Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Wystan Curnow
Subject: Re: poetry and visual art
Dodie,
I was amused, too. Bemused. Actually I know plenty of NY artists who are
‘amazingly open, personal, and unpretentious’ but I also like my artists
reserved, cool, and up with the play, here in Auckland but, you know,
especially in New York. The city, seems to me, is more than it’s moneyed
dealer/museum structure–calling it corrupt is a symptom of poet’s self-pity
more than a cure for it–and US campuses are almost by definition islands of
teaching/learning devoid of culture, in the sense of the culture sustained by
major urban centres. University professors can be open, personal and
unpretentious, but do they dress well? What are their tastes in art, music and
poetry? So, one of the great advantages enjoyed by visual artists has been the
cultural life of New York. I don’t know that the workshop culture on campuses
is a key, because in New Zealand the difference between the mainstreams of
the two arts is much the same and there are hardly any courses in creative
writing here.
Jordan Davis said the view that any painting with words in it instantly fell to
half the value it would have had had it not those words still had substance. For
much of the 80s it was arguably the other way around. And certainly, the likes
of Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, make a decent living installing words on
gallery walls and even selling them to collectors and museums for good prices.
There seems little doubt that the prestige of literature (and of poetry especially)
has fallen over the century, and that of the visual arts has risen. The process has
accelerated over the second half. This has something to do with the rise of
visual media generally. There is probably a connection, then, between the
greater prestige of the visual arts and the more avant-garde character of its
mainstream.
I was interested in George Bowering’s comment that in Canada the poetics of
avant-garde were the mainstream. Even if he is exaggerating, and given that it’s
not the case in New Zealand, I nevertheless suspect that internationally it is the
US avant-garde tradition that is the more widely known and followed. Am I
wrong? How this has a bearing on the art/poetry relation is that in the visual