Books

Just read my first Flannery O'Connor - A Good Man is Hard to Find. I remember reading the title story somewhere else and it was just as good the second time. She is terrific at conjuring up a sense of mounting dread. Her characters feel real mostly because they act out of motives that are obscure even to themselves. That sense of mystery gestures to the beyond, the religious, the damned and the salvific. There is a dogged persistence to her most memorable characters, like Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson in the otherwise slight story "The Artificial Nigger." The religious symbolism is laid on a bit too thickly for my taste, but hey, I'm not of the South. The masterpieces are here: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," "Good Country People," and "The Displaced Person." The slighter ones too: "A Stroke of Good Fortune," "A Temple of the Holy Ghost," "A Circle in the Fire," "A Late Encounter with the Enemy."

When I told NJ that I was writing a series of poems in the voice of a Jamaican transplant to America, she recommended Ishion Hutchinson's House of Lords and Commons, and Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal. The Hutchinson is marvelous, a lyricism that is always surprising, precise, and intelligent. I had to read it twice to understand what he is saying, but I wanted to read it a second time, and probably a third, because it was so musical. There is so little apology in it. I'm ambivalent about Cannibal. Sinclair has passages of gorgeous beauty, but the associative metaphorical leaps often leaves me holding on to nothing. I had the impression of listening to a virtuoso but had no idea what I was listening to, besides the generalities of family, home, and feminism. I did not think the allusions to The Tempest added to my understanding of the play or of the poetry. It's very probable that I'm just not the right reader for it.

Ponti by Sharlene Teo. My expectations might have been set too high because of all the hype (Simon and Schuster! Glowing blurb from Ian McEwan!) but I was seriously disappointed by this debut novel by Singaporean writer Sharlene Teo. What is real and deeply felt (synonyms in my aesthetics) is the difficult relationship between mothers and daughters, and between close (girl)friends, but the novel does not succeed in translating what is deeply felt into a persuasive plot or convincing characters.

The plot feels secondhand: cinema ticket girl is picked out by an auteur wannabe to become a film star; girl student bullied by schoolmates because she is different; young girl brings food to fugitive Malayan Communists in the manner of Pip to Magwitch. The character arcs are mundanely depressing. Where are the monsters? Where is the bloodsucking Pontianak? A mother who does not like her own daughter? So many mothers are like that. A friend who abandons her friend in need? If that's monstrous, we have too many of them and so they are no longer monstrous. There is a lack of focus in the novel's key image. Ghosts are not quite the same thing as monsters.

And the style. For all its self-conscious wryness regarding cliches, filmic and literary, the writing does not escape whoppers of its own. Near the beginning of the novel, we have this description of the medium "sister" of the Ponti:

"Depending on the time of day and the angle, Aunt Yunxi looks anything between fifty and a hundred years old. She is as fit as a fiddle. In all the time that I have known her I have never heard her sneeze even once. She appeared on our doorstep nine years ago: 1995, the year my father walked out. My mother is the last person to ask for help to admit that she is struggling. She is too proud. But Yunxi simply knew. Call it sibling intuition. She swept into our lives after having traveled half the world...."

I counted nine cliches. No, you can't justify them by saying that this passage is in the voice of a teenager and teenagers speak in cliches. If I want teenage cliches, I go and hang out with teenagers, not stay at home on a bright and sunny June day to read a book. 

Beyond NaPo 56

United States Virgin Islands

Let’s find
an instrument
close at hand—
an old sardine
can, white
pine wood,
a useless sack
for twine—
and join a
scratch band
that welcomes
us. United States,
we sing
of thee,
with our squash,
our cane flute,
ukelele,
and ass pipe
made from the
exhaust tube
of a car,
we sing,
make thyself
worthy of
us and make us
worthy of
thee, we sing
all together
from Twin
City, Rock
City, Love
City, from
all over,
islands old
as the
volcano
but forever
virginal.

Beyond NaPo 55

Puerto Rico

To see
the bioluminescence,
light without fire,
sit tight
in your canoe
and
stir the dark
water. A tiny
meteor
will appear
in the atmosphere
of the bay.
Stir again,
this time not
with your paddle but with
your hand,
and direct
the sentence of
the second meteor.
You are then
angel
and patient.

Beyond NaPo 54

Northern Mariana Islands

These islands
have names--
not Asuncion,
Saipan, Tinian,
Pagan,
but older
ones--
Launch Pad, Mission Field,
Way Station,
The Secret of My Heart's Desire,
and one that is
possibly
mistranslated
as
Dandelions Growing Out of a Boot.

Beyond NaPo 53

Guam

Ferried over
by a military transport,
the brown
tree snake
has nearly
killed off
the ko'ko' bird,
now only
bred
in captivity.
Forests,
where the secretive
rail once ran,
its elongated
body slipping
through
the receptive
herbage,
are empty
of bird whistle
but full
of spiders
and swathed
like a bride
in spider webs.

Beyond NaPo 52

American Samoa

He charged
at the ball
and at the
quarterback.
He sacked
all our defenses.
He made
America
sit up and
look for
their maps.
“I have
a fear of being
average,”
said the
tight end.
He shot
himself dead
in the chest,
the warrior,
said good-bye
with the lyrics
of “Who
I Ain’t.”
Born in Oceanside,
California,
but he came
from the territory
with one
zip code.

in memory of Junior Seau (1969 – 2012)

Beyond NaPo 51

District of Columbia

Not real,
marmoreal
city,
mammary
gland,
memory
land,
march
of the living
and the
dead,
the murmur
in the corridor
that changes
everything.
The reflecting
pool,
humming tunelessly,
steals
your face.


*

Lady Bird (2017), written and directed by Greta Gerwig, is a good movie, but not a great one. Why the fuss over it? Saoirse Ronan, as the Sacramento high school senior stumbling through her first romance, family entanglements, and college application, makes it very watchable. Laurie Metcalf is wonderful as Mom. Lucas Hedges, Lady Bird's first boyfriend who turns out to be gay, is a natural actor. He also appears as the nephew in Manchester by the Sea.

In Valentina's Wedding (La Boda de Valentina, 2018), a silly but enjoyable romp, an all grown-up Ryan Carnes as Valentina's gringo fiance. Still has the body he showed off in Eating Out.

Beyond NaPo 50

Wyoming

Here you
can stand
over the
Continental
Divide,
rivers to
the left,
rivers to
the right,
and feel
the irreconcilable
differences.
Rain stands
here too,
in this
great Basin,
not running
to any
ocean, true,
but moving,
nevertheless.
The rain
sinks here
into the
parched ground,
or else
evaporates
into the air.

Beyond NaPo 49

Wisconsin

This is the house that Wright built
and rebuilt
and rebuilt
after each ravagement,
the limestone
from a local quarry,
the plaster
mixed with sienna
to resemble
the sandy banks of the river,
the shingles
weathered to the color
of silver-grey trees,
the windows
placed to let the sun in
at every hour
of the day.
This is the house
that houses
Japanese prints and Ming vases,
a council circle
re-de-signed by an
immigrant Dane,
and bears the name
of a Welsh bard,
which means Shining Brow.
This is the house
that built other houses
and the centrifugal
house for
Non-Objective art,
later named
after its founding Jew.
This is the house
that students come to
every summer
to study how to build a house.

Beyond NaPo 48

West Virginia

A snippet of video
cut from a cut
and recombined with the clip
is called West Virginia.
A pod of dolphins
leaving a super-pod
to join a herd
is called West Virginia.
Welcome to the secession from the secession,
which is not
the same as unity,
or Not Having Left.
Welcome to the past,
the present, and the future.
The deutero-stomes,
whose first hole
formed the anus of the organism,
split from the proto-stomes,
whose first hole
formed the mouth,
590 million years ago.
We look forward
to their rejoining and our recording
of the convention
of the blastopore.

Beyond NaPo 47

Washington

“I don’t belong
to any of you,
 not to the Army Corps
of Engineers,
not to the
anthropologists,
not even to
the Confederated Tribes
of the Coville Reservation,
to whom
I most closely resemble
in my genetic material.
I am not native.
I am not foreign.
I am the Kennewick Man,
named so
because I was completely
found in Kennewick,
which means a grassy place,
as in the grass
is always greener on the other side,
also, winter paradise,
for winters there
are mild,
or, in another name, Tehe,
the laughter
of a girl
when asked
the name
of where she lived.”

Beyond NaPo 46

Virginia

Do you
want
the name of your state
on a landmark
case
against loving?
“Mr. Cohen,
tell the Court
I love
my wife
and it is just unfair
that I can’t live
with her
in Virginia.”
Mr. Cohen,
tell the court
of public opinion
I love
all my boys,
the statistician,
the father, the masochist,
the Starbucks manager, the above-average architect, the ex-lawyer,
and the lovers still in their diapers,
and it is so unfair
that I can’t live
with all of them
at once,
at their peak,
o, blue ridge mountain,
by
the Potomac
with its
two sources.

Beyond NaPo 45

Vermont

sugar maple
rock maple
hydraulic lift
phloem tap
bowling pins
guitar neck
pure stand
shade tolerant
pool cues
sad sap
real estate
civil union
fall colors
secret history
climate change
commemorative coin
winged seed
winged seed

Beyond NaPo 44

Utah

In the painting
of the Promontory Summit
by Thomas Hill,
in the ceremony
of
the golden spike,
which would join
not just
two rails,
not just
two halves of a country,
but
two world-faring oceans,
you can see
the Big Four,
the railway officials,
the railroad workers,
women,
even an Indian,
but not a Chinese
stone blaster
stone carter,
bridge builder,
cook,
who survived
the panning
years
over the Sierra Nevada.

Beyond NaPo 43

Texas

They raise
them now,
the broncos,
for bucking,
running wild
on the open
range, but
gentled for
worming,
for loading
in trailers
and in the
bucking chute.
The beasts
are scored too,
for rocking
hard and not
in a straight
line, for bucking
unpredictably.
On the first
jump out of
the chute,
the cowboy
has to mark
 the horse
out—his heels
have to tap
the shoulders
of the athletic
gelding for
the ride to count.
Make it count.

Beyond NaPo 42

Tennessee

Heartbreak.
Jailhouse.
You’ve got
to love
the words
as much as
the music.
You’ve got
to shoot
not just
from the
pelvis but
break out
the pulse.

Queen

I've just discovered Freddie Mercury. https://youtu.be/oozJH6jSr2U

Beyond NaPo 41

South Dakota

You could
flash
a route,
but the
pure
ascend
the rock
on-sight,
without
fore-
knowledge,
every
handhold a
self
discovery.
You could
dance
with the
crowd
on the
head
of a pin,
but the
tenacious
 angel,
who knows
when
to smear
and when
to
campus,
always
mindful
of the
risk of
a
zipper,
climbs
the
Needles.

Beyond NaPo 40

South Carolina

There’s no
sensation
like
syncopation.
I’d rather
Charleston
in Charleston.
There’s more
to destroy
than the
towers of Troy.
I’d rather
Soloi
in Soloi.
Give up
the dry eye
to the blue sea
and the blue sky.
I’d rather
Shanghai
in Shanghai.
For the scoop
and the dope,
for the good trope,
Grant in Grant
and
Hope in Hope.
I may
never
Barbados
in Barbados,
or Buncombe
in Buncombe,
but let me be
banged up
by a gang
of 251 men
or more.
I’d rather
Singapore
in Singapore.

Beyond NaPo 39

Rhode Island

On a sailboat
or in a
synagogue,
the end will
come.
Watching
the green
light or
lighting the
gas light,
the end will
come.
Working on
a farm
or in a
pharmacy,
the end will
come.
Reciting
a letter
or rescinding
a check,
the end will
come.
Out of
the sky or
into
the skin,
the end will
come. Come,
the end,
for, after
a lifetime of
waiting, we
are well
provided for.

Beyond NaPo 38

Pennsylvania

Fourscore and seven
years ago, Charlie Chaplin
released City Lights,
the Scottsboro Boys
were convicted of
rape, Nevada legalized
gambling, Harold Urey
discovered deuterium,
the Empire State
Building was completed,
John Haven
Emerson perfected
his iron lung, a gallon
of gas cost 10 cents,
Dick Tracy began
his career
in the Detroit Mirror,
Al Capone was
jailed for tax
evasion, the Bible
Student Movement
took the name
of Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Alvin
Ailey was born—so
I date this poem
and this poem dates me.

Beyond NaPo37

Oregon

Under it all
swims the fungus,
the weight of
200 whales
spread thin
over 2000 acres,
surfacing
like splashes of latex
in most places,
breathing
through the gills
of honey mushrooms
every fall.
It kills trees, yes,
creeping
after the network
of roots
and tying its
shoestrings
around and about
their feet,
but the slow
decay,
the inevitable
drop,
makes temporary
homes of trees
for what
we hear
as birds.

Beyond NaPo 36

Oklahoma

Sooner
rather than later,
all 25 native languages
spoken here
will disappear,
unless the school in Tahlequah
succeeds
in teaching its children
to cherish their Cherokee,
the language 75% of which
consists of verbs,
some verbs
denoting the quality
of their direct objects,
so you can say
in one word
hand me something flexible,
like a rope,
hand me something
long, like a broom
or a pencil,
hand me
something liquid,
or a container
for liquid,
like a cup of joe,
hand me something living.

Beyond NaPo 35

Ohio

The blushes
along
even the baseball bat
make you think
of passion
but it was
a celebrity wedding,
this Andy Warhol
print of Pete Rose,
this picture bride,
this baseball card,
made in the exciting
year chasing the world record
of hits,
and breaking it
the day after
the work was unveiled.
Two years later,
Rose was
banned for betting
on his Reds
and Andy,
who did not know
a thing
about baseball,
was dead.

Beyond NaPo 34

North Dakota

You know Fargo,
now get to
Minot, where
every September
Vikings take up
swords to fight
the Trolls at the
Norsk Høstfest,
and the solemnest
business, to induct
into
the Hall of Fame
chefs, oil drillers,
actors, the dishy
Josh Duhamel,
musicians, coaches,
the secret agent
who saved
Mrs. Kennedy,
the school counselor
who spent
all his free time
building a Viking ship
from scratch,
through his leukemia,
which sailed,
after his death,
through the Great Lakes,
the Erie Canal,
down the Hudson,
into the storm of the Atlantic,
the ship Hjemkomst,
all the way to Norway,
 ending in champagne
with the pale King.

Beyond NaPo 33

North Carolina

Wilmington—where
the term “race riot”
was invented
to dress up the killing
of blacks.
At the age of 32,
Alexander Manly
 dared to write
in 1898,
“Every Negro lynched
is called
‘a big burly, black brute,’
when in fact
many…were
sufficiently attractive
for white girls
of culture and refinement
to fall
in love with them
as is very well
known to all,”
and had his words
twisted
in the white papers
and afterwards
his Daily Record
burned and gutted,
and his people,
women also,
gunned down
by the Red Shirts.

NaPo Day 30 and Beyond NaPo 31 and 32

New Jersey

Put out the light, Edison,
return to your river, to your
fishing with a bamboo rod.
Forget your rod and let
the fish still swim in their
ignorance. The schoolchild
working late into the night
on advanced trigonometry
will thank you. The factory
worker descending into the
chemical tank will thank you.
The first-time lover too,
fumbling with the buckle
of the boy on top of him,
borrowing an excuse from
the moonless night for his
inexperience. That lover, he
will remember the sweet
terror afterwards, as will
the savage, cowering in
the fundamental shadow
of the eclipse of the sun.


New Mexico

No, it doesn’t go
beep-beep.
The roadrunner
has a slow
and descending
dove-like
coo.
With its red
and blue
mascara,
it’s a drag queen
who has
just undressed
after the show,
and from the print
of its
zygodactyl
feet, digits
2 and 3
facing forward,
1 and 4
facing back,
nobody knows,
not even him,
where he goes
off-stage
into the night
of flashing horns.


New York

Which
place to tout
in one’s home state?
So many places
you should see,
as it must be
in yours,
but you must not miss
Ellis.
Through the Main Building passed the ancestors of forty percent of Americans.
Shivering, sleepless
through the night,
Louis Adamic
heard every snore
in his rib
and dreamed in a dozen
different
languages.
The statue
is the ideal but
the station was the reality.
Heartbreak Island,
those excluded,
some wearing
my face, others
dressed with so-called defects,
called it.
Families called it Island of Tears.
They still do.

Sancho and NaPo Day 29

Last night, went with GH to the National Black Theater to watch Sancho, written and performed by Paterson Joseph. Brought from the Caribbean to London by his master, Ignatius Sancho rose from servitude through education and patronage to become an author, composer, and letter writer in the eighteenth century. He was even painted by Thomas Gainsborough as an English gentleman. No Moorish prince or spear-shaking warrior for him. The talented Joseph, whose parents also came to London from the Caribbean, from St. Lucia, showed a vital connection to one whom he considered legitimately an ancestor. The first half of the play was well conceived and written, dramatizing his birth on a slave ship, the theatricals at his mistresses' London house, his education by the powerful Montagu family. The courtship portion fell a little flat and the opening of a grocery shop at Westminster felt anticlimactic. But the writing brought the one-man play to a suitably triumphant end, which I won't give away, except to say that it echoes nicely the theme of the political symbolism of the image at the start.

