearly defined, and it’s that — maybe — that’s the real meaning of solidarity.
I’m not even sure what can be meant by “solidarity” in poetry at all — if I knew that, I probably wouldn’t feel the need to write it. But I’m sure it’s nothing to do with speaking up for others. I’d rather have a poetry that via its own lyric subjectivity can pose questions about what the limits of that subjectivity are, and the limits of solidarity. How do we write, how do we think, into what the implications of what a collective subjectivity actually means. Because one of the things that poetry is best-placed to do, in terms of its connections to other kinds of radical discourses, is to engage with the cacophony that collectivity really is, to think through the chaos of voices that make up and are not subsumed within their own collectivity. Because otherwise, there’s the danger of ending up like Neruda, who specifically says he’s speaking for the working class, giving them a voice. Maybe they don’t want that voice.
SC: I agree with so much of what you are saying here — the importance of what’s “outside” of poetry, the problems of homogenizing the collective. Regarding the “avant-garde” in the post-2008 moment, I am stumped by some poets maintaining (the old Adornian idea) that we can “resist by form alone.” Form continues to be important to me — I guess I wouldn’t be a poet otherwise — but now perhaps more than ever I am interested in the dialectic of form and content, their irresolvable co-implication and enduring tension, in the midst of which the poem occurs. At a recent reading someone asked about the tendency towards direct speech in my work, and noted that, by contrast, a poet like Oppen (whom I had mentioned) didn’t exactly make direct political pronouncements, even though we take his work to be highly charged with left politics. To me, one crucial difference is simply history. Oppen returned to poetry, after his hiatus, in the midst of rampant anti-communism and a seemingly triumphant “golden age” of capitalism (1950–70, or thereabouts — Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, in The Making of Global Capitalism, are very good on this).3 Telling it slant, as it were, may have been the understandable tactic — and Oppen tells it so wonderfully slant. For myself (at least, this is how I responded to that question), the historical contingency of this moment leaves me little choice but to directly address the mire.
That said, I think I was already leaning in this direction while writing The Commons (2005–08). And the real impetus towards a “common address” came from the Zapatistas and their communiqués. Here was a call, from the very margins of globalization, for a renewed commons and a common condition and subjectivity. And it was a demand for direct address — “here is our simple word,” they said, slicing through decades of poststructuralist unease. So it really interested me that this call for direct discussion (encuentro) and a common ground of resistance came from an Indigenous community in the global south. Interestingly, it seems, privileged people assume the invisibility and obviousness of their subjectivity, but they largely talk a language of liberal individuality. Real calls to transcend mere individuality, to invoke a common subjectivity, shared conditions and interests, come and continue to come from an “outside” that reveals itself to be in fact a broader and more permeable “inside.”
So yes, how not to “speak for,” but nonetheless acknowledge, listen to, and “speak with,” that’s part of the challenge that has drawn me. Poetry reveals there’s no such thing as the “voiceless” — such a formation is projected from a position of privilege. The Zapatistas taking to the net to make their proclamations demonstrated how much of a voice existed — a multitude of voices, actually, the ensemble of which spoke counter to neoliberalism’s individualist pleasure-consumption modality.
What’s our common (at least, and I think importantly, 99% common) condition now? Social and ecological erosion? The downward spiral? Crisis that simply reveals deeper and deeper layers of crisis? And though that crisis is common, it nevertheless impacts us quite diversely. The crisis of a middle-class family struggling to stay on top of escalating debt, pinching their “opportunities” (no vacation this year, kids!) is of course startlingly different than the crisis of someone who is evicted for not paying their rent, and is now unsure how they are going to eat this week. Which is, of course, a different crisis to that experienced by a T-shirt slave in Bangladesh. Add race and gender and sexual orientation and the crisis shifts further again and again, fracturing and layering. To what extent can we generalize from these differences?
The Paris Commune is another touchstone you and I share. And we’ve both written poems in response to, let’s say, the example of Rimbaud, the way he careens through the locus of the Commune, trailing sparks of madness and outrage. Rimbaud of course doesn’t exactly represent direct speech or the “simple word.” I love your lines “the point is a total reworking of all definitions / that means history, senses, cellular matter.”4 That sounds like an apt description of Rimbaud’s, and your own, work. Maybe what we (so-called “engaged,” so-called “committed” poets) share now is a certain awareness of a “deranged” situation, the permanent and expanding crisis of the present, and the necessity, at some level, of a response that is itself also — because it is an identification of current conditions, a riot dog barking at an endless wall of cops — a kind of Rimbaudean “derangement.” From the historical moment, through the senses, on down to our cellular matter.
SB: Yeah, what is our “common condition”? And where do we — privileged male poets tapping away on our computers — fit into it? I’d probably feel more at home having a beer with an apolitical middle-class office worker than I would sitting in a shanty town somewhere. That’s obvious, but also kind of an uncomfortable fact. In dark moments I wonder how much of this is vanity. Especially lately, I wonder sometimes why I even write. Maybe the people who say that political poets might be better off doing something other than writing poetry are right after all. Maybe we’d be better off writing leaflets, coming up with good slogans. I mean, obviously I don’t really think that, but at the same time it’s a real issue, and if we’re serious about leftist poetry, it’s something we should face.
I like the section in Benjamin’s One-Way Street, right at the beginning, the section called “Filling Station,” where he writes that people need to give up on the “pretentious gesture of the book”5 and write on placards, posters, etc. I find that very attractive, but also, I still write books. And so did Benjamin. But if I could write poems good enough to be painted on a placard, or sprayed on a wall, that would be great — that would be a far more meaningful publication. One of the best moments in my writing life was when I found out one of my poems had been distributed on a leaflet at Occupy Oakland. The slogan is kind of like the anti-poem — and any dialectician should be immediately interested in that, even if it’s only as a purely theoretical problem.
Maybe that’s what is ultimately interesting about the Paris Commune. Because the risks of fetishizing an event like that are enormous. But think about the immense flourishing of newspaper production in the Commune, or the decrees pasted on the wall, the wall newspapers. I don’t know what the situation is in Canada, but in the UK the possibilities of that were criminalized by Blair a decade ago: you’d always run a bit of a risk going out flyposting or doing graffiti, but if you got caught you’d get a slap on the wrist at best. Nowadays — for political work at least — you’re looking at a pretty hefty fine. Much more serious. Of course, there are stencils, people still do that — but it’d be pretty difficult to make a big wall newspaper just with a stencil. But maybe that’s where we should go. Maybe that’s where the cacophony of voices should lead us. And that’s the difference between our work and the dominant forms of the avant-garde — the centrality of communication. And what does that mean — a total communication, using everything at our disposal, nerve endings and asteroids, the entirety of history. Maybe that could be a slogan: Occupy the Future.
1 Silvia Federici, “Feminism and the Politics of the Commons,” in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, eds. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (Amherst: Levellers Press, 2013): 52.
2 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012), 12.
3 Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2012).
4 Sean Bonney, Happiness: Poems After Rimbaud (London: Unkant Publishing, 2011).
5 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (London: New Left Books (Verso), 1979), 45.