The Commons - Softcover

Collis, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 088922580X ISBN 13: 9780889225800

Publisher: Talonbooks, 2008

Synopsis

In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, just escaped from an Essex asylum, walking the more than eighty miles to his home in Helpston; we pick wild fruit with anarchist Henry David Thoreau, also newly escaped from jail (for not paying his poll tax); and we comb the English Lake District, undermining William Wordsworth’s proprietary claim upon it, with a host of authors of RomanticGuides and Tours.

Tearing down (intellectual) property’s fencing, The Commons veers in and out of history to find spaces of linguistic hope. What we call, in less inspired moments, allusion,” borrowing,” or even (pretentiously) intertextuality” is just this fact that poetry proves again and again: our languages are common. Shared. Un-enclosable.

About this title

About the Authors

Stephen Collis is a poet, critic and scholar. Author of two previous books of poetry,Mine and Anarchive, his essays on contemporary poetry and poetics have appeared in many journals includingThe Capilano Review and The Chicago Review. He is the author of two book-length critical studies,Phyllis Webb and the Common Good and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism.

Stephen Collis
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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 088922580X
• ISBN 13: 9780889225800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144