The Commons

Literature & Fiction

Collis, Stephen

Poetry

Talonbooks

Structured in three parts, On the Material is a meditation on language, geography, socio-economics and the body, moving from the glut of fossil-fuelled consumer excess to the materiality of a single book. Composed almost entirely of quatrains (each page being comprised of four four-line stanzas) and written while travelling through North America in 2008, 4 × 4” navigates issues of space and movement in the global age. As economies crumble, ecosystems fail and peak oil approaches, Collis records the production of a disarticulation of social discourse that our consumer society has generated: After all we made money out of matter here / Now condos shield us from the computer hum / Of on-line trading and wars ?ash on ?at screens / As 4 × 4s cool and ping mud covered in double garages.” In its bridging second section, I Fought the Lyric and the Lyric Won,” the desire to express wins out over the desire to possess. Beauty, contemplation and human communication seem to have abandoned the world, and their absence from the everyday has re-engaged the poet’s struggle with languagehas left a need to reinvent human discourse and its attendant relations. The third section, Gail’s Books,” is a sequence of poems in memory of Stephen Collis’s sister, Gail Tulloch. A month after Gail’s death from cancer in 2002, a ?re destroyed her house, removing every material reminder of her from the earth. All that remained was one book recovered from a pool of water in the ruins after the ?re. Dried in the air, this book, and those Collis had previously borrowed from his sister, become a way for the poet to read back into the elemental heart of absence and lossthe material” of the books displacing, and in some way recovering, how language holds the materiality of the physical world.

On the Material

<div> To the Barricades moves back and forth between historical and contemporary scenes of revolt, from nineteenth-century Parisian street barricades to twenty-first-century occupations and street marches, shifting along the active seam between poetry and revolution. Avant-garde technique is donated to lyric ends, forming an anti-archive of the revolutionary record where words are bricks hurriedly thrown up as linguistic "barricades." Stephen Collis is the author of five books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize#150;winning On the Material and three titles in the ongoing "Barricades Project." An activist and social critic, his writing on the Occupy movement is collected in Dispatches from the Occupation (Talonbooks, 2012). </div>

To the Barricades

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries the majority of the English common lands were enclosed, by decree and by force, depriving communities of their independence and self-sufficiency. The resistance to capitalism’s primitive accumulation,” registered in recurring peasant revolts and nighttime attacks on hedges and fences, failed to stem the tide of what we now call privatization” but it spilled over into Romanticism’s own advocacy of a kind of 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. In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, pick wild fruit with Henry David Thoreau, and comb the Lake District with a host of authors of Romantic guides and tours, undermining William Wordsworth’s proprietary claim to the region. Somewhere along the way Robert Frost’s wall falls down, the Zapatistas make their appearance, and Gerrard Winstanley reclaims the earth as a Common Treasury.” This 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.

British & Irish

In pursuing Susan Howe s own writing through words of her literary predecessors, Collis ranges deep in and beyond the American archive s wilderness, catching sight of various elusive quarry: Charles Olson and Herman Melville; Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allen Poe, and Margaret Fuller; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, James Clarence Mangan and William Shakespeare. At the heart of this are the simple literary exchanges embodied here in a selection of correspondence between Howe and Olson editor George Butterick that remind us that poets invariably find their poetry in other poets poetry, that the future is waiting for us in the past, and that no original or origin is ultimately possible.

Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

History & Criticism

ELS Editions

Poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott left copies of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species to decay in five distinct ecosystems in British Columbia. A year later, they photographed what remained, reading poetry into nature's "rewriting" process and documenting the gorgeous detritus in Decomp, a long poem in prose and color photographs.
Darwin is an eye amidst graphed genera seeing the web it is woven thereof. A matted scrap of printed material, shit, soil and leaf rot—all dried, bleached and curled up at small edges.
Stephen Collis is the author of four books of poetry and a collection of essays, Dispatches from the Occupation.
Jordan Scott is the author of Silt and Blert, which explores the poetics of stuttering.

