The Commons

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.

About the Author :
Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010) and three parts of the ongoing “Barricades Project”: Anarchive (New Star, 2005), The Commons (Talonbooks, 2008, 2014), and To the Barricades (Talonbooks, 2013). An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). 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), as well as the editor, with Graham Lyons, of Reading Duncan Reading: Robert Duncan and the Poetics of Derivation (Iowa University Press, 2012). He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University, where he was a 2011/12 Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow.

Review :
“Words like beauty, pleasure, and liberty do not sound hackneyed. Instead, their writing sounds synonymous with persistence. Collis is slightly off-step/beat, just out of range of any comfortable assumption, and a good shuffle away from clear understanding. This is not poetry that leads, but includes. It is a welcome philosophical divergence in popular culture.” — Prairie Fire Review of Books "For Collis, the world of poetry is a place in which '"the commons,'" a free place of exchange and mutual association, still maintains a parlous grip on imagination." "Stephen Collis is like Woody Allen laying down his favorite scenarios in European outfits. " — Kevin Killian