On Sean Bonney: Poetic Radicalism at the Turn of the Third Millennium

A two-day international conference to take place at

Université Paris Cité

10th and 11th of December, 2026

Organising committee:

Bastien Goursaud (Université de Picardie – Jules Verne)

Andrew Hodgson (Université Paris Cité)

Abigail Lang (Université Paris Cité)

Elise Legal (Université Paris 8)

Sean Mark (Université Catholique de Lille)

With this conference we seek to explore the work of British poet Sean Bonney as a vital site of radical contemporary poetics, still little discussed in scholarly criticism. As the first international conference dedicated to Bonney’s oeuvre, it aims to open up how the poet’s formally innovative and politically uncompromising practice functions as a mode of social reflection, confrontation, and refusal within late-capitalist Britain. Esther Leslie writes that Bonney’s poetry

suggests something splattered on the pavement, words that rose up in advertising and avant-garde poetry smashed back down to the ground, to the common ground, in order to rally the troops, our troops, to combat a terror that is outside us, but in every syllable of our language, every grain of our word and world.

Esther Leslie, ‘Bouleversed Baudelairizing: On Poetics and Terror’. (2022) 14(1): Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Bonney’s work might be understood as one of the ways society interrupts itself: a fractured, antagonistic, and insistently re-contemporising poetic form that refuses reconciliation. Bonney’s poetry is a largely pre-Brexit and pre-Covid imagining of Britain that already seems to invite historicised readings, with its themes of international financial crisis, a Tory party still ostensibly cloaked in Blairite wool, and imperial wars projected far away from threatening the grey terror of everyday life in the West. As such, it is a poetic body of work that can be seen to define the British radical poetic tradition at the turn of the millennium.

Sean Bonney was born in Brighton in 1969, and grew up outside Hull. He published seven collections of poetry alongside a number of pamphlets, among them Blade Pitch Control Unit (2005), Baudelaire in English (2007), Letters Against the Firmament (2015), Our Death (2019). He received a doctorate for the study of the works of Amiri Baraka from Birkbeck College, University of London in 2012. After that, he took up a postdoctoral post at Freie Universität Berlin, researching the poetry of Diane di Prima among others, and later, the poetics of the 2008 financial crisis. He died in Berlin in 2019.

Potential themes for papers might include, but are not restricted to:

Sean Bonney and:

Writing as a destructive process

Translation as a renewing echo

Early-21st century blog culture, the burgeoning digital, and serialisation

The digital commons

Neoliberalism

France/francophone culture

The long shadow of modernism

Language aesthetics of fracturing/tearing

Poetic doubt

Concrete poetry, visuality and the page

Poetry as traumatised/traumatic vehicle

Poetic language: tics, stutters, shudders

Anarchism, revolution and acceleration

Poetry readings, activism and political organisation

Punk, jazz and Surrealism

The poet as researcher

Crisis poetics

Amiri Baraka

Diane di Prima

Katerina Gogou

Working class poetics

The English radical tradition

The Ranters

Cosmological tropes

Poetry, addiction, and inebriation

Ecological apocalypse

We welcome proposals for translations of Bonney’s work from English into French. Creative responses (textual, visual, experimental, performed) inspired by Sean Bonney’s work are also welcome. 

Proposals for papers (including a 300 word abstract and a 100 word biography) should be sent to bonneyconference@gmail.com by 30/04/2026.