The Commons - Brossura

Collis, Stephen

Brossura

ISBN 10: 088922580X ISBN 13: 9780889225800

Casa editrice: Talonbooks Ltd, 2008

Riassunto

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the English common lands were enclosedtaken, 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 domainThe 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 includesAnarchive (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.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sugli autori

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”andOn the Material (Talonbooks 2010).

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.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Talonbooks Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 088922580X
• ISBN 13: 9780889225800
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 140
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile