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Allen Curnow : simply by sailing in a new direction : a biography
Allen Curnow (1911-2001) is widely recognised as one of the most distinguished poets writing in English in the twentieth century. For seventy years from Valley of Decision (1933) to The Bells of Saint Babel's (2001) Curnow's poetry was always on the move, exploring such universal themes as identity, memory and mortality and striving to 'make it new'. Through literary criticism and anthologies such as the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse he helped identify the distinctive imaginative preoccupations that made New Zealand's writing and culture different from elsewhere. By the time of his death at the age of ninety, he had completed a body of work unique in this country and increasingly recognised internationally. This major biography introduces readers to Allen Curnow's life and work: from a childhood in a Christchurch vicarage, through theological training, journalism and university life, marriages and children, and on to an international career as a writer of poetry, plays and criticism. The book lucidly identifies the shifting textures of Curnow's writing and unravels the connections between life and words. The result of several decades' research and writing, Simply by Sailing in a New Direction offers deep insight into the development of New Zealand's finest poet -- book jacket.
Book
Singing wild: Allen Curnow in 1940
In August 1940, Allen Curnow wrote Douglas Lilburn and warned him, 'For God's sake, never let them claim you as a \"N.Z.\" composer. They are the great enemy, these publicists of \"national\" arts and letters'. He also complained that 'we [New Zealanders] persist in identifying freedom with the most destructive, most enslaving idea in history, the idea of nationality, of which fear is the father and murder the child'. Such sentiments may be surprising to hear from a poet who would go on to edit the Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-45 (1945) and the Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse (1960), anthologies whose introductions are famed for their 'aggressive proclamation of nation'. Anyone, though, who has spent extended time with Curnow's oeuvre comes to expect such contradictions. One common response has been to take a step back and locate individual statements within the larger arc of his intellectual and literary development. Critics such as Lawrence Jones, John Newton, and Stuart Murray have explored with sensitivity and insight the many zigs and zags in the poet's career as he pursued two now-opposed-now-coinciding imperatives, 'creating a new national literature and fulfilling the [...] demands of the modernist aesthetic'.
Journal Article
Allen Curnow, A post-Christian poet?
'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him' goes the opening sentence of Julian Barnes's 'Nothing To Be Frightened Of' (2008), his part-memoir, part-disquisition on thanatophobia. Barnes’s line might provide a fitting epigraph, even a ' fitting tribute', to Terry Sturm's recent biography of Allen Curnow and / or to the new collected edition of his poems edited by Elizabeth Caffin and Sturm. Because the question I want to begin to explore is what happens if we think of the Methuselah of New Zealand poetry as a 'post-Christian' poet?
Journal Article
Allen Curnow: Venetian correspondences
I'm writing about Venice, 'the floating city', because I have my father to thank for this feeling I have for the seashore - 'last year's Adriatic/yesterday's Pacific'. Afloat or on the hard, the beach is where I like to be. There's something visceral and helpless about this attraction to the ocean. I'm in love with it. Being too far from it for too long, discomforts me. In my twenties in Philadelphia, studying Herman Melville, I'd be walking eagerly to work in the early morning, crossing the Schuylkill River and the mere sight of its waters would fill my nostrils with salt sea air. Nowadays it's the smell of the mangroved mudflat of the Onepoto inlet at the bottom of the garden that does it for me, delivers my morning dose of ozone (Dimethyl Sulphide). The reason for this is (I swear): an adolescence spent on the shores of nearby Shoal Bay, in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour. My father bought a property there following our move north from Christchurch in 1951. Herbert Street was a dirt road that ended at a cliff edge. The house, designed by architect Vernon Brown, was the work of boatbuilder, Brian Donovan, whose shipyard was next door. Soon we had a 12-ft clinker-built dinghy with a Seagull outboard, beached at the bottom of the section to go fishing in. A.R.D. Fairburn found it for us. Then, later on, there was the family bach on the West Coast. It was walking distance up Lone Kauri Road from where the surf of the Tasman's wrestler shoulders would 'throw' us all, every man Jack and Jill, time after time, down upon Karekare beach's black sands. And have us leaping back up again, eagerly eyeing the next dumper.
Journal Article
Curnow's sonnets
The term sonnet, the 'OED' tells us, comes into use in English in the middle of the sixteenth century, when it can mean either a 'song having a poetic quality' or the more strict idea of a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme. Over time this idea of the sonnet has come to dominate. In the 1590s, the 'OED' further shows, 'sonnet' had also become used a verb meaning to 'compose sonnets, to sonnetize'. This of course is the prime period when composing sonnets was considered a social grace as well as an artistic practice. The 1590s sees the posthumous publication of Sidney's sequence 'Astrophil and Stella' (1591), and the publication of Spenser's 'Amoretti' (1595). Shakespeare had already started writing his sonnets, with several of them being published (and praised) in 1598, prior to the publication in 1609 of his whole collection of 'Sonnets'. Between them these three poets set the terms under which, ever since, any poet writing sonnets in English has sought to engage. In his 1990 interview with Peter Simpson, Curnow describes himself as writing for 'anyone, anywhere, who reads poetry in English and knows the tradition'. By tradition Curnow means (and I assume knows his interviewer will readily grasp) the sense of the liveness of the canon of English poetics, as classically defined in turn by T. S. Eliot in his 100-year-old essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent': 'the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order'.
Journal Article
Remembering Curnow
I first met Allen Curnow, very briefly, in 1961, when I lived at Pukerua Bay and was a friend and neighbour of Denis Glover. Allen often came down to visit Denis, with whom he shared that great South Island background so important to their poetry. I wanted to ask Allen why he hadn't considered certain young Wellington poets for his latest anthology. I was thinking of myself, of course, and Fleur Adcock, Hone Tuwhare, and Gordon Challis, but Denis, sensing trouble or desperate for a drink, or probably both, hurried Allen away before I could make a nuisance of myself. Wellington poets were a bolshie lot in those days and often acted like disgruntled outsiders, which I suppose we were.
Journal Article
Allen and Jeny: A tribute
Shares detailed personal memories of the poet and his wife. Celebrates the firmness and moral authority of the latter, noting that her own scholarly career with its meticulous research was deliberately underplayed in her life with her poet husband. Builds on and explains Allen's remark that ‘a poem must be visceral’. Describes many reminiscences of why the husband and wife were a 'glamorous pair'. Includes three poems by the article's author: Eyebrows, toenails, Dining with Jeny, and Jeny climbs the steps. Source: National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, licensed by the Department of Internal Affairs for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
Journal Article
Contraries in two late poems by Allen Curnow: 'A busy port' and 'looking West, late afternoon, low water'
The two poems I have chosen, 'A Busy Port' and 'Looking West, Late Afternoon, Low Water', both date from the 1990s and were first published in book form in 'Early Days Yet' (1997). As it happens, I was indirectly involved with an earlier publication of both poems.
Journal Article