Rich Owens on Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire (PPNL)

Poet-scholar Rich Owens has a thoughtful essay in the new Poetry Project Newsletter addressing Sean Bonney's Abandoned Buildings and Wild Horses Of Fire in terms of devaluation, distributed authorship, and the limits of digital commoning.

You can also read a PDF of the essay at Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor and at the Poetry Project's website.

And here I sense the vehicle that delivers Bonney’s poems and Donovan’s criticism embodies almost precisely the same contradictions each confront in their thinking—that is, the very instrument that allows each to circulate their work to the widest possible audience also shackles and mediates it, distorts and compromises it, generating a tension that challenges the potential efficacy of the work. But the risk Bonney and Donovan court in addressing the commons by way of a fundamentally compromised and widely devalued digital publishing service alerts us to the rigid material limits we—as poets, artists and critics—are forced to work within and through.
--Rich Owens, "PRISON-HOUSE OF COMMONS: SEAN BONNEY VIS-A-VIS THOM DONOVAN"