Title Pending 10823

This paper presents one case study in my theory of 'sonic poetics'. Sonic poetics is the apprehension of sound and listening as each operates in the reading of a poem. However, sonic poetics is not exclusive to poetry: sonic poetics is a way of being that can be applied, through aesthetic, ethical, decolonising and antifascist contexts, to academic or non-academic practices. I centralise key acts of listening within Sean Bonney's poetry in a wide spectrum of impossible music, microsounds, inaudible sound, human and inhuman sounds. How is sound presented in his poetry and how does this inform our own listening? I give readings of what I call Bonney’s ‘sound spectrum’ in his last book, Our Death, analysing individual autonomy within dominant cultures, and trace an avant-garde tradition from Baraka, Césaire, Hölderlin, and Pasolini in poetry, to Iannis Xenakis’s ‘stochastic resonance’, and François J. Bonnet’s concept of ‘desiring-listening’, in Sound Studies. The desire of sonic poetics is for creating, listening to and within autonomous spaces. François J. Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds: a Sonorous Archipelago is a key text for sonic poetics. His voyage into archipelagic interstices of listening targets sound itself, as well as listening beyond the audible. Sonic poetics begins where Bonnet’s The Order of Sounds ends: sonic poetics examines sound and listening as it is represented in poetry.