Comments to eco-poets Allison Cobb, Steve Collis & Brian Teare

Dear Allison, Steve, Brian:

Sending this before I head off for another bout of protesting the UHM budget cuts. The conversations have been fascinating. Some thoughts, not intended (in the least) as criticism, but as participation:

--[Allison Cobb's power point on plastics & her research on them highlighted the networks that join us & our plastics.] The emphasis on connections that you all make: as someone interested in how to write about spirit, which inevitably means connections, links, I find myself getting swept up into a kind of negative sublime here. How does one write about spirit-connections without using the words of the world, matter? How can one do it while acknowledging the insufficiency and destructiveness of so many connections, while finding ways to honor those we feel on our meditation pillows?

--Perhaps one way is to value attention over attachment. The meditative poem pauses long enough to notice, but does not stop, does not reach out to take the thing or idea and put it in a sack like plastic rubbish. Plastic is the opposite of meditation. I can imagine a Clark Coolidge-like "The Plastic Text," instead of "Crystal," even as the content would necessarily be different. The notions of "desire" and "grief" and "fear" are all attachments. We can feel desire for plastic as easily as for a flower. It's hard to realize that we need to let go of both flower and plastic, if perhaps in different ways.

--According to Steve's important work, the way those of us are non-indigenous have to connect to the land may be by way of the idea of the commons. But don't we need to separate that out from the fact that rich aristocrats could send their horses across the commons to hunt foxes in 18C England? That that historical period was also fraught with chasms between rich and poor, employer and toiler? That the commons was perhaps not a solution, but another wedge between anger and action? How can we create a commons not attached to bad economics, but to what Steve later called "a basic level of care for all human beings" that our societies ought to provide?

--Is poetry then a rubbish to energy project? Or is analogy itself, Eliot's catalyst, suspect now? I  I switched from poetry to prose poetry at the point at which I found the drive of my poems to be toward abstraction (a gathering of objects toward an idea) rather than as a consideration of the world in front of me. That tension remains in the spaces between the sentences, and I can't seem to live without it.

--I wonder where Allison sees the end point of research into the car part that generated her project, Autobiography of Plastic? If you could find the very hole in the ground, what then? Back to considerations of origins (which we tend to value) over what comes after (which we tend to suspect). As an adoptive mother whose children both know members of their birth families, I understand both the lure of origins and the significance of the families that come after. I honor my children's ancestors, but I am their parent. The adoption of the car part is quite profound, to my mind, because it exists apart from its definite, marked history. It enters the world of the mystery, again miming the spirit, without being part of it.

--So I'd come at this from a spiritual and an adoptive poetics. Adoption need not be appropriation, though many people come at it from that angle. Spirit need not discard the words of this world, though we do need to be suspicious of Emersonian gyres of meaning that fail to address material problems on the ground.

Sorry if this seems redundant. But I needed to think it out a bit this morning. Finding your visits wonderful and various. Just wish they were not in the "deep, dark November" of the semester's soul!

aloha, Susan

PS This has been revised from an email sent to the poets a few days ago.

11/21/2014 Introduction to the eco-poets: Allison Cobb, Brian Teare, Stephen Collis

There's a short film among the 32 about Glenn Gould where the Canadian pianist walks into a truck stop and sits alone at a table. The background noise—conversations between truckers, a waitress taking orders, breaking off a relationship—comes forward like counterpoint from a Bach fugue. Among the scatter, Gould is a gatherer, one who notices. For many of us, this is a rare experience, this act of paying attention (odd mercenary verb). “You missed that,” writes Alexandra Horowitz in her book, On Looking: A Walker's Guide to The Art of Observation. “You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you.” Until a few of us walked across a small section of this campus on Tuesday, we had thought the campus pristine. Forty-five minutes after we started, we had filled three black plastic bags full of cups, sandwich containers, straws, bags, styrofoam bits, a blue flag, a pink tassel, one pink rubbah slippah, a sour and dirty melange of objects that washed up on the shores of our campus (as Allison Cobb puts it). What we consume, consumes us.

On Wednesday, a dozen students and faculty sat around this heap of trash; we made fellowship of it, talked about our connections to it. Allison Cobb, who works as a writer for the Environmental Defense Fund in Portland, Oregon, takes walks in her neighborhood and picks up bits of plastic. She takes photographs of plastic, labels bits of it, “desire,” “fear,” “grief.” She does research on her trash, considers her relation to it, thinks about networks of connections between us and our disposables. To some extent, she argues, we are plastic, because we have ingested some of what we threw away; it comes back to us by way of fish and birds, even our beer. We throw plastic away; we don't mourn its loss. Allison, whose book, Greenwood, detailed history and reportage of a Brooklyn cemetery that my grad students loved, will read from her ongoing project, Autobiography of Plastic.

Steve Collis comes to us from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he teaches at Simon Fraser University's Burnaby campus. Like Allison, he is obsessed with the materiality of networks: he is currently involved in protesting the Kinder Morgan pipeline that runs from northern Alberta's tar sands to Vancouver. Kinder Morgan, a Texas oil company, means to tunnel through Burnaby Mountain on the way. The protests have been so successful that Steve and his colleagues are being sued for $5.6 million dollars in damages by the corporation. In this work, Steve has allied himself with indigenous groups whose land is being desecrated. His own poetry finds connections to the land by way of the commons, land that is shared, rather than parceled out to the highest bidder and then made into a luxury condo in Kakaako. A recent book, DECOMP, co-authored with Jordan Scott, follows on a project of placing Darwin's Origin of Species in different bio-regions of B.C., then picking them up a year later, tracing their natural decomposition.

Brian Teare grew up in Alabama, and has lived in Indiana and California before his current stay in Philadelphia, where he teaches at Temple University. At Temple, he asks his students to research their watershed, find out where the water they drink comes from. In his poetry, he meditates on nature, sex, dying, the big issues. He is author, most recently, of the beautiful book, Companion Grasses. He engages a natural world ruined by human beings in this passage from “Susurrus Stanzas.” Read page 20.

What we consume, consumes us. We desire, fear, grieve over what was once contained by plastic, but stays on this earth as an empty, permanent, impermeable, container. But what we notice perhaps does not. To pay attention is not to consume but to honor and to release, not to say “this is ours,” but to let go of our need to grasp: On your next walk across campus, pick up one of these containers. Spend some time with it. Think about its relationship to you and your friends. Then let it go, in a bin.

Nature Unwriting: Stephen Collis & Jordan Scott, DECOMP

Avant-garde writing takes the tools of its trade and makes them into subject matter. If words are bricks, the writer starts with bricks and constructs a wall of words. This wall isn't intended to express the writer's ideas or feelings, but to show how the bricks and mortar of expressing those ideas and feelings can work, when divorced from them. Walling the reader out operates on her, interrupting her, demanding that she realize she's looking at language, not at a seductive narrative or image. Avant-garde methods include chance operations, and begin from rules; concept matters more than content (though content is often surprising, funny, jarring).

Avant-garde writing constructs a world, but it often appears removed from this one. Recent experimental writing suggests that such writing can be made from the real world, can be a new form of realism. As I proof-read a short essay I wrote on Alzheimer's, I find this sentence: "Experimental writing, which has traditionally started from language and worked back toward a life that considers itself sturdier than it is, can be used to write outward from identity's implosions." Poets now appropriate the avant-garde to engage with forces of history, nature, identity. Or is it the other way around?

Consider Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott. Their new book Decomp begins as concept-question: what happens when you take copies of Darwin's Origin of the Species and you put them in five ecosystems of British Columbia's wilderness for a year? Their only conscious contribution to the project--at first--was this laying down of books. A wait-see. An odd and compelling idea that would not germinate but fall apart. A mode of composition that would end as decomposition.

Their book is composed of photographs of the weathered books, poems, sections called "The Readable" that come from the decomposing texts, glosses, essayistic bits, quotations from Blanchot and other writers, reactions and poems from friends, including Fred Wah, dialogues between Collis and Scott. Unspoken dialogues with antecedent authors hum below the top soil: Susan Howe (on whom Collis has written beautifully), Ronald Johnson, Tom Phillips (where A Humument meets moss). 

"Typos in the accidental, a species of form and will, when the form is ever so clearly: cadence as rot," they write on 95. In one of the "Readable" sections we see this: "during the period great piles of or life had erritory hardly." In another this: 

Nature

when the

form

ever 

is

so

clearly

the

inside

plan

who 

red

Each ecosystem has its own textual form above and beyond loss. Some leave long lines, others short ones. Some ecosystems leave pine needles; others cover their books with a layer of dusky dirt. Some ecosystems leave more to read than others. Some reading is red.

The erasures by nature bleed into human typos: "the fosl of mmigration" (69). The writers are themselves an ecosystem, above and beyond, or at least beside, those of the forests they leave their books in. "An us, with our books, waiting at the edge in a kind of explicatory light, wondering what method mulch is, what understanding ensoilment. What is forbidden returned as litter. Our leaving on the ground, for the ground." Ground is precisely what the 20th century avant-garde wanted to refuse. Like place it was too sturdy a fiction, needed to be displaced. Displacement now replaced by decomposition, because place has regained its place in our world. It is what is most under threat, least to be taken for granted. Place itself devolves, becoming litter. The book is a place in this equation, and what we find in it comes in spite of destruction.

Allegory, then, of climate change? Of destruction as odd counterpoint to Darwin's evolution? Perhaps. But also a return to the avant-garde as politics, a very different form of it. If Futurism praised the machine, its maleness, its tendency to blow things up, then Decomp-ism praises a slower disintegration of the material world, even as it hints at a poetics of more--or less than--praise. Because, while the text is reduced to another kind of beauty than the one Darwin intended, it is also a symptom of unraveling. As in Alzheimer's the destruction of language becomes its remaining beauty. As in Alzheimer's what occurs is "natural," in the sense that decomposition and disease are natural. Until "The Readable" is an empty box only. "The book is buried and we cannot read a thing." 

For the ones who try to read the text the forest has toyed with, there is a stark lesson. "At the edge of forest, I'm all mystery of separation; hologrammed immensity of what the forest does with us, with our entitlements" (117). We are the ones who disappear, along with our texts. That we have set this erasure in motion only makes it more pathetic, in the original sense of pathos. We have undone our best words. The forest has done what we knew it would do.

And yet, in the absence of a reader, there is still an interlocutor. Steve and Jordan keep talking. They continue to curate these erasures, and to write off of them, around them, through them. The process is a doing and an undoing at one and the same time: "Us in crustaceous forms weaving what is undone and what is done by our hands' distant cupping. What is to. To our undoing. Joined" (128)

Next Big Thing by Stephen Collis

When I did my next thing, here, I tagged Steve Collis, here (that's his Tinfish Retro chap, for free lidat).  I previously blogged on his work, here. This is his self-interview.
 

What is the working title of the book?

To the Barricades, forthcoming from Talon Books in April.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The book is the third in a series, following Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008), to investigate the history of insurgency and revolution—especially in its “grassroots” formations. After looking at the anarchist revolution in Catalonia in 1936 and the resistance to enclosure in England, from the Diggers to John Clare, I wanted to look at the many instances of barricade building in Parisian history (although this became entangled with scenes of contemporary protest and occupation). An inspiration here was David Harvey’s book, Paris, Capital of Modernity.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Ah…maybe the non-actors from Peter Watkins’s fictional documentary film, La Commune: Paris 1871.

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

A long time ago in a galaxy very nearby … we came close to revolutionary success, we can get there still, and the voices of insurgents past and present are merging into one incendiary chorus.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The book is also interested in the idea of the revolutionary potentiality of what I call the “biotariat”—the uprising of the exploited planet itself.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

When poets get agents we will know that something is deeply wrong.

Make up a question you think is pressing in way of poetry today.

A good deal of politically engaged poetry continues to be written, but how do we get past the self-defeating idea of efficacy (if political art is defined in terms of its efficacy, poetry pales) to an enabling idea like solidarity (political art so defined works to strengthen networks of solidarity by deploying its affects of engagement, urgency, indignation, etc.)?

Tags: Jonathon Skinner, Shannon Maguire, Thom Donovan, Christine Leclerc.

_The Primordial Density Perturbation_, by Stephen Collis, Tinfish Retro Chapbook #3

Stephen Collis, The Primordial Density Perturbation, Tinfish Retro Chapbook, June 2011. $3

This is a small book about catastrophe. Catastrophes in play are environmental, political, cultural. Vancouver poet, Stephen Collis, makes quick weaves of contemporary language—lexicons of fashion, violence, economics, media-speak, poetics, disaster. His word-sprint reveals the paradoxical richness and paucity of our lingo, rich in material, yet poverty-stricken as a solution-narrative to what ails us. A formidable poet-critic, Collis writes critical poetry about the contemporary world, pulling in with his seine everything from Tahrir Square to the Pacific plastic patch. It's quite a catch.

Stephen Collis is the author of Mine (2001), two parts of the ongoing Barricades Project—Anarchive (2005) and The Commons (2008)—and two books of criticism: Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (2006) and Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (2007). His most recent book, On the Material (2010), won the 2011 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. A long-standing member of the Kootenay School of Writing, he teaches poetry, poetics and American literature at Simon Fraser University.

Tinfish Editor has blogged elsewhere on Stephen Collis's work.

[Excerpt]

It’s the events we lumpen

struggle agro-crop to

imagine the woops of

primordial density perturbation

or instant class consciousness

you know sea all swelly

of a sudden the perfect

heterotropic ship running

guns for governments or it’s

kefayas! all around Tahrir Square

up-thrust subduction no

two party system but

where did anything come from

and how like curtains

round a wizard ignore that man

tear it off this gauze from

eyes this false separation of

individuals we in this y’all

crap thrown fast from

unheard explosions

On Teaching the Difficulties

We had the "accessibility" talk in my graduate workshop yesterday. Every semester I've taught poetry has featured some version of this conversation. In some classes, the question arises in monetary terms. One undergraduate class told me that they were going to make money off their poems; when I laughed, they told me I wasn't taking them seriously enough. "Do you want to hear about my small press's finances?" I asked, and then told them about the alternative economy I participate in as a poetry publisher. In other classes, the question arises out of the energy it takes to read poetry. One of my first students at UH wondered who on earth would work a long day at the bank and then go home and choose to read something difficult. (That circles back on money, too, I see.) Yesterday, the question was engaged on many levels, as befits a class of ambitious graduate students. We have been reading Susan Howe's Singularities these past two weeks. It's a book I've been obsessed with for 15 years now, the only one of her books I teach with any consistency, and so I've perhaps forgotten what a shock it is to read it for the first time. During the week several words popped up on our google group discussion board, among them "discomfort," "audience," "understanding," and "accessibility."

I love these words because we all think we know what they mean. So I began class by asking students to talk about what we mean when we say them. What is an accessible poem? What is an inaccessible one? Who reads these poems? The discussion quickly turned into a loop: accessible poems make us comfortable; inaccessible ones lack an audience (except academics, of course!); a lack of understanding makes us uncomfortable. And so on. One student wanted to know how to enter into the process of reading a Howe poem; it turned out she knew full well, but could not find the end of the scout's path. To be fair, no one was arguing for the easy, lounge chair poem, but everyone was weighing the quotient of "getting it" and "getting stuck," failing to communicate (another of those words).

To understand a poem is to have some control over it. To have control over a poem means you can write about it effectively, that you can quote it to good effect, that you can carry it around with you as an answer, or at least a well-formulated question. To fail to understand a poem is to be irritated. In workshop sometimes our irritation flares up because a student's poem simply cannot be adequately interpreted as written. The poem that doesn't work is out of our control. But so are many poems that do work. These are the poems we want desperately to "understand" (standing under, having a foundation, holding the poem up like Atlas an entire world).

Graduate students are, by definition, good readers. Lack of understanding understandably irritates them; it's a paper cut to their sense of themselves. So, on the one hand, I suggest relaxing a bit. Listen to the poem, let it sit for while, don't worry on it so much. On the other hand, trust the poem to mean, if not quite to be understood. But this still leaves important questions like, "how can a poem with a small audience (or even smaller than usual) act in the world?" "How can a poem influence its audience if that audience is so small?" "Should we expect poems to act, or do they describe the world?" And so on. Good stuff.


But how to work toward the idea that "not understanding" can be a poem's subject, that "not understanding" or "not hearing" or witnessing an absence in the archive needs to be enacted rather than told? How to illustrate the "narrative in non-narrative" that Howe claims for her work? The exercise I developed came in two parts. First I asked students to find a six line section of the book; in ten minutes they were to rewrite those lines to render them "accessible." Perhaps the most vivid of these translations was by a student who took "velc cello uncannunc" and spun it out as "European strings," thus preserving the poem's larger context as she elaborated on the imposition of western culture on the "wilderness." A couple of students had not completed their translations because they'd better understood the passages in looking at them more closely.

After we'd discussed the translations, what was gained and (mostly) what was lost in doing them, we turned to the second part of the exercise. Here I handed out a copy of our latest administrative memo from the President of UH, M.R.C. Greenwood about further possible cuts in the university's budget. (One student had kindly printed it out 10 times for me, as my office printer no longer works.) I read a paragraph of the memo out loud and asked students to render a few sentences of it inaccessible. "Do you mean to say that it's already inaccessible?" chimed one student, getting way ahead of me.

A couple students translated Greenwood into Howe, making the memo's language into a chant. Another punned on green and wood and budge and jet (hurts my teeth simply to repeat that!) One replaced nearly every noun with "what." And so on. In the discussion afterwards, we talked about how alert we became to the memo's language, how we did not simply let it flow past us as if it did make sense.

That gets us to resistance, the resistance students feel toward poetry, especially of the difficult kind. This resistance is the teacher's ally, I think, because it evokes such crucial questions as those we discussed yesterday. And, if we take the budgetary memos and make them into difficult poems, that skepticism leads us into difficult questions about the university and the state. Who will spend this money? How can we best argue for the value of a university? What happens when, as one of my facebook friends put it, the bankrupt rhetoric of a university administration meets the rather more literal bankruptcy of the institution?

Poetry is not level ground, is steeplechase. But, like Stephen Collis, I hold to poems whose meanings live both within and without what one of my students, Jaimie Gusman, calls its "anyjar" or container. In a review of Hank Lazer's Portions in The Poetic Front, Collis distinguishes between the oulipian work of Christian Bok and the rather different formal limitations of Lazer as follows, "if I were to make the comparison, the difference between Bök and Lazer is that the former details the struggle to negotiate his constraint outside the poem, while Lazer shows us the struggle inside the poem, where it remains an (im)potentiality." It's the "(im)potentiality, or impish potentiality, that I so love, and love to teach, in "difficult" poems.

"Intercontinental and damn proud of it": Gaye Chan, Nandita Sharma, Stephen Collis and Otherly Ones

There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope--letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood.

John Ashbery, "For John Clare,"The Double Dream of Spring


I live in a condominium community; outside my back windows is a large common area, green, carefully mowed, populated mainly by egrets and the occasional solitary golf cart, which the property manager drives to his office in a shed at the edge of the field. Beyond the shed there is preservation land, a narrow undeveloped strip (that seems bigger than it is) covered by trees. My husband points out that this land includes a deep gulch and a swamp, not good for development in any case. When we moved in eight years ago, people ran their dogs in the common area during the late afternoon; on any given day, you could join them and talk about their dogs, since that was their only subject of conversation. A few years ago, we noticed that the dogs no longer congregated outside and were told by a dog owner that they had been disallowed. And for a while there was a group of roosters and hens that wandered the green space, beautiful ones. Their raucous cries at all hours got them banned, too, as they were carted off one day to who knows where. Since then, my kids and I have played catch out back and there is the occasional soccer-playing dog, some children. But mostly the land lies green and still, something to be seen but not a stage for sound, except for what mowers and weed whackers exhale, like asthmatics with microphones.

So the condominium community is the simulacrum of a commons, or the land not privately owned but shared in the years before the Enclosure Movement in 18th century England. When I looked up "enclosure" on-line, I found a link to the Encyclopedia Britannica. I opened it and got the beginning of an article: "the division or consolidation of communal fields, meadows, pastures, and other arable lands in western Europe into the carefully delineated and individually owned and managed farm plot of modern times." A couple of lines later I read this: "To enclose land was to put a hedge or fence around a portion of this open land and thus prevent the exercise of common grazing and other rights over it." Directly underneath these words in a bright orange box was an alert to me, the reader: "MEMBERS GET MORE: Activate your Free Trial today!" A few more knowledge teasers followed, and then a promise of "premium content." Not that I begrudge the Encyclopedia their subscribers, but surely this is another example of enclosure, the fencing off of knowledge. Hence the allure of Wikipedia's seeming openness, to builders and receivers. If you read only this entry of my blog, you will be reading an "enclosed" version of my work, only a small slice of what I mean to say--a more fluid substance than the single link can offer. The internet's wild openness covers over the largest agglomeration of small farms ever devised. And that reminds me, I will soon need to build some fences against my children's curiosities.

Of course land use offers us a mirror on ourselves (and that's a western metaphor, no doubt about it); hence the Romantics' love for unenclosed nature in the face of industrial-era divisions. Another analogy occurs closer to home. The U.S. Post Office says I live in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i, but you could say that I live in Ahuimanu in the ahupua`a of Kahalu`u. Hawaiians organized the land in bands that went from mountains to the sea; they did not possess what westerners consider "private property," though the Great Mahele of the early 19th century changed that, under western influence. The land was tilled by commoners who did not own it but stayed, generation after generation. The land I live on is organized less according principle of the ahupua`a than that of the belt, or the road that goes around most of the island. I live mauka of Kahekili Highway (a bypass of Kamehameha Highway); the makai side features a strip mall and McDonald's. Near me, the land's tillage is done more frequently by road crews than by farmers.

Enter unlikely allies, if only geographically so, namely Gaye Chan & Nandita Sharma of Kane`ohe and Stephen Collis of Delta, BC, near Vancouver. Chan & Sharma have made a practice over the past few years of challenging notions of "public" space, unveiling it as a fiction operated in the interest of nations, not their citizens. They consider themselves modern day Diggers. What is termed "public" land, they argue, is really that of governmentally held land. "Public" does not equal "commonly held." (The military opens Bellows Beach to civilians only on weekends.) They work with plants and with the internet. Their project, Eating in Public, is easily accessible on-line. In it, they tell the story (with illustrations) of their use of "public" land (state and Bishop Estate-controlled) to grow papayas. This is their attempt to enact a "commons." Another version of their story can be found in Jules Boykoff's and Kaia Sand's book on guerrilla poetries. It also brings together the notion of a material commons (where food is grown for the public) and a decolonized mental space. The results are moving, surprising, and sometimes sadly funny, as when they show us the gently regretful notes from the person instructed to remove their plants.



Stephen Collis is in the process of writing a series of books advocating the commons, including the most recent, aptly titled The Commons, from Talonbooks in Vancouver. His interests range from the anarcho-scholasticism of Susan Howe, in a wonderful teachable book of poetics, to anarchist Spain, the work of Phyllis Webb, archives, mines, and in this volume everyone poetical from Robert Frost to John Clare to William Wordsworth to Henry David Thoreau and finally to the poet himself and his collaborators "Alfred Noyes and Ramon Fernandez," who seem one with Collis, as well as his most formidable opponents (to quote that other Stephen, Colbert). "Noyes and Fernandez" write an introduction at the end of the book, in which they define the commons so: "Common lands are held in trust by everyone and governed only by local custom. They embody sustainability and the sharing--commoning--of the resources such sustainable communities depend upon" (139). He too joins the material with the imaginative, noting that enclosure "is happening now with water and air, with ideas and genetic coding and materials . . . In so far as a literature takes on a practice of quotation, collage, allusion and intertextuality it holds out a sort of commons--a page on which any may write with the common resources of the poetic past" (139).

To that we might add something called parodic collage; The Commons begins with "The Frostworks," a re-mix of "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost. Where Frost opens his unstraightforward poem, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," Collis responds:

Something there is
that spills
makes gaps
the work of
hunters at spring
the wall
between us
is a collapse

and so on. Frost's grammatically perfect sentences give way to "gaps" of no commas or periods, simply a flow of words from Frost's poem in an order unimagined by the New Hampshire farmer poet.

In "Clear as Clare," Collis remixes John Clare, but not to the witty effect of his operation on Frost. Clare walks through England in a poem that owes much to Susan Howe's peregrinations through histories and texts. Most moving to this reader were the following lines:

a little patch of common
buckled to my bread
the woodpecker sweeing
flags flaze and flitting

said arable
said commons
said cottage rushlight
clouted dipples stirtling

dim to the seem

and beneath these lines a "note":

at night ... hounding home

This page combines the virtues of Clare's early close-watching of nature and close-listening to language with the sadness of his later poems of loss. I remember reading John Burrell's book on Clare in college (yours used for nearly $700), a book that claims Clare's madness had much to do with the enclosure movement. While I'm now loath to go along with analogies between social conditions and mental ones, the book made a strong impression at the time.

Collis performs similar operations on Wordsworth and Thoreau, before turning to a meta-commentary on his work as a poet in the final section "from THE BARRICADES PROJECT" (119-134). Here the non-enclosure of vocabularies, including the use of computer jargon in "Dear Common: !Ya Basta!": "I'll download your rebellion / but my virus makes actions properties / buying up the domains of freedom / and surveiling the lines of defence" (128). I quote these lines as Twitter announces it will not shut down for maintenance an hour tonight in order to keep lines of communication open among Iranians protesting the likely fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Such odd marriages of capital and rebellion! Collis's conclusion is an overt getting-to-the-point:

Let us propose post-capitalism (131)

and an ending that seems to address Chan & Sharma:

we are hope's eternal website
very otherly moving coasts
intercontinental and damn proud of it
very otherly at least and yes
very otherly awaiting the dawn

In his afterward to the Quixote Variations by Ramon Fernandez, translated by Alfred Noyes / Stephen Collis, Collis writes about poems that do not end, either because they have been reworked so often that "authenticity" is in question (Whitman, the unnamed Marianne Moore) or because they are not finished. "It is that 'area larger' that is the wonder in poetry--the suggestion, amidst poetry's inherent brevity, of a wider field of intellectual and emotional play the poem we read is a condensation of" (32-33). If the poem is inevitably enclosed, then, the poet's and reader's imaginations cannot be; the poem on the page has a fence around it. The poem in the mind is not a palm at the end of it, but part of the commons. This is not the Commons on which Emerson saw his eyeball, but a commons on which people like Chan, Sharma and Collis are planting vegetables and flowers and more poems. That other commons we call the commons.




For anyone interested in reading more on the Commons, Nandita Sharma recommends the following:


1) Neeson, J.M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820, J. M. (1993), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

2) Linebaugh, Peter, 2007 The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons For All. Berkeley: University of California Press.

3) Linebaugh , Peter and Marcus Rediker, 2000. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press.

More work by Stephen Collis in Tinfish 18.