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