We want Wystan

Al Filreis

We are hoping to bring Wystan Curnow to Penn in the fall of '08: poet, art critic, curator, maker of beautiful exhibit catalogues, editor of the most important anthology of essays on New Zealand literature.

Wystan Curnow was born in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1939, the son of the noted New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow. Wystan studied English and History at the University of Auckland, and took his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Back in the USA, Cancer Daybook, Castor Bay, and, most recently, Modern Colours.

Of Cancer Daybook he wrote: "I should say the first of these poems had at the time of their composition a peculiar purpose: that of distracting a disease. On a day to day basis, it seemed best to delay their publication as a volume until such time as that purpose had been well and truly served."
In 1998 Curnow brought out a stunningly beautiful retrospective catalogue of the life and work of Imants Tillers, the Australian visual artist, curator and writer. Tillers has exhibited widely since the late 1960s, and has represented Australia at important international exhbitions such as the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1975, Documenta 7 in 1982, and the 42nd Venice Biennale in 1986. Since 1981 Tillers has used his signature canvasboards to explore themes relevant to contemporary culture, from the centre/periphery debates of the 1980s, to the effects of migration, displacement and diaspora. Most recently, his paintings have been concerned with place, locality and evocations of the landscape. For his catalogue of Tillers' work, Curnow wrote substantive new art-critical prose, focusing on Tillers' great work, The Book of Power.

Curnow is also a writer of short stories, and in 1971 won the Katherine Mansfield Award for fiction.

At the time Essays on New Zealand Literature was published (1973), as we learned from the dustjacket: "Dr. Curnow is married with four children. He lives in Birkenhead and has a good view of the sea."

If we are able to bring him to Penn during the fall term of '08, Curnow would be given workspace at and use as a home base the Kelly Writers House. Students in Al Filreis' and Charles Bernstein's courses on modern and contemporary poetic and poetics would study Curnow's work, meet with him both in and out of the classroom. Students in poetry writing workshops (through the Creative Writing Program) would receive from Dr. Curnow commentary and guidance on their own poems. The students in Kenneth Goldsmith's experimental writing workshop, called "UnCreative Writing," would work closely with Curnow on their projects. All the while, events — a grand public reading, informal lunchtime workshop, recordings of Curnow's poems for PennSound (in front of a live audience) — would be on the Writers House events schedule. Students in Fine Arts and Art History will participate in any and all of these events, as would faculty, staff and students associated with the ICA. Finally, Curnow would be featured on two episodes of the ongoing poetry podcast, "PoemTalk," which is a collaboration of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing and the Poetry Foundation of Chicago.

[] Wystan Curnow PennSound page
[] review of 2001 Venice Biennale
[] Writing History on the Margins: New Zealand
[] three poems in Jacket 2006
[] bibliography
[] "Matisee Asleep"
[] "High Culture Now! A Manifesto
[] Best New Zealand Poems
[] "Max"
[] review of Curnow's Imants Tillers and the Book of Power

October 19, 2007

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.