The Commons

In The Commons we wander the English countryside with the so-called mad peasant poet John Clare, just escaped from an Essex asylum, 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.

Tearing down (intellectual) property’s fencing, The Commons veers in and out of history to find spaces of linguistic hope. What we call, 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.