Wystan Curnow
Wystan Curnow was born in Christchurch in 1939, and educated at the University of Auckland, and the University of Pennsylvania where he completed a PhD in the poetry of Herman Melville in 1972. He lectured in English, more particularly in American literature, at the Universities of Rochester, York (Toronto) and Auckland where he is now a Professor Emeritus. He has published extensively on modern and contemporary art and literature. His selected art writings, The Critic’s Part, were published by Victoria University Press in 2014. He was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature and art in 2005.
Curnow has been writing poetry for over four decades. Five books have been published, the most recent of them, The Art Hotel, as scene of reading, a collaboration with architect Dino Chai, was published by Split/Fountain in 2009. ‘Text for a Cul-de-Sac’, commissioned by Lawrence Weiner, was published in Weiner's artist book, The Other Side of a Cul de Sac (The Power Plant, Toronto), and a selection from his first collection, Cancer Daybook, 1989, was reprinted in a book published by the Drawing Center, New York, to accompany its 2016 exhibition of Jennifer Bartlett’s pastels, entitled Hospital. His poems have appeared in journals such as the London Review of Books, Landfall (New Zealand), Jacket, Green Integer Review, and EOAGH (USA) among others. His work has been included in 10 anthologies.
He has given readings in London, Edinburgh, Belfast, Cologne, Halifax, Calgary, San Francisco, San Diego, Buffalo, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane. He has been a visiting writer at the prestigious Kelly Writers House, at the University of Pennsylvania and has occupied four international writer’s residencies: a Poetry Fellowship at the University of New York at Buffalo (1991), a Moet & Chandon fellowship in Avize, France (1997), an Institute of Modern Art Brisbane residency (2010) and the Landfall/Seresin Tuscany residency that same year.
Curnow comments: ‘Charles Bernstein once contrasted poems that mapped consciousness with poems that mapped the language. These days mine are of the latter kind. Each takes a particular pathway through the language we use and that uses us.
‘My poems are not usually one-off. “Episodes: first season” and its companion “Episodes: second season” (Landfall 229, Autumn 2015) belongs—although it's probably too early to say, to a new project with the working title ‘Wealth, or The Return of the Free Lunch’. These two start with plot summaries of episodes of TV series, vampire series in this case, and take it from there. Some of the references are obscure, but then none of us occupies the same corner of the language’
