I teach contemporary literatures, cultural studies and critical theory in the Department of English at UBC. I am also a member of the Improvisation, Community and Social Practice Research Initiative. My book of poems is Embouchure (Nightwood Editions, 2011). My creative and critical work centres on the intersections of music and text, and theories of listening, performance and reception. More at http://www.kevinmcneilly.ca.
Aside from producers and performers, I was one of the few people able to attend both stagings of ... more Aside from producers and performers, I was one of the few people able to attend both stagings of Québécité, a jazz opera composed by Ottawa native (now New York-based) D.D. Jackson, with a libretto by Governor General’s Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke. The premiere at Guelph’s River Run Centre on 5 September 2003 was the main event of the tenth Guelph International Jazz Festival, for which it was commissioned. This performance was recorded by the CBC, which has broadcast portions of it several times over the past few months. The opera was mounted again in Vancouver for two nights in October at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, a much more intimate venue. A comparison of this scaled-down performance with the grandiose version at Guelph – a remarkable and significant contrast, despite their obvious continuities – points up the demands of form and scale in this emergent musical genre. Jazz opera – with few, but powerful, antecedents in such works as Scott Joplin’s Treemonish...
Produced in tandem with the first major exhibition of Michael Snow's work in the UK, at Arnol... more Produced in tandem with the first major exhibition of Michael Snow's work in the UK, at Arnolfini in Bristol, this book offers critical clarification of the artist's concern since the 1960s with perception, the filmic and narrative. Generously illustrated with images of Snow's seminal works, it brings together historically significant texts on the artist's work, for instance by Amy Taubin and Regina Cornwell, along with vital new essays by Al Rees and Malclom Le Grice, for example. Lucy Steeds is the co-editor, with Catsou Roberts, of the whole and contributes the essay 'Snow in England'.
... "It is myself," he writes in a discarded draft, "that I remake."29 Yeats&... more ... "It is myself," he writes in a discarded draft, "that I remake."29 Yeats's ongoing labour to ... the negative dialectics of Adorno, wherein an individual subject sustains an ongoing engagement with a systematic or "logical" universality through what Adorno calls "self reflection", a ...
In this multimedia collaboration, visual artist Jeanette Hicks creates four ink and water images ... more In this multimedia collaboration, visual artist Jeanette Hicks creates four ink and water images in relation to Francois Hicks improvised clarinet Aerials. Interview with musician Francois Houle and artist Jeannette Hicks in which they discuss the origins and development of their collaborative project "ElectroAerials." Hicks and Houle explore the intricacies of improvisation and the collaborative relationship between sound and visual representation.
Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Robson Reading Series at ... more Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Robson Reading Series at IKBLC. Kevin McNeilly is an associate professor in the Department of English at UBC. He has been interested in poetics and philosophy since graduate school: he wrote his Master's thesis on the poetry of Robert Bringhurst, and his doctoral dissertation on the later work of William Butler Yeats. He has written and published scholarship and critical essays on a variety of literature, media and music, including work by writers, thinkers and performers such as Charles Mingus, Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Zwicky, Miles Davis, and Robert Creeley. He is a member of the "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" research initiative. In addition to his academic publications, he has had poems published in Canadian Literature and The Antigonish Review. Embouchure (Nightwood Editions, 2011) is his debut poetry collection. He lives in Vancouver, BC.
And that’s what the book does for Helwig, for us. All these years later, he’s still capturing mom... more And that’s what the book does for Helwig, for us. All these years later, he’s still capturing moments, still calling out the names of things. Many of those moments and names are important: Helwig lived and wrote through the CanLit Boom, the remarkable cultural explosion that took place between the late 1950s and mid-1970s and left us with what are still the best-known names in Canadian literature. He remembers many of them here, names we know well, and names we likely should know better, like poets Tom Marshall and Edward Lacey and publisher Michael Macklem. Fifty years ago, Helwig began writing in vignettes, scenes rather than stories, ‘because that was how the world came to me, in fragments, in moods.’ Something of that method survives in his memoir. It’s there in his memories of others, of lives crossed as well as lived – a character sketch of CBC TV’s impossible and impossibly brilliant John Hirsch, for instance, or a brief scene starring a young, drunk Timothy Findley in ‘very brief powder blue shorts.’ It’s there in the poems and short chapters from the present interspersed throughout the story. And it’s there, too, in the book’s one – perhaps unavoidable – weakness, the episodic feeling of its later chapters. Mostly, it’s there in the well-caught, well-said detail: a poignant conversation overheard in a hospital waiting room, a prophetic road sign in Newfoundland, the way the light hits a room at the end of a day. Helwig’s prose in The Names of Things is clean, solid, more functional than fancy: like I imagine his father’s furniture repairs were, like his own renovations of homes in Kingston, Wolfe Island, and now Prince Edward Island. It’s an important book by a modest man, a poet who could say of another, better-known poet, Michael Ondaatje, ‘With my friends writing like that, how could I not be impelled to write more poetry?’ Tom Marshall saw in Helwig ‘a struggle between the bourgeois and the arsonist, a selfish, hungry, driven man trying to be a decent husband and father.’ Maybe so, but we don’t see much of that selfishness here, more the decency. (NICK MOUNT)
Aside from producers and performers, I was one of the few people able to attend both stagings of ... more Aside from producers and performers, I was one of the few people able to attend both stagings of Québécité, a jazz opera composed by Ottawa native (now New York-based) D.D. Jackson, with a libretto by Governor General’s Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke. The premiere at Guelph’s River Run Centre on 5 September 2003 was the main event of the tenth Guelph International Jazz Festival, for which it was commissioned. This performance was recorded by the CBC, which has broadcast portions of it several times over the past few months. The opera was mounted again in Vancouver for two nights in October at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre, a much more intimate venue. A comparison of this scaled-down performance with the grandiose version at Guelph – a remarkable and significant contrast, despite their obvious continuities – points up the demands of form and scale in this emergent musical genre. Jazz opera – with few, but powerful, antecedents in such works as Scott Joplin’s Treemonish...