*

New Hampshire

Not on this trip
but on another
day, you’ll visit
old “Live Free,
or Die.” Live
first,  you think,
and in your way
rises from the sea
of eroded plains
Mt Monadnock.

NaPo Day 27

Nebraska

Banged-up
Chevy jitters
past Wenzl
Hardware (closed),
Pioneer Theater,
(shuttered), Western
Outpost (cowboy
boots for sale)
to Long Home
Coffee Company.
Inside,
three men
rhyming with Cezanne
mutters
about Walmart.
A schoolgirl
is excited
on her phone
about a college on the coast.
The tablemat
plugs a play (New!)
about two ladies
who lock themselves in a closet
and pray
when America
elects a Democrat.
Over the brown sink
of the Missouri
swoop
tiny white-bellied
insect-eaters
in lasso loops.

NaPo Day 26

Montana

Little
was lynched here
for organizing
the miners and lumberjacks
and speaking
against the war.
German
was forbidden
for a time.
Further back,
a general asked for the bison
to be slaughtered
to starve
the Indians.
In these
rich valleys
between sky-topping mountains,
a river
runs through
the last best place,
and by the river
roamed
families of triceratops,
plucking
at the palms
with their
beaks.

NaPo Day 25

Missouri

He came into the world
with Halley’s Comet
and went out with it,
as he fore-said.
He trained as a steamship pilot
and studied
the river’s every swirl and snag.
He nicked his penname
from an old sailor,
an old river cry,
meaning, mark the two fathoms
that give safe passage.
He changed his mind.
He decried the domination
of the Philippines
and praised the Chinese Boxers.
He was against slavery
but made his masterpiece, Huck,
struggle with
the common prejudice,
terrified he was
going to hell for freeing Jim.
Have I read it?
No… I’d rather float
with this boat
downriver
and think of his dark last years
when his daughter Suzy died,
and then his wife Olivia died,
and then another daughter, the youngest, Jean.

NaPo Day 24

Mississippi

Good levees,
once built
by slaves,
then poor
Irish, taken
over by the
state, funded
by the Fed,
make good
fortunes until
they don’t.
(The wetlands,
endemic sponge,
are vanishing.)
The river
sleeps while
it runs the
manmade
course and
once in a
while wakes
up, like
an epidemic
or a riot,
into flood.

NaPo Day 23

Minnesota

Get on
the green bus.
It stopped
when the plane
on the way to the funeral
of steelworker Martin Rukavina
crashed
into dense forest,
but the bus
has started up again.
Ignore
the jeers
that you’re hopping
on the bandwagon,
some wagons
just have
the better music,
Bob Dylan i
s playing,
and anyway the bus
is passing
some nice bits of water—
Minneapolis, city of water,
Minnetonka, big water,
Minneota, much water,
Minneiska, white water,
and, Dakota
for waterfall, or curling water,
Minnehaha.

In memory of Paul Wellstone, United States Senator from 1991 to 2002.

NaPo Day 20 - 22

Maine

If the Old Sow,
sucking whirlpool,
with treacherous
troughs, standing
walls of water,
boils and spouts,
and that natural
impossibility, the
reverse waterfall,
is the American
Charybdis, Scylla
is the exposed trail
of hikers making
their endless way
through Acadia,
up the mountain,
with their packs
and in their good-
grip shoes, to the
glacial erratic called
Bubble Rock,
which they threaten,
in so much photo
evidence, to push
off and crush who-
ever is below,
smiling for the
record and showing
all their teeth.



Massachusetts

There is a Quality,
so familiar,
to dismay
in social media.
The table
is set for us
to be quotable,
be thunderous.
Time to
slip away
from our chair
and
parley—
with the Air.



Michigan

Five died
building
Mackinac
Bridge—
one fell
into a
caisson,
one of
a heart
attack,
two when
the catwalk
collapsed
their first
day on
the job,
and one
ascended 
too
quickly
from the
straits and
died from
the bends.

In memory of James LeSarge (26), Albert Abbott (40), Jack Baker (28), Robert Koppen (28), and Frank Pepper (46).

NaPo Day 19

Louisiana

The state
produces
the most
number of
vampires.
Imprisoned
by their
immortality,
disdainful
of science—
how can it
stand up
to sorcery—
perversely
proud of
their hue
and cry, the
music of
hurricanes,
the undead
are figures
of corruption.
Don’t go
near them
or you will
catch their
fang and feel
their half-
throttled
angst and
turn in a
funk into
one of them.

NaPo Day 17 and 18

Kansas

The ghost, cowboy hat,
curtain moustache,
sidles up and chuckles
appreciatively, howdy,
boys, welcome
to Kansas, and slips
into the bar. The street
is deserted, except
for the pale sheriff
with a five-point badge,
walking a skeleton
horse, who glares at us,
spits near our feet
and croaks, liberal elite.
When we turn the
corner, a tall woman,
hooked to translucent
wings, is giving out
flyers that say in red,
What Would Jesus Do?
and show a pair
of rainbowed hands
letting fall a bloody
fetus. There isn’t much
else to see. For more
than unfunny cartoons,
we will have to follow
the flight to the cities.
What’s this? A terrier,
hair gone white, sniffs
our penny loafers,
crawls away, muttering,
Dorothy, we’re not
in Kansas anymore.


Kentucky

Not our place,
not anyone’s,
although we name
the caves
Rotunda,
Grand Avenue,
joke about
Fat Man’s Misery,
even
mythologize
the stream, calling
it obviously
the Styx.
Bats, with their
livid cries, live here,
little eastern pipistrelle
with its
tricolored fur,
fire-walking salamanders,
two genera
of eyeless fish,
albino
shrimps, and who knows
what else.
A seahorse
far from the sea?
To find out
we jockey further
and further
into the miles of dark,
not to encounter
ourselves, Lovecraft
has it wrong, but to meet
some other
life,
in this system
of caves,
which rarely
has a natural
opening.

NaPo Day 16

A break in the alphabetical order to take in the news of the day:

Maryland

O say
can you see
by the dawn’s
early light,
what so
proudly
we hailed
at the twilight’s
last gleaming,
whose broad
stripes and bright
stars through
the perilous
fight, o’er
the ramparts
we watched,
were so
gallantly
streaming?
And the rockets’
red glare,
the bombs
bursting
in air,
gave proof
in the night
that our flag
was still
there; o say
does that
star-spangled
banner yet
wave o’er
the land of
the faith
and the home
of the Ba’ath.

God's Own Country

Friday night, watched "God's Own Country" (2017), about a young Yorkshire farmer (a very credible Josh O'Connor) who numbs his frustrations with binge drinking and casual sex until a Romanian migrant worker (Alec Secareanu), joining his family farm for the lambing season, shows him how to be himself, a gay man capable of love and connection. The film brings to mind "Brokeback Mountain" except that "God's Own Country," directed by Francis Lee, is much better. It actually shows the blood and death of newborn lambs. Some survive, some don't, a visual comment on the dangers and pitfalls of coming out in this day and age still. Not in love with the title, though.

NaPo Day 15

Iowa

What’s the line
around the barn,
a viewing line for
some dear leader?
Oh, it’s the line to see
the butter cow,
600 pounds
of U.S. Grade AA salted butter,
or else it’s to see
the butter Elvis, or the butter Obama,
or Grant Wood’s
bony couple in butter.
Barbara Ehrenreich
writes, “I’m not going out
of this life
without butter
on my bread.
I’ve had so much grief
from people about butter.
I like a glass of wine,
or a bloody mary, too.”
 Oh, look,
this year, Norma “Duffy” Lyon
tops herself.
She has sculpted
with 2000 pounds of butter
a life-sized
The Last Supper.

NaPo Day 14

Indiana

Open cockpit,
open wheels,
writing an O
200 times
in dust and smoke,
on the oval track,
plotting ahead,
jostling for
position with
other high-
strung vowels,
every zero,
slightly different,
always imperfect,
if it is not erased
in flames,
every event
a non-event,
going nowhere
fast, despite
the hundreds
of thousands
of diehard fans
randy for
memorabilia,
just for one, just one,
to lift
at finish
a bottle of milk.

NaPo Day 13

Illinois

It is called
Little Egypt
because of
its rivers and
the fertile
land. Because
of starvation’s
trek
for a handful
of meal.
Because of
slavery and its
deliverance
in uncivil
war. Little Egypt
is not in the south
of the state,
it’s everywhere,
its boundaries
the boundaries
of the promised
land, its capital
the capital
creamed off
of labor. It’s make
hay while the sun
shines, it’s the
massacre—mass acre—
at Haymarket.

NaPo Day 12

Idaho

You have come
to the heart,
division and double,
of the matter,
the deepest canyon,
a fall
higher than Niagara,
but more secret.
The sun
comes down
on potatoes and semi-
conductors.
The river
is called Salmon,
or No Return.
Neither in
Mountain Time
or in
Pacific Time,
O my governor,
O my private,
is there
a highway
between Boise and
Coeur d’Alene.

NaPo Day 11

Hawaii

My myth too—home,
the underworld,
an ancestor
who returns as
a sea turtle
when he is not
the naval officer
who died
at Pearl Harbor.
From the school,
which trained
the black
president,
my aumakua
took
the name of
Steve McGarrett.
Hawaii Five-O 
was sometimes
shot
in Singapore,
do you know?
How do you
know a man
would die
for you
if you don’t
sleep with him
first?
Under another
trademark,
he took up
with me
in New York
where we were
happy-unhappy
for two years
until he was
recalled to the spirit
world,
reappearing
under the
world-class surf
a shark.

NaPo Days 9 and 10

Florida

This evening walk
around Lettuce Lake
begins on the planks
of good intentions.
Palm fronds droop,
like fingers over
railing, over land
sliding below
wetland, and weeds
yielding along an
indeterminable
wave to duckweed,
a false green
carpet to the door
of the lake.
Bald cypresses, wearing
beards of moss, sit
surprised in water,
their grayish knees
breathing above the
rootless bladderworts.
Here, the wading bird
is king, the Great Egret
picking its way between
land and lake, spearing
the temporary frog
to an unexpected
hump of ground. Here,
the roseate spoonbill
swirls the mud.
Even the osprey,
which nests in feather-
tips of trees, must
bury itself in the
lake, wings held up
like an archaic angel
landing on a gravestone,
before rising with
silver in its beak.
And here, reads the sign
in stainless steel
raised by park
authorities, is
Alzheimer’s Walk
that travels two feet
above the bog, two
feet from the leafy
stink, but does not
sink.


Georgia
Flying, flying
so high, circling
the top
five times, I’m flying
into the
mountain
and your mind.
Flying, always flying,
I won’t be landing.
It’s peaceful
up here
above the pines.
Flying, flying
like a bird,
circling the top
five times, I’m flying
into the mountain
and your mind.
Flying, I say,
always flying,
there’s no landing.
It’s peaceful up
here
above the pines.
I’ve always
been flying
into the
mountain
and your mind.

With thanks to Ray Charles 

NaPo Day 7 and 8

Connecticut

Wrong, the idea
was found in the boats
of the Punic Wars,
 the idea of inter-
changeable parts
for building
American muskets,
delivered only
after the death
of the contractor
by his family
left behind.
American words
were standardized
earlier
by the great Webster,
who taught generations
of American children,
including the kiddos
from Sandy Hook,
to spell center
for centre, program
for programme, and
armory for armoury.


Delaware

Where are the catapults
firing pumpkins
into the sky? Where are
the slingshots flinging
the hardiest squashes—the Caspers,
the Luminas, La Estrellas—
for the longest way
without getting
pie? Where are the
complicated air
cannons with the names
Big Ten Inch, 2nd
Amendment, Old
Glory, De Terminator
pumping their fists
in victory and vengeance?
All gone. The World
Championship
Punkin Chunkin
has been canceled.
A machine exploded
two years ago
and hit
a female TV crew.
We don’t wish
for anyone,
anyone,
to be hurt,
but where will
the boys go now
with their Universal
Soldier, their
Bad to the Bone?

NaPo Day 6

Colorado

After the gold, the silver,
it was the turn
of the carnations,
the precious metals
of a rush
of colors,
the historic medals
coaxed
from the ground,
won and worn
on the lapel
by queers and presidents—
first to grant
women’s suffrage
by popular vote,
first to repeal
Prohibition,
first to legalize
the recreational use
of cannabis—
you can get high
and green
just thinking
about it.

NaPo Day 5

California

Arnie has no more
devoted follower
than Olympus Chan
from Guangzhou.
For at least a year,
between fifteen and
sixteen, he went so far
as to put on
the Austrian accent.
Trained and won
Mr. Universe at age
20, same age as Arnie.
Moved to Hollywood
to be in the movies.
Had his big break
not as Conan, but
Young Confucius,
breaking his opponents’
jaws when they did not
heed what he said.
Grew rich selling
herbal supplements,
grew famous too.
Then the ultimate
test, the gubernatorial
contest, he loved
saying “gubernatorial”
with a Cantonese twang,
which he won
handily against the
El Salvadoran, on the
back of a huge Asian
turnout, and not a few
El Salvadorans, at last
striking gold as Asian
American and universal.

NaPo Day 4

Arkansas

for the Little Rock Nine 

It’s KAN-sas
but it’s AR-kan-SAs,
the final “s” is silent.
Here you can dig
for diamonds—prospect,
it’s called—
and name them
Hallelujah,
Amarillo Starlight,
Okie Dokie,
Superman’s,
Bleeding Heart,
Uncle Sam,
Brown Rice,
Limitless,
and Sweet Caroline.
Little rocks,
the markers of the change
from delta plain
to the Ouachita foothills.
Little rocks,
the final “s” is not
silent.

NaPo Day 3

Arizona

Remember “Raising Arizona”?
Infertile couple,
a convenience store
robber and a cop,
kidnap one
of the “Arizona Quints”
and raise the baby
in their desert trailer.
Daddy’s bounty
hunter finds them, and they
blow him up.
You want to know
my interpretation
of the Coen Brothers movie?
The couple, Nicholas
Cage and Holly
Hunter, are European
colonialists, white
trash, Papa Arizona
is the Injuns,
and Junior is the land.
The kidnap
is all very fine.
When Cage & Hunter
return the kid
in the end, it makes no
sense.
Remember the reviews?
Technically brilliant.
Incoherent story.

NaPo Day 2

Alaska

You like the sea?
You’ll like Alaska,
34,000 miles
of tidal shoreline.
Not for nothing
is it the object
to which the sea
is directed. It is
something of a
marvel, a marriage
of extremes,
the sea locked
solid in an iceberg,
the outcrops
of rock
melting and running
over all forms of life,
even the hardy
shield ferns
that cling
to these
unpromising islands.
You like volcanoes?

50 States in 50 Days

It's National Poetry Writing Month again, and I've started a project tentatively titled "50 States in 50 Days," as a way of getting to know this country better. Suggestions welcomed. Here's Day One:

Alabama

Why would you
want to see
a natural disaster,
even if
it’s the greatest?
Visit the Vulcan
instead,
cast-iron god
holding up
his new spearhead
to the sun.
You can’t see
the impact crater,
even though
the impact rim
is intact.
You can only walk
in the maze of rings
of fractured rock,
more than 3 miles across,
hope to find
in the ground
a splinter of shocked quartz,
which proved
this is indeed
a star-wound.


*

PB invited GH and me to a sake tasting last night. Terada Honke has brewed sake for more than 340 years in Kozaki, in Chiba Prefecture, 87.5 km to the northeast of Tokyo. The lecture was by the 24th Head, Masaru Terada, who married into the family, like the two generations before him. The brewing house specializes in so-called natural fermentation, which allows the rice malt to ferment naturally with micro-organisims in the air, without artificial additives. The only "ingredients" added are white koji mold and a yeast called Shubo. The sake we tried were Gonin Musume, Kaiko Shu, Shibotta Manma, Musubi, and Daigo No Shizuku.

Dolphins

PB invited me to join him last Sunday to watch documentary on the US incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Part of the 11th Annual Peace Film Festival, organized by Yumi Tanaka and a band of volunteers, Resistance at Tule Lake (2017) by Konrad Aderer was less about the resistance than about the remembrance of this infamous episode of American history. Tule Lake camp was where those who refused to answer, or answered no-no to, the government's loyalty questionnaire were sent. There was a special segregation center inside the camp for those judged especially resistant or disloyal. The government also mounted a campaign to persuade the prisoners of all ten concentration camps to give up their US citizenship and be deported to Japan, even though most of them had never seen that country. Fearful and angry, many Tule Lake camp inmates joined the pro-Japan faction called the Hoshi-dan. The film showed them running in squads and doing other physical exercises to train themselves up to be fit for Japan. With the exception of one incident, when inmates refused to obey an order and were sent to stand outside in the wintry cold, some in their underwear, the film was stronger, more interesting, about the split in allegiances among the prisoners. It is a split that has haunted generations of Japanese Americans after the war.

Read two of the books bought at AWP. The Affliction by C. Dale Young is a set of intricately interlinked stories, narrated by the same person whose identity we only discover at the end. What I like most about the book is the use of the trope of disappearance for being gay, for exile from family and community, and finally, for death. The magic realism of the plot does not color the style much. The language is workmanlike. Better known as a poet, Young's prose is, well, rather prosaic. Here's the opening paragraph:

No one would have believed Ricardo Blanco if he had tried to explain that Javier Castillo could disappear. What was the point in trying to explain it to someone, explain how he had seen it himself, how he had watched as Javier Castillo stared deeply as if he were concentrating and then, slowly, disappeared. Ricardo always began the explanation in the same way, by stating that it wasn't a sudden thing, that no, no, it was gradual thing that took sometimes as long as three minutes.

Too many iterations of "explain." Overly familiar language such as "stared deeply" and "always began the explanation in the same way." Vagueness in "someone," "a sudden thing," "a gradual thing." Should the verb "stating" have any place in a novel if the character is not making a police statement? A human who can disappear and reappear somewhere else is a miracle, but the language fails to convey the miraculous.

The other book was a short novel Lion Cross Point by Masatsugu Ono, translated by Angus Turvil. Published by the independent press Two Lines, it is also about abandonment by a parent, but Ono brings the reader right into the experience of the trauma. The language, as translated, is spare, and so gives lots of room for breathing and imagining. Not much happens, but what happens is elemental. The betrayal of loved ones. The kindness of strangers. And the enormous hope one can invest in a healing dolphin.

Turning 48, or Post Your Birthday Wish, If You Wish, Below this Post

Turning 48, or Post Your Birthday Wish, If You Wish, Below this Post 

I’ll write one true thing a day in the week running up to my birthday.

John Ashbery is boring and I’d rather eat cardboard than read his poetry.

I’m a poor judge of character, which is my saving grace in making friends.

Angrier. Sadder. Heavier. I look at the young and am disconsolate.

There are no moral phenomena, but I have to act as if good and evil exist.

Last week I wrote a respectable poem about sex with a party of cyborgs.

 John Ashbery is boring but “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is brilliant.

Love, I have been under increasing pressure to make a false allegation.

 Photo by Guy E. Humphrey. I name it "Wallflowers."

Old Rendering Plants

We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge. The premise is intriguing: a black Bostonian family, the symbolically named Freemans, join a research institute to teach sign language to a chimp called Charlie. The situation is set up for a scathing social critique of racism, some of which Greenidge delivers. The most effective, because the most moving, involves the allure of white trickery to a stern but lonely black schoolmistress. Nymphadora is the most searing portrait of the novel, and she burns the other characters out of the stretched canvas.

Old Rendering Plant by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole. Published by Two Lines Press, which I discovered at AWP, after Tim Tompkins suggested looking for its editor, and his good friend, Olivia Sears, this German novel is dense with the poetry of a wasted landscape. It is haunting, a nightmarish reckoning with history and holocaust. After reading it, I was filled with the excitement of imitating it, but found I could not, its sensibility being so antithetical to mine.

GH and I saw the film Comfort and Consolation in France (2017), written and directed by Vincent Macaigne, at Film Society Lincoln Center yesterday. After squandering their inheritance abroad, Pascal and Pauline return to their family estate and face the envy and resentment of their friends. Intelligent dramatization of the continuing class struggle, fleshed by a strong cast of three couples. The couple in the middle, torn between class pride and attraction to old privilege, was finally the most sympathetic. GH thought the film dated, since it did not mention immigration or the refugee crisis in Europe at all.A good point.

Poems in BPR

I have three poems in Birmingham Poetry Review (Spring 2018 number 45), a publication of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The issue features the great poet Gerald Stern with new poems written in his 90s, and a perspicacious essay by Lucy Biederman on him titled ""And I Go On and On": Gerald Stern's Poetics of Protest." It's bracing to read about how Stern has integrated his politics into his poetics from the start. Some terrific poems in the issue. I particularly enjoyed Saara Myrene Raappana's "Heroic Origins" (it's about bees), Chelsea Rathburn's "The Corinthian Women" (who stood aside while Medea murdered her children), and Gary Soto's two Untitled poems based on Henry V 4.1.98-99 and the bard's Sonnet 150.9. Thanks, Adam Vines and Gregory Fraser, for accepting my poems. Annual subscription is only $10.

Hyphen Interview

THL and JEHL: If the city could answer your questions, what would you ask it? Why are these important issues to you?

JLK: Will you ever change your survival and authoritarian mentality, which prioritizes economic development and political control above all else? How can you be changed? Will you remember me? And how will you remember me?

THL and JEHL: Also let’s consider the reverse. What would your city ask you? Why?

JLK: Who are you?

Thanks, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho and Jason Eng Hun Lee, for the interview.

Cyborg Sex

Last Tuesday, went to the Morgan Library to see the show of Peter Hujar's photographs: "Speed of Life." The creator of the iconic image of the Gay Liberation Front, showing 2 lines of young people walking down the street, arms linked, fists punching the air, Hujar was really a portraitist. The most compelling photos are headshots, followed by those of the body in half-recline.

Since I was there, I also looked into the Tennessee Williams show, "No Refuge but in Writing." The final plays are really the results of lots of earlier stories, aborted versions, and messy revisions, suggested by Eliza Kazan and others, as much as by Williams's own muse. He exploited his life for his materials, as all writers do, and his life included other people's lives.

*

Wrote "Returning from the Women's March in DC" on Friday, tinkled with "Judy" on Saturday, and "Cyborg Vs The Grim Reaper" this morning. Cyborg sex: the wave of the future!

The Square

Wrote "The Morning After Trump's Election (Watusi)" from Connor's perspective yesterday. Today added a small section to "Handheld Devices" and refitted the sequence to reflect the aging of both men.

