This essay examines the work of the contemporary, innovative Canadian poet Stephen Collis. This essay investigates Collis’s Anarchive (2005) and his later book The Commons (2008), works that when taken together comprise two parts of his Barricades Project. The correlated work of this Canadian poet points toward a current moment in Canadian art when the innovative writing practices have begun to examine the role of Canadian culture within the urban space of “globalized capitalism.” This essay points out how Collis has designed a poetry that enacts a hope for social change within the public, urban space. Taken together, this essay suggests the extent to which architecture impacts contemporary poetry’s aesthetic design, doing so in order to argue that the contemporary, innovative poetry makes use of an architectural sensibility in order to articulate poetry’s participation within the civic realm of the public space.
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