Anarchive

Anarchive reworks the familiar story of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the anarchist uprising that burst forth in its midst. It explores the possibilities for poetry in the long tradition of transaction and tension between art and political rhetoric.

As the revolution in language rages, Jack Spicer, Federico Garcia Lorca, Cervantes, Orwell, and anarchists Buenaventura Durruti and Ramon Fernandez take to the barricades in the streets of Barcelona and Madrid. The anarchic archive of their correspondence over Spain becomes the stuffof revolutionary legend.

Anarchive takes up the history of anarchy as a site for poetic archeology, keeping in mind not only the figure of the anarchist as ideal poet but that poetry is built out of the sudden uprisings and insurgencies of language itself.

AUTHOR

Stephen Collis

Stephen Collis is an award winning poet, activist, and professor of contemporary literature at Simon Fraser University. His poetry books include Anarchive (2005), The Commons (2008), On the Material (2010, awarded the BC Book Prize for Poetry), and To the Barricades (2013). He has also written two books of criticism, including Phyllis Webb and the Common Good (2007). His collection of essays on the Occupy movement, Dispatches from the Occupation (2012), comes out of his activist experiences and is a philosophical meditation on activist tactics, social movements, and change. A Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University in 2011/12, Collis has read and lectured across Canada, the United States, and Europe. The Red Album is his first novel.