Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Commons

The Commons

Collis, Stephen

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0889229155
ISBN13: 9780889229150
Publisher: Talonbooks
Published: Sep 9 2014
Pages: 152
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.47 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.35
Language: English

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosed--taken, by force, out of the hands of local collective use and privatized. The resistance to capitalism's primitive accumulation, registered in recurring peasant revolts, failed to stem this tide of what we now call privatization--but it spilt over into Romanticism's own advocacy of a kind of literary commons. Underground in the literary since the nineteenth century, the fight against enclosure resurfaces today amidst continuing capitalist accumulations 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, just escaped from an Essex asylum and 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 Romantic Guides and Tours.

Resisting enclosure with each word, tearing down (intellectual) property's fencing, wandering in search of new commons, new spaces outside property's exclusive and excluding domain--The Commons veers in and out of history to find spaces of linguistic hope. What we have named, 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.

The Commons is another installment of what Collis has called (half in jest) The Barricades Project--a broadly based, historically ranging test of the old adage that poetry is the revolutionary act par excellence. It includes Anarchive (2005) and will eventually continue in The Red Album. The Commons includes an introduction to The Barricades Project, written by Collis' collaborators Alfred Noyes and Ramon Fernandez.

Also from

Collis, Stephen

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All