The Commons by Stephen Collis

The Commons by Stephen Collis

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, by decree and by force, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. The resistance to capitalism's primitive accumulation, registered in recurring peasant revolts and nighttime attacks on hedges and fences, failed to stem the tide of what we now call privatization - but it spilled over into Romanticism's own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in poetry since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing accumulation and a renascent sense of the commons under globalization.

In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, pick wild fruit with Henry David Thoreau, and comb the Lake District with a host of authors of Romantic guides and tours, undermining William Wordsworth's proprietary claim to the region. Somewhere along the way Robert Frost's wall falls down, the Zapatistas make their appearance, and Gerrard Winstanley reclaims the
earth as a Common Treasury.

This second edition includes the essay Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons.

Stephen Collis is a climate justice activist and a professor of poetry at Simon Fraser University.

Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry, Mine (New Star, 2001), Anarchive (New Star, 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008)--the latter two forming parts of the on-going Barricades Project--and On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010), winner of the 2010 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Noted for his seminal analyses of affinities between twentieth-century poets, he has lectured widely on poetics and done numerous readings in Canada and the U.S.

Collis is also the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks, 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions, 2006). He is currently editing a collection of essays, Reading Duncan Reading and continuing his work on The Barricades Project. A member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he teaches American literature, poetry, and poetics at Simon Fraser University.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780889225800
ISBN 10	088922580X
Title	The Commons
Author	Stephen Collis
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Talonbooks
Year published	2008-05-15
Number of pages	144
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable