Stephen Collis

The Commons Stephen Collis Second edition

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. Recurring peasant revolts failed to stem the tide of "privatization"?but resistance spilled over into Romanticism's own advocacy of a 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. This revised 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.