Alan Loney

Alan Perress Loney is a writer, poet, editor, publisher and letterpress printer. His work has been published by University and private presses in New Zealand, Australia and North America. His own presses have printed and published many of New Zealand's most noted poets. He has also produced books himself, and in collaboration with artists and printmakers in New Zealand and overseas. Originally living and working in New Zealand, he now resides in Melbourne, Australia.

Born in Lower Hutt, New Zealand in 1940, the eldest of eight children in a working-class family, he left school at the age of fifteen. Music provided him with a youthful entry into Wellington's bohemian and intellectual scene as he played the drums in several bands including the University Jazz Club.

In his early twenties, under the influence of poet George South, Loney turned from music to poetry and started writing. His first volume of poems The Bare Remembrance was published by Caveman Press in Dunedin in 1971. After moving from Dunedin to Christchurch in 1974, he set up his own private press, Hawk Press. As well as printing the work of younger New Zealand poets, he produced a second volume of his own work, Dear Mondrian, which won a New Zealand Book Award in 1976. By the time Hawk Press closed in 1983 it had published over twenty poets.

Inspired by his discovery of Charles Olson's 'Maximus Poems' and new ideas on poetics such as those promoted by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Loney's own work continued to develop along progressive lines. He befriended American poet Robert Creeley when Creeley toured NZ in 1976 and published Hello by Creeley, a work that reflected on the poet's experiences in New Zealand. (Creeley was heavily involved with Olson and was part of a school called the Black Mountain Poets). This early contact with contemporary American writing surfaced in other ways than in Loney's own work. In 1982 and 1983 he edited the only three numbers of a quarterly literary magazine "Parallax: a journal of postmodern literature and art". His contacts as an editor and publisher and his own subsequent writing led to later travels to the USA where he read at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Pennsylvania, spoke at seminars and gave a talk in the Threads Talk Series. Several recordings of Loney's lectures and readings are available on PennSound

Running parallel to this work as a poet, his printing developed after moving back to Wellington with a new press called Black Light in 1987. Here he expanded his range of publications and experimented with typographical design. Also in Wellington, he founded The Book Arts Society in 1990 which had a wide range of members united by their interest in and concern for the ‘book as form’. Under this umbrella, printers, designers, writers, collectors, calligraphers, paper-makers and binders joined a program of exhibitions, workshops, talks and seminars.

...
Wikipedia