On Sean Bonney: Poetic Radicalism at the Turn of the Third Millennium
A two-day international conference
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)
Supported by:
Université Paris 8 – TRANSCRIT EA 1569 et ED 31 Pratiques et théories du sens
Université Paris Cité – UFR EILA et UMR 8264 ECHELLES
Université de Picardie Jules Verne – CERCLL 4283 UR
Université Catholique de Lille – FLSH – MUSE
LOOP
Day 1 – Thursday 10 December 2026
08:45–09:15 – Registration and Coffee
09:15–09:30 – Opening Remarks
09:30–10:50 – Panel 1
France, Translation, Baudelaire, Rimbaud
Patrick Armstrong (École polytechnique)
“Sean Bonney and the Jolts of French Prose Poetry”
Patrick Durgin (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
“Appropriate Legacy”
Iris Colomb (Goldsmiths, University of London) & Jeff Hilson (University of Roehampton)
“Abandoning Baudelaire: Sean Bonney in Abney Park Cemetery”
10:50–11:10 – Coffee Break
11:10–12:30 – Panel 2
Language, Enemy
Simon Perril (De Montfort University)
“‘Could We Really Arrive at a Knowledge of Poetry by Studying the Saliva of Dogs?’: Barks, Bites and Bloch – Letters to Bonney”
Marty Hiatt (Independent Researcher)
“Letters Against: Language and Temporality in Some of Sean Bonney’s Prose-Poems”
Tom Allen (New York University)
“Sean Bonney’s Rumours, Sean Bonney’s Lies”
12:30–14:00 – Buffet Lunch
14:00–15:20 – Panel 3
Blog, Archive, Hauntology, Attribution
Benjamin Carde (Aix-Marseille Université)
“Spectral Remanence and the Poetic Hydra: Our Death as a Radical Praxis of the Intertextual”
Stephen Willey (Birkbeck, University of London)
“‘I Would Not Privatise This’: Sean Bonney, Walter Benjamin, and the Limits of Constellation”
Robert Kiely (Independent Researcher)
“Nonattribution”
15:20–15:30 – Coffee Break
15:30–16:30 – Keynote
Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics (Birkbeck, University of London)
19:30–21:30 – Reading at Profil Galerie
Day 2 – Friday 11 December 2026
09:45–10:00 – Coffee
10:00–11:40 – Panel 4
Anti-Fascism, Poetics, the Counter-Apocalypse
Sacha Kahir (Independent Researcher)
“Storm Corners and Chthonic Politics as Anti-Fascism in the Last Works of Sean Bonney”
Juha Virtanen (University of Kent)
“Methodologies of the Wrong Apocalypse: Heresy, Bonney, and Ecological Collapse”
David Grundy (Freie Universität Berlin)
“Sean Bonney and Anti-Fascism”
Thomas Conchou (Centre d’art contemporain de La Ferme du Buisson)
“Intoxication and Lucidity in the work of Sean Bonney”
11:40–12:00 – Coffee Break
12:00–13:20 – Panel 5
Lament, Prophecy, Spectre
Jamie Addison (University of Sussex)
“‘Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe from the Enemy If He Wins’: Lament in the Work of Sean Bonney”
Sam Langer (Independent Researcher)
“Some Aspects of Sean Bonney’s Lamentations”
Jack Barron (University of Cambridge) & Thomas Fraser (Université Paris Cité)
“‘We Think We Are Probably Very Far from Home’: Sean Bonney’s Haunts & Apparitions”
13:20–14:50 – Buffet Lunch
14:50–16:30 – Panel 6
Friendship, Care, Continuation
Vicky Sparrow (University of Nottingham)
“Sean Bonney’s Unhelpful Feelings”
Helen Dimos (Independent Researcher)
“To Meet Again. Re-reading Sean Bonney”
Richard Owens (Sussex County Community College)
“‘When I Was Hungry’: Sean Bonney and His Friends”
William Rowe (Birkbeck, University of London)
“how to continue”
16:30–16:50 – Coffee and Discussion
Addresses:
For the conference:
Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, Room 720, 7th Floor
Université Paris Cité,
Place Paul Ricœur,
75013 Paris
To enter the building, ID must be shown at the reception, after which a keycard will be provided to allow access to the seventh floor.
For the poetry reading:
Profil Galerie,
11 rue des Arquebusiers,
75003 Paris
First door code 7623, first door on the left, ring at Poirey, second floor, door on the right.
Contact: andrew-robert.hodgson@u-pariscite.fr; abigail.lang@u-pariscite.fr
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.