F R I D A Y , J A N U A R Y 0 6 , 2 0 1 2

Anti-humanism, jazz, and Oceania: a briefing with Hamish Dewe

Back in 1995 a cantankerous poet and

printer named Alan Loney photocopied and stapled together a few poems and stories
by his friends, and gave the resulting sheaf of paper the rather grand title A Brief
Description of the Whole World.

Over the past seventeen years Loney's creation has evolved into a stylish, eclectic
journal called brief, which has published forty-three issues, attracted the services of
a series of editors, and regularly won funding from Creative New Zealand.

I edited a couple of issues of brief back in 2005-2006, and I'm guest editing the 44th
issue of the journal, which will have the theme of Oceania. Hamish Dewe edited
the 43rd issue of brief, and I wanted to talk with him about his experiences, and
about my plans for number 44. When I dropped into Hamish Dewe's house this
morning he was stretched out in his backyard, close to the place where a great plain
of mud-grey concrete gives way to plots of rising corn and spinach, and reading
Wyndham Lewis' supposedly unreadable novel Roaring Queen.

As long-time readers of this blog will know, Hamish has never been afraid to talk
turkey, and he took pleasure in both defending his own editorial principles and
questioning my ideas for the next issue of brief. Here's a transcript of my interview
with the man who was once described as 'the Ezra Pound of Auckland'...

SH: With its relatively small number of contributors and lack of obvious editorial
interventions, your issue of brief might seem like a throwback to the early days of
the journal in the mid-'90s...

HD: The similarity wasn't intentional. Back in the early days Alan Loney gave
contributors ten or so pages each and let them do what they wanted - he was leasing
space on the shop floor. I haven't done that. I've selected - I've rejected.

SH: Do you think that an editor needs to be an interventionist?

HD: Yes, unless he or she is a utopian. In the best of all worlds free expression might
be possible. In practice, though, writers tend to need pressure from outside. They
need to be told when they're producing shit. Loney's laissez-faire approach meant
that writers felt free to fill up their allotted pages with shit.

SH: You didn't include any of your own writing in your issue of brief. Other
editors, myself included, haven't been so modest...

HD: I see the editor as somebody leading a group, without dominating it. A group of
musicians, say. I used to belong to an improvisational jazz band. The most difficult
thing to do, in a band like that, is to know when not to play -

SH: Miles Davis used to sit out whole songs -

HD: That's right. I want to supervise things but I don't want to take over.
 SH: brief has been the focus for a number
of controversies over the years, as it has evolved. Alan Loney handed the
editorship to John Geraets, who began to solicit work from a wider circle of
writers and to comment on important cultural and political issues. Jack Ross
succeeded Geraets and began to publish people Loney disapproved of, and to
editorialise about subjects like the Iraq war and the imprisonment of Ahmed Zaoui.
Loney felt the journal had changed too much, and urged a boycott of it -

HD: Loney is a control freak.

SH: But he felt that he was making principled criticisms of the way the journal was
evolving. He had wanted brief to be a sort of record of the work being done by
neglected Kiwi writers - by members of what he called 'the Other Tradition' -

HD: That tradition existed mainly in Loney's head. Loney himself wasn't neglected -
he got grants, residencies, published a couple of books with Auckland University
Press - and neither were many of the contributors neglected.

SH: Loney seemed to derive some obscure psychological gratification from

imagining himself as a victim of persecution. Admittedly, his antics annoyed so
many people that he eventually really became a neglected, if not persecuted, figure.
He now lives overseas and has few contacts with the New Zealand literary scene.
How do you regardbrief, today?
HD: I see it as a way of cohering a community. There's a group of writers who share
their work in the journal. I'm wary about making too many generalisations about
their work, though -

SH: There's been some discussion at Reading the Maps about the future of offline
publishing in general, and offline literary publishing in particular. In this age of
online living, is it possible for a literary community to cohere around a print

journal? HD: I admit to belonging to various social

media. Facebook, twitter. But I'm a lurker at those places, not a poster. I don't feel
entirely comfortable in the online world. I love the old-fashioned print publication. I
love the spine, the pages, the coarseness of paper. I write in pages, and I think in
pages. The page is my horizon. I simply can't concentrate in the endlessness of
cyberspace.

SH: Do you sympathise, then, with those technosceptics who wonder whether the
online reading of literature is an entirely good thing?

HD: People like Nicholas Carr who argue that in twenty years kids won't be able to
read Tolstoy because their brains will have been rewired by the net strike me as a
little extreme. But I wonder whether the advocates of internet literature have
forgotten the importance of constraints. So many great works of art, of literature,
have been built around constraints. The sonnet is a constraint. The diptych is a
constraint. The cartoon frame is a constraint. Grammar is a constraint. You can't
think without constraints. The open-endedness of the internet, the ability of a site to
grow and grow, seems to excite many people: I don't know why. I like short poems
partly because I like to be able to see all of what I'm reading in one glance. I'm a
synoptic reader. I annoyed Brett Cross, who was laying my issue of brief up, because
I insisted on putting those poems which covered two pages on facing pages. I
couldn't bear to split them.

