Stephen Collis
Biography
Stephen Collis is the author of three books of poetry, Mine (New Star 2001), Anarchive (New Star 2005), which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and The Commons (Talonbooks 2008). His essays on contemporary poetry and poetics have appeared in many Canadian and American journals, and he is the author of two book-length studies, Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (Talonbooks 2007) and Through Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-Scholasticism (ELS Editions 2006). A member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, he teaches American literature, poetry, and creative writing at Simon Fraser University.
Poet's Note
We begin to see that the intention of the boundless is manifest in
the agony and restoration of pages or boundaries or walls
—Robert Duncan
Poetry’s “business” is to test the limits of meaningful form. This can occur at a “local” level—the line, the page—but also at a more “global” level, in the articulations of the long poem, the book, the “project.”
Such testing of limits and boundaries also occurs between what might seem to be “one’s own” and what is more properly “another’s.” This is ever the case with language—words have always been spoken before—they are the common property of humankind—or whose are they? I take words from the mouths and texts of others and taste them again, sounding their resonances. In poems I speak my relationship to a language I did not invent, and to its other users, both past and present. It is a commons we may squat upon, if it is anything at all. Its boundaries are unknown to us but we walk them in our poems, finding out.
The Commons is a book of walking along such boundaries, breaking fences where property intrudes—convinced that the history of poetry is a history of borrowings, of forms flowing into other forms. No commodities. No capital accumulating. Not in the “usual” sense.
The Commons is also merely a small passage in a much larger structure I call “The Barricades Project,” whose limits I do not yet know. This is the real test: how dispersed, how indeterminate, how discontinuous can a “long poem” or “project” be? How far can it go into the “not mine,” and still remain, in some sense, “mine”? If we cannot draw a limit around its “property,” can we still find sustenance there? Can we—share?
In the end, I will be both local and global in my testing of the poem. On every page I will sound what I can, I will listen to the words of others, I will murmur back into time and alterity, I will make what local musics I am able amidst the global din.
Sample Work
“4 X 4” (pdf)
“Before Canoes to Memory” (pdf)
External Links
“Drawing the Curtain on The Midnight” (a review of Susan Howe's The Midnight at Jacket)
“Of Blackberries and the Poetic Commons” (pdf at the Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain)