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Kevin McNeilly

University of British Columbia, English, Faculty Member

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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.

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Papers by Kevin McNeilly

This Ain’t No Time for Innocence: Québécité

Canadian Theatre Review

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...

Improvisation and Emergence, For Frédérique Arroyas

Critical studies in improvisation, Jul 20, 2022

Extemporaneous Genomics

Duke University Press eBooks, Mar 3, 2016

Michael Snow: Almost Cover to Cover

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'.

Bibliothèque Nationale

I find a snapshot of the man folded in foxed pages on Brecht and Kabbalah, and try to picture him... more I find a snapshot of the man folded in foxed pages on Brecht and Kabbalah, and try to picture him as he once was: drummed out of the academy, scolded by professors and officials, he stays slouched over a dark library table, contemplating the scholar as hero, and scribbles a short note on Baudelaire. Groucho Marx moustache and uncombed black hair make him look the part, a latter-day Nero fiddling, as Rome's troubled façade crumbles, with marginalia. Speech and action determine which souls enter Valhalla; his received a failing grade. Suicide his own final solution, he died at the Spanish border, a mind on edge. What else could have been done? Not fear but pride brought him up short. Now he fills a dirt wedge on foreign soil, alone, under a hedge.

Cultural Morphologies: Yeats, Spengler and Adorno

... "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 ...

The crime of poetry

Canadian Literature, 2004

Extemporaneous Genomics

Negotiated Moments

Lines of Flight : Improvisation, Hope and Refuge

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.

This Transitive Age

Robson Reading Series at IKBLC Presents "Embouchere

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.

Improvisation and Exhaustion

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation

Five Fairly Short Talks on Anne Carson

Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2003

<i>The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks</i> (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2008

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)

Kiss the Librarian, But Close the Hellmouth:'It's Like a Whole Big Sucking Thing

Slayage: The Online …, 2001

Toward a Poetics of Dislocation: Elizabeth Bishop and PK Page Writing" Brazil

Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature …, 1998

, P.k. Page introduced a glosa based on elizabeth bishop's "The Sandpiper" by admitting that, whi... more , P.k. Page introduced a glosa based on elizabeth bishop's "The Sandpiper" by admitting that, while both she and bishop lived in brazil in the same period, they had never met. Page's interstitial lyric "Poor bird" is intended, as she works herself through bishop's lines, as both a tribute to bishop and a demarcation of poetic kinship, a provisional map of their common poetic yearning: a vocation year in, year out, morning to evening looking for something, something, something.

Kiss the Librarian, But Close the Hellmouth: "It's Like a Whole Big Sucking Thing

Slayage, 2001

This Transitive Age

Canadian Literature, 2016

Poetry, Textures of Loss

Canadian Literature, 2016

Improvisation in Scattered Times

This Ain’t No Time for Innocence: Québécité

Canadian Theatre Review

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...

Improvisation and Emergence, For Frédérique Arroyas

Critical studies in improvisation, Jul 20, 2022

Extemporaneous Genomics

Duke University Press eBooks, Mar 3, 2016

Michael Snow: Almost Cover to Cover

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'.

Bibliothèque Nationale

I find a snapshot of the man folded in foxed pages on Brecht and Kabbalah, and try to picture him... more I find a snapshot of the man folded in foxed pages on Brecht and Kabbalah, and try to picture him as he once was: drummed out of the academy, scolded by professors and officials, he stays slouched over a dark library table, contemplating the scholar as hero, and scribbles a short note on Baudelaire. Groucho Marx moustache and uncombed black hair make him look the part, a latter-day Nero fiddling, as Rome's troubled façade crumbles, with marginalia. Speech and action determine which souls enter Valhalla; his received a failing grade. Suicide his own final solution, he died at the Spanish border, a mind on edge. What else could have been done? Not fear but pride brought him up short. Now he fills a dirt wedge on foreign soil, alone, under a hedge.

Cultural Morphologies: Yeats, Spengler and Adorno

... "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 ...

The crime of poetry

Canadian Literature, 2004

Extemporaneous Genomics

Negotiated Moments

Lines of Flight : Improvisation, Hope and Refuge

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.

This Transitive Age

Robson Reading Series at IKBLC Presents "Embouchere

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.

Improvisation and Exhaustion

Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation

Five Fairly Short Talks on Anne Carson

Canadian Literature Litterature Canadienne a Quarterly O Criticism and Review, 2003

<i>The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks</i> (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2008

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)

Kiss the Librarian, But Close the Hellmouth:'It's Like a Whole Big Sucking Thing

Slayage: The Online …, 2001

Toward a Poetics of Dislocation: Elizabeth Bishop and PK Page Writing" Brazil

Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature …, 1998

, P.k. Page introduced a glosa based on elizabeth bishop's "The Sandpiper" by admitting that, whi... more , P.k. Page introduced a glosa based on elizabeth bishop's "The Sandpiper" by admitting that, while both she and bishop lived in brazil in the same period, they had never met. Page's interstitial lyric "Poor bird" is intended, as she works herself through bishop's lines, as both a tribute to bishop and a demarcation of poetic kinship, a provisional map of their common poetic yearning: a vocation year in, year out, morning to evening looking for something, something, something.

Kiss the Librarian, But Close the Hellmouth: "It's Like a Whole Big Sucking Thing

Slayage, 2001

This Transitive Age

Canadian Literature, 2016

Poetry, Textures of Loss

Canadian Literature, 2016

Improvisation in Scattered Times

Fainter Music: Charlotte Mew’s Untimely Dissolve (Unedited Version of a Paper Presented at the Material Modernisms Conference at UBC in July 2001)

This is an unedited version of a paper delivered at the Material Modernisms conference at UBC (Va... more

Pierre Hébert, Scratching Dissent (Conference Paper presented at the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, September 2011)

Listening in the Margins: Kathleen Jamie, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (Paper Presented at the Acoustic Communication and Sound Design Symposium, September 2011)

Presented at the "Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Design" symposium at Green College, UBC, ... more Presented at the "Acoustic Communication and Soundscape Design" symposium at Green College, UBC, 16 September 2011, sponsored by Green College and the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University) Two recent collections of lyrical essays by contemporary UK poets - Findings (2005) by Kathleen Jamie and Edgelands (2010) by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Robertsfocus on unravelling various cognitive boundaries and material contact---zones, the liminal spaces that both divide and confound the natural and the artificial, the urban and the rural, the human and the non---human. These texts interrogate constructions of human self---knowledge, and in so doing produce a poetics - a careful re---making - of spaces, refiguring various collisions of the wild and the habitable, of landscape and landfill, of the biotic and the plastic into a viable, late ecology. These works make their case for a specifically epigone phenomenology, a renewal of attention - what Jamie calls

Late Settings, Boxed Sets: Sandover, Watchmen, Galactica (Keynote address at the English Unbound conference at UBC, March, 2007)

Late Rhapsody: Tyrone Power Reading Byron (Paper Delivered at the Byron and Modernity Conference, October 2007)

John Zorn and Walter Benjamin: Radical Jewish Culture

Canadian Literature 166 (Autumn 2000): 5-16, 2000

Five Fairly Short Talks on Anne Carson

Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003): 6-10., 2003

Connective Tissues (Co-authored by Julie Dawn Smith)

Critical Studies in Improvisation 4.2, 2008

The Crime of Poetry: George Elliott Clarke in Conversation with Wayde Compton and Kevin McNeilly

Canadian Literature 182 (Autumn 2004): 53-64.

Gifts and Questions: An Interview with Anne Carson

Canadian Literature 176 (Spring 2003): 12-25.

Restless Fields (Review of Books by Ken Babstock, Mark Goldstein, Basma Kavanagh, Barbara Langhorst, Fred Wah)

Canadian Literature

Twice the Culture Cringe (Review of Two Books by Greg Gatenby)

Graceful Clarities (Review of Hologram by P. K. Page)

Translator Retranslated (Review of the Selected Poems of Adam Czerniawski, trans. Iain Higgins)

Trans Layton (Review of Layton, l'essentiel: Anthologie portative d'Irving Layton by Michel Albert)

Many and Other (Review of Two Books by E. D. Blodgett)

Earth Enough and Time (Review of Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New by P.K. Page and Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation by Eric Ormsby)

Almosting (Review of Apocrypha: Further Journeys by Stan Dragland)

Pray Meditate Upon its Poetry (Review of Two Books by Lise Downe)

The Poet's Novel (Un)framed (Review of From Cohen to Carson: The Poet's Novel in Canada by Ian Rae)

La beauté est nue (Review of Illuminated Verses by George Elliott Clarke)

Ragas of Longing: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2004

The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks (Review of Robert Bringhurst)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2008