SH: And you also have a liking for old-fashioned means of composition?

HD: I like to compose long-handed. In fact, I can't type poetry. I hate the finality of
type, and I hate the neutrality of type. You strike a key, or press a keyboard button,
and you get the same letter as you got the last time you hit the key or button. It feels
mechanical. It is mechanical. But when you write you can vary the size and shape and
darkness of your letters, of your words. You can cross out errors or unacceptable
truths. You can mutilate phrases. You can write corrections and queries between the
lines. I know that a poem is usually published in print, not in longhand, but there is a
thread, a secret thread, that goes through the composition process, that insinuates its
way into the published text, when you compose in longhand...

SH: Can I ask you about the cover of your issue of brief?

HD: It was my favourite image from Wall, an exhibition of drawings held by Ellen
Portch at Elam last year. I am interested in the character it shows. I call him Sexless
Man. And I like the form of the drawing. I like its extreme structuring. I like the
regularity and repetition.

SH: Is the drawing a sort of visual equivalent of the poems you like?

HD: I do like poems that have a structure apart from the ego.

SH: That's quite a resonant phrase but I'm not sure exactly what it means. Can you
unpack it for me?

HD: Must I? I like resonant phrases. I have a tendency to talk in aphorisms...I guess
what I mean is that I don't like poems which revolve around individual selves. I don't
think the self offers the best vantage point on the world
SH: You want something larger than the self?

HD: Something smaller.

SH: I was listening to an interview with Alice Oswald, the British poet and
translator of The Iliad, and she was criticising the tendency of Westerners to see the
countryside in Romantic terms, in the terms that Wordsworth and his friends
established so long ago. She was arguing that there are many ways to see a
landscape, to see the world, and she asked the question "How does a landscape look
from the point of view of moss?" Is that the sort of question you're trying to
answer?

HD: Not really. Isn't it very Romantic to think you can impersonate moss,
instantiate yourself as moss in a cave? What fanciful bullshit! If you're talking about
models for breaking down the self, breaking through the self, I'd prefer you to discuss
Louis Althusser and his anti-humanist approach to the world -

SH: You like Althusser's idea that humans aren't the centre of the world, that
humans don't really even control their own actions, and that human history isn't
heading towards any sort of great goal?

HD: Very much so. I don't like Marxists who talk about dialectics. To me dialectics
always seems to involve some idea of synthesis, or reconciling small things in terms
of something bigger. I don't want reconciliation. I want fragments. I think that what
makes us human is the small stuff, the forces and processes that pass through us,
under the radar, so to speak, of our superegos, or even our conscious minds -

SH: Stuff like -

HD: - hunger, boredom, lust...

SH: Are you surprised that a number of people have called you a pessimistic
writer?

HD: No. And I take such criticism as a compliment. A while ago I was called dour.
That was meant as a criticism. I took it as a very great compliment.
 SH: Can I ask you to name a favourite text
from brief 44?

HD: I don't want to talk about a favourite but I'd like to draw attention to the poems
by Vaughan Rapatahana. They hark back to the early days of the journal -

SH: That seems to me a weird thing to say, because Vaughan's poems are short
and carry readily accessible, strongly political messages. By contrast, a lot of the
stuff in Alan Loney's brief seemed quite abstract and elaborate.

HD: Yes, Vaughan's work is political.

He sits in exile in Hong Kong passing judgment on Maori and Pakeha alike for their
perceived xenophobia and philistinism. He is disgusted by the way Australia and
New Zealand act as deputies for the US in the Pacific. He is worried about the threat
that the English language and Western culture poses to Pacific island societies.

But can't someone write poems which are passionately political and at the same time
linguistically adventurous? Just take a look at the way Vaughan, in his polemical
fury, mutilates his words and lines, throwing letters and whole phrases across the
pages. Just look at the way the meaning of his poems is tied up with the shape his
poems makes on their pages. He reminds me of some of the wild Futurist poets of the
early twentieth century - of Marinetti, for example, who tried to simulate the feeling
of war on the page by going berserk with typography...

SH: I think Vaughan has brought something different to brief, and to similar
spaces where he has published over the last year or so. brief has - let's face it - been
a journal dominated by urban middle-class Pakeha, but Vaughan has a very
different background -

HD: And his concerns are different. His focus on rural Maori society, and on the
Pacific -

SH: And his work in trying to save Pacific languages. As you know, I'm editing the
next issue of brief, and I've given it the theme of Oceania. I took the term Oceania
from the late Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau'ofa, who disliked 'Pacific', because he
thought that it suggested an ocean without people, rather than a set of peoples
connected by water. I don't want to pretend to be anything but a palangi, and I
don't want to pretend that brief isn't a palangi journal - I just want to bring a few
more Vaughan Rapatahanas into the literary consciousness of palangi Kiwis, and
make a few of us, at least, think about our society and our writing in terms of the
ocean and islands which surround us -

HD: That sounds very noble, but also quite problematic. briefrepresents a particular
set of people - most of them are used to thinking in terms of a national New Zealand
literary tradition, and in terms of European and North American writers. That's
where their models come from. Is there any real chance they'll embrace cultural
traditions they've never heard about before? I think they'll reply to your efforts with a
resounding silence -

SH: It can be argued though that a silence about Oceania - a reticence about New
Zealand's real geographical context, its real neighbours - underlies the whole
history of palangi literature here. The nationalists who created the official model
of New Zealand literature in the '30s, people like Allen Curnow and Charles Brasch
and Frank Sargeson, were seduced by a vision of this country as a handful of
islands floating in a vast empty ocean. We only need to think of some of the key
phrases of Curnow's famous nationalist poems - phrases like 'Not in narrow seas',
'distance looks our way' and so on - to appreciate the emphasis on isolation, on
loneliness.

Curnow and the other nationalists thought that New Zealand's great problem and
opportunity was its isolation. And the 'internationalists' who challenged their
programme - people like Louis Johnson - accepted, consciously or unconsciously,
the notion of New Zealand as a very physically isolated place. Johnson argued that
modern communications and literary tradition meant that there was 'an
underground tunnel' between this country and Europe. He also pointed out that, in
the postwar decades, we were drawing a lot closer culturally to America. But he
apparently never thought to challenge the idea that New Zealand sat in the middle
of a vast and empty ocean.

The reality is that, for many hundreds of years, the Pacific was a highway for
Polynesian cultures. And in the nineteenth century writers like Melville celebrated
Oceania as one of the great crossroads of humanity. Victorian New Zealanders
considered the seas to their north as vital to their colony's future, and worked to
build an island empire. The 'isolation' about which Curnow et al talk so often was
an economic and political construct. After the advent of refrigerated shipping New
Zealand became Britain's farm, and the Pacific became less economically
important. And as New Zealand and other foreign powers annexed most of the
Pacific Islands, restrictions were placed on movement across the ocean. Trade links
to cities like Sydney and Auckland were lost, and Polynesian vaka were burnt.

As a result of all this, palangi Kiwis lost their awareness of the galaxy of societies
which lay in the seas to their north. And it's surprising how little things have
changed, despite the recent great migrations to New Zealand from the Pacific
Islands. Epeli Hau'ofa celebrated the new mobility of island peoples in the late
twentieth century, because he saw it as a reopening of the Pacific highway which
palangi colonists had closed for decades. In Auckland some of the most vital art is
being made by Pacific immigrants, or people with a 'Pasifika' background. Painters
like Andy Leileisu'ao, who calls himself a Kamoan, or Kiwi Samoan, and Glen
Wolfgramm, who describes Tonga as his 'foreign homeland', are doing remarkable
work, as they bring palangi and Polynesian cultures into dialogue. But where are
the palangi artists and writers attempting a similar dialogue? Why isn't the great
emigration from the north stimulating us, as well?

HD: That's all very well, but you can't force people to take an interest in a particular
culture. And you shouldn't try to tyrannise us with geography.
Many brief contributors probably feel more comfortable with American literary
models than Pacific literary models. That's alright.

SH: I don't want to tell people what to read. But it does seem to me that palangi
Kiwi writers could be enriched by contact with other inhabitants of Oceania. There
are all sorts of fascinating intellectual currents floating across the Pacific.

Over the past year and a half I've been investigating the Tongan intellectual scene,
and in particular the 'Atenisi school of thought, which has its origins in a
tumbledown private university on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa but now has
adherants in universities across the world. Futa Helu, the founder of 'Atenisi,
wanted to fuse Polynesian and classical Greek thought. I think that was a
fascinating, if quixotic, ambition. I think Helu can teach us something about

biculturalism, about cultural exchange. Futa Helu was

passionate about Heraclitus - so is the poet and classicist Ted Jenner, one of the
most prolific and distinguished contributors to brief. Paul Janman, whose movie
about 'Atenisi was recently released, is a long-time reader of brief. I think
there are connections waiting to be made.

HD: I think you need to be clear about the difference between exchange and
appropriation. If you want to take something from another culture - fine. Picasso
stole from the Africans, Pound stole from the Chinese. But appropriation is not the
same as genuine exchange. I wish you well, but I think your Oceania issue will be an
aberration in the history of brief. I don't think you're going to inaugurate a new era in
the history of the journal. I think it's better to have smaller ambitions - to try to keep
the quality of the journal high, and to introduce the odd new voice, like Vaughan
Rapatahana. Your issue sounds like a utopian enterprise, and I am not a man for
utopias.

Send submissions for brief 44 to shamresearch@yahoo.co.nz

[Posted by Maps/Scott]
POSTED BY SKYLER AT 1/06/2012 04:14:00 PM

S U N D A Y , S E P T E M B E R 2 0 , 2 0 0 9

The Eviscerator Returns

Six and a half years ago, as the deadly

fireworks display called Shock and Awe was brightening the skies above Baghdad, I
helped to run an anti-war poetry reading at a small pub in Ponsonby. The event
attracted political activists, whose staccato verses perhaps needed to be shouted
through a megaphone and repeated by a crowd of thousands to attain their best
effect, plus a few uncompromising avant-gardists like Richard Taylor, who insisted
on performing a particularly long and particularly recondite pasage of his
notorious Infinite Poem, and a gaggle of apolitical Bohemian hipsters, who recited
the sort of sub-Kerouac kitsch which seems to be the stock in trade of the live poetry
'scene' in Auckland.
The evening was saved by the money collected for the anti-war movement, and by the
unexpected appearance of Hamish Dewe, a talented young Auckland poet who had
departed for the wilds of China at the beginning of the noughties. Apart from his
fierce love of Ezra Pound and his impeccable craftsmanship, Hamish had been
renowned in nineties for the enormous Panama hat he would almost always wear
in public.

'One form of war is economics', a bare-headed Dewe told the audience as he took the
stage, 'and one type of war booty is cheap labour'. Perhaps noting the puzzled looks
on the stoned faces of the wannabe Kerouacs, Dewe explained that he had 'exchanged
time for money in China, which is now a capitalist hellhole'. Hamish read several
short, caustic poems that drew on his experiences attempting to share the pearls of
English literature with the bored, spoilt children of a brand new bourgeoisie in the
universities of Chinese cities mutilated and polluted by out of control capital
accumulation:

disgust engendered

in the human mechanism

——what is there to

keep you from

doing away with

it, altogether?

——the call of the

necessary
though bestial

cannot be ignored

动物 torment

'As Marx said', Dewe muttered, while fossicking about in a folder for one of his
poems, 'capital comes into this world oozing blood and sweat from every pore. China
is blood and sweat.'

When the audience was asked to vote for the best performer of the night, they gave
Hamish the honour by a solid margin. The lefties had responded to his evisceration
of Wild West capitalism, the literary crowd admired the careful, high modernist
construction of his poems, and the hipsters were impressed by his cool, almost
detached delivery.

Later in 2003 Hamish Dewe returned to China to exchange more of his labour-time
for money, but he sent home regular poem-reports on the country he hated.
'Shanghai', which was published in the the journal brief earlier this year, exemplifies
the controlled fury of Dewe's despatches:

our backs, minds, like

our streets,

swayed

with the force of acquiescence

to
French

German

English

Japanese

rapacity

and crowded round the effluvia of

the Huangpu

studded with hairdressers

that don’t cut hair, staffed

with the cream of Anhui

‘virginity’, like our

kitchens

laundries

bedrooms,
contort.
So much to revile and so little time.

Hamish Dewe recently returned from China for good, and I am pleased to announce
that he was resumed his early habit of producing short, caustic commentaries on
Kiwi society. I am also pleased to announce that Hamish be will be taking the mike
during next Friday night's Titus Books launch for Richard von Sturmer's memoir On
The Eve of Never Departing and the acclaimed Mexican poet Rogelio Guedea's
collection Free Fall (you can read a preview of each book here). Dewe is a fan of
Latin American poetry and an accomplished translator from Spanish and Lusophone
literatures, so it is appropriate that Titus Books boss Brett Cross has invited him to
read some of Free Fall's lapidarian prose poems. Just don't ask Hamish whether he
had a good day at the office.

Here's the formal invite for what should be an exciting night:

Titus Books

is pleased to invite you along with friends, family &c.

to the launch of

On the Eve of Never Departing

by Richard von Sturmer

Free Fall
by Rogelio Guedea

Friday Sept 25th

Fordes Bar, 122 Anzac Ave
Central City from 6.30pm

Introduction by Tony Green

Readings by Richard von Sturmer

and Hamish Dewe
MC: Scott Hamilton

Live music by Otis Mace

POSTED BY MAPS AT 9/20/2009 10:22:00 AM

https://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2009/09/six-and-half-years-ago-as-deadly.html