Decomp

Scott, Jordan

Coach House Books

Poetry. ANARCHIVE initiates an ongoing project that takes up the history of anarchist uprisings as a site for poetic archeology. ANARCHIVE investigates two propositions: that there is a necessarily familial relationship between poetry and anarchy, and that poetry is, moment by moment, built out of the inherent and sudden uprisings and insurgencies of language itself. Stephen Collis is a poet and critic who teaches literature at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of MINE, and the editor of the forthcoming COMPANIONS AND HORIZONS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SFU POETRY.

Anarchive

New Star Books

In this collection of long and serial poems, Stephen Collis returns to the commons, and to his ongoing argument with romantic poet William Wordsworth, to rethink the relationship between human beings and the natural world in the Anthropocene Era. Collis circumambulates Tar Sands tailings ponds and English lakes  and stands in the path of pipelines, where on Burnaby Mountain in 2014 he was sued for $5.6 million by energy giant Kinder Morgan, whose lawyers glossed Collis’s writing in court by noting that underneath the poetry is a description of how the barricade was constructed.” Called by Eden Robinson the most dangerous poet in Canada,” in Once in Blockadia Collis is in search of how we can continue to resist  as we only begin to understand the extent of our complicity and the depths of the predicament we are in.The bulk of Once in Blockadia is made up of two long sequences evolving from found texts, and two long poems that engage with Wordsworth. The two found texts relate to two blockades Collis was involved in: one blocking the flood of commodities into the Port of Vancouver, and the other blocking the potential flood of oil out of Vancouver. In both cases the poetry and notes” that follow offer glimpses into the documentary fact” of events, the resistance behind the blockade, the reasons for them, and the complex of resistant affects driving the events. The two Wordsworthian long poems involve two walks  one in the Alberta Tar Sands, and the other in Wordsworth’s beloved Grasmere. In the first instance Wordsworthian description is applied to the impossible to aestheticize Tar Sands; in the second, Wordsworth’s own beloved home is revealed not as an alternative to the destruction of extraction, but as conditioned, surrounded, and structured by it.

Once in Blockadia

Almost Islands is a memoir of Collis’s friendship with and regular visits to legendary poet Phyllis Webb―now in her nineties and long enveloped in the silence which followed her last published book in 1990―as well as an extended meditation on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, place, colonization, and climate change―the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing. “I go to see her because she is poetry’s old crone and I am seeking. I go to her―usually three, four times a year―because it is a small ministration I can perform for her, and for her poetry, as she slowly reaches into the finite―a long, slow embrace of nothing…. If living is a process of learning how to die, then is writing a process of learning how to stop writing? I go in search of lost words, in search of the hoped for defence against the loss of words, drawn to the shaping sounds of fate and mortality.” This is a book of poetic, political, and philosophical digressions―a book that weaves numerous themes together in a non-linear fashion. In part, it makes a literary argument: that Webb’s turn, in the 1970s, from a failed poet about a European radical to the indigenous artworks literally etched into the rocks of her local environment has both literary and political meaning and importance. Beyond this, Collis seeks to build upon and extend Webb’s expansion of her “poetic” sense of the political, by proposing a political agent, the “biotariat,” that is both human and more than human―this after following as many pathways as he can through Webb’s own reading and thought. Finally, this is a book obsessed with the problem of Webb’s not writing, its implications for a writer (me) who―compulsively―probably writes too much, and the wider social, political, and world historical implications of withdrawal, self-silencing, and not-doing.

Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

Arts & Photography

A History of the Theories of Rain explores the strange effect our current sense of impending doom has on our relation to time, approaching the unfolding climate catastrophe through its dissolution of the categories of "man-made" and "natural." How do we go on with our daily lives while a disastrous future impinges upon every moment? Stephen Collis provides no easy answers and offers no simple hope. Instead, he probes our current state of anxiety with care, humour, and an unflinching gazing into the darkness we have gathered around ourselves. Asking what form a resistance to the tenor of these out-of-joint times might take, A History of the Theories of Rain explores the links between climate's "tipping points" and the borders constraining the plants, animals, and peoples forcibly displaced by a radically altered world ecology.

A History of the Theories of Rain

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Collis, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Collis, Stephen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Collis, Stephen. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Commons

On the Material

To the Barricades

The Commons

Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

Decomp

Anarchive

Once in Blockadia

Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten

A History of the Theories of Rain