Produced in tandem with the first major exhibition of Michael Snow's work in the UK, at Arnol... more Produced in tandem with the first major exhibition of Michael Snow's work in the UK, at Arnolfini in Bristol, this book offers critical clarification of the artist's concern since the 1960s with perception, the filmic and narrative. Generously illustrated with images of Snow's seminal works, it brings together historically significant texts on the artist's work, for instance by Amy Taubin and Regina Cornwell, along with vital new essays by Al Rees and Malclom Le Grice, for example. Lucy Steeds is the co-editor, with Catsou Roberts, of the whole and contributes the essay 'Snow in England'.
... "It is myself," he writes in a discarded draft, "that I remake."29 Yeats&... more ... "It is myself," he writes in a discarded draft, "that I remake."29 Yeats's ongoing labour to ... the negative dialectics of Adorno, wherein an individual subject sustains an ongoing engagement with a systematic or "logical" universality through what Adorno calls "self reflection", a ...
In this multimedia collaboration, visual artist Jeanette Hicks creates four ink and water images ... more In this multimedia collaboration, visual artist Jeanette Hicks creates four ink and water images in relation to Francois Hicks improvised clarinet Aerials. Interview with musician Francois Houle and artist Jeannette Hicks in which they discuss the origins and development of their collaborative project "ElectroAerials." Hicks and Houle explore the intricacies of improvisation and the collaborative relationship between sound and visual representation.
Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Robson Reading Series at ... more Webcast sponsored by Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the Robson Reading Series at IKBLC. Kevin McNeilly is an associate professor in the Department of English at UBC. He has been interested in poetics and philosophy since graduate school: he wrote his Master's thesis on the poetry of Robert Bringhurst, and his doctoral dissertation on the later work of William Butler Yeats. He has written and published scholarship and critical essays on a variety of literature, media and music, including work by writers, thinkers and performers such as Charles Mingus, Elizabeth Bishop, Jan Zwicky, Miles Davis, and Robert Creeley. He is a member of the "Improvisation, Community and Social Practice" research initiative. In addition to his academic publications, he has had poems published in Canadian Literature and The Antigonish Review. Embouchure (Nightwood Editions, 2011) is his debut poetry collection. He lives in Vancouver, BC.
And that’s what the book does for Helwig, for us. All these years later, he’s still capturing mom... more And that’s what the book does for Helwig, for us. All these years later, he’s still capturing moments, still calling out the names of things. Many of those moments and names are important: Helwig lived and wrote through the CanLit Boom, the remarkable cultural explosion that took place between the late 1950s and mid-1970s and left us with what are still the best-known names in Canadian literature. He remembers many of them here, names we know well, and names we likely should know better, like poets Tom Marshall and Edward Lacey and publisher Michael Macklem. Fifty years ago, Helwig began writing in vignettes, scenes rather than stories, ‘because that was how the world came to me, in fragments, in moods.’ Something of that method survives in his memoir. It’s there in his memories of others, of lives crossed as well as lived – a character sketch of CBC TV’s impossible and impossibly brilliant John Hirsch, for instance, or a brief scene starring a young, drunk Timothy Findley in ‘very brief powder blue shorts.’ It’s there in the poems and short chapters from the present interspersed throughout the story. And it’s there, too, in the book’s one – perhaps unavoidable – weakness, the episodic feeling of its later chapters. Mostly, it’s there in the well-caught, well-said detail: a poignant conversation overheard in a hospital waiting room, a prophetic road sign in Newfoundland, the way the light hits a room at the end of a day. Helwig’s prose in The Names of Things is clean, solid, more functional than fancy: like I imagine his father’s furniture repairs were, like his own renovations of homes in Kingston, Wolfe Island, and now Prince Edward Island. It’s an important book by a modest man, a poet who could say of another, better-known poet, Michael Ondaatje, ‘With my friends writing like that, how could I not be impelled to write more poetry?’ Tom Marshall saw in Helwig ‘a struggle between the bourgeois and the arsonist, a selfish, hungry, driven man trying to be a decent husband and father.’ Maybe so, but we don’t see much of that selfishness here, more the decency. (NICK MOUNT)
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