Watched The Square (2017) with MH yesterday, after lunch with LF and JT. Written and directed by Ruben Östlund, it stars Claes Bang as the chief curator of a prestigious Stockholm museum who is trying to promote a controversial new exhibit. As MH confirmed, the film is spot-on in its satire of art institutions and their patrons. What was less expected was how moving it was in illuminating the seemingly obvious, but infinitely complex business of creating a public square of mutual trust and equal rights.

Connor and Seal: "Later, at the Same Dance Party"

Another retro-fit today, with some small revisions to fit it into the overarching narrative.


Connor:

Later, at the Same Dance Party

Finally he withdraws his sweet body
from the kiss, and the veil descends.

I’m completely involved with someone, 
he says, he’s coming back tomorrow. 

Thrust together by his words, we taste
each other’s mouth through the silk.

Then all the names of the world—
body, kiss, tomorrow, his name Seal—

swaddle in a wet underwear
the things they designate.

When he backs off again, a cry
I cannot recognize passes my lips,

Take me home with you. 
It does not pass the cloth of gold.

He presses through the crushed bodies,
 pulling his tee-shirt down as he goes.

Connor and Seal: Meeting Seal at an 80's Dance Party on Throwback Thursday

Today's offering retrofits an old poem (from "The Book of the Body" sequence") with a new title.


Meeting Seal at an 80’s Dance Party on Throwback Thursday

It is time to bring your face into focus
before this lens moves below the chin to other features harder
to identify as yours.
The best image is that of the cheeks.

The right cheek and the left cheek do not meet.
Like the back of the hand and the palm,
like the head of a silver coin and its tail,
the cheeks do not see each other except in a mirror or a photograph.

This is true of my cheeks
until my right brushes your left when we dance and, in that flash of flesh,
the coin turns up both head and tail,
the back of the hand shakes hands with the palm.

Connor and Seal: Identity House (New York)

Connor:

Identity House (New York)

Shirtless bartenders
popping the cork.
Drag queens hosting
What-the-Fuck.
Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee,
can such places be?

Flirtations flit.
Beauty meets.
Grown men deep
kissing on the streets.
Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee,
can such places be?

Talk we must about
coming out
in the calmness of
Identity House.
Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee,
can such places be?

No more need for
metaphors
unless we are figures of
speech, yes, us,
Connor, Tom, Alberto, Jee.
Can such places be?

Connor and Seal: A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe

Connor:

A Tale of Two Cities, Three Maybe

She’s a baby from Vietnam,
from Saigon, if the truth be told.
She’s a girl from Nebraska City
and she’s sixteen years old.
 She’s unusual, that’s for sure.
She asks him out for ice cream
at Nancy’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor
by Dick’s Movie Palace of Dreams.

She’s in love with the boy
She’s in love with the boy
but after a whole year of eating pussy
he knows he’s not in love with Katie.

First, an ice cream, and then, a movie.
One thing leads to another.
She’s smart, a looker, but he has eyes only
for her quarterback brother.
In the lab, she makes up excuses
to peek at his dissection.
He sneaks his looks in the locker room
at Tommy’s pink ass and Joe’s erection.

She’s in love with the boy
She’s in love with the boy
but after a whole year of eating pussy
he knows he’s not in love with Katie.

He tells her at the Farm Aid show
he’s applyin’ to New York University.
This town’s too small for big dreams,
he explains, to let her down easy.
With her mother’s heart condition,
she knows she’s not going anywhere.
Trisha Yearwood looks so very small
as her voice lifts off into the air:

She’s in love with the boy. 
She’s in love with the boy
but after a whole year of eating pussy
he knows he’s not in love with Katie.


With apologies to singer Trisha Yearwood, and songwriters John Charles Ims and Jon Ims.

Connor and Seal: Art Show at the Center

Connor:

Art Show at the Center

On a black dummy,
a shawl—not cashmere,
cigarette butts.

Apple seeds arranged
like tea cozies
around the roots of trees next door.

So this is what art is!

You are one thing and you are
used for another.

Slightly built, curly haired,
the Artist-in-Residence
smiles from New Jersey.
 Close enough to New York,
if you ask me.

The star of the show:

3 blocks of yellow soap,
the height of my chest,
carved
voluptuously
to look like—urinals.

Oh, the urge to use them!
To spray them
and be clean.

Connor and Seal

Connor:

Nebraska

From the bluff
we turned our backs on the river
and opened a trail,
as Lewis and Clark.

We spotted the grizzly,
Tom did, glummer than Meriwether,
and gave him wide berth
slowly on our stomachs.

When I hit
some raccoon shit, Tom changed
my name to Pvt. John Collins
and tied my paws to a tree

and whipped me with the whip
of a branch,
rubbing himself until he let go
gum from the orange.

We hurried home, it was getting dark,
and watched dad slam the boot
on boxes of his stuff
and drive off.

I was the one to break
the silence, kept during the whipping—
Tom, let’s go back
and tie me up.

The Book of Emma Reyes

Given to me by Elda Rotor in a bag full of literary goodies, The Book of Emma Reyes is a revelation. Godmother to Latin American writers and artists in Paris, Emma Reyes was illiterate until her late teens, escaped from grinding poverty and the convent in Columbia, to Buenos Aires and then Paris, to re-invent herself as painter. The memoir, written as a series of letters to Colombian historian and critic Germán Arciniegas, won praise from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As translated by Daniel Alarcón, the style is artfully simple and wholly faithful to the world. No literary flourishes, no imaginative metaphors. Just a sustaining belief that the material itself holds its own interest.

Autoclaps

Last night, watched The Toilers and the Wayfarers (1995), written and directed by Keith Froelich, set in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Matt Klemp, who played the beautiful young Dieter, showed real talents as an actor. But he seemed to have acted in one more movie before calling it quits.

This afternoon, watched Ghost in the Shell (2017), directed by Rupert Sanders, and starring Scarlett Johannson as Major, a crime-fighting robot with a human brain. It was more exciting and pleasurable than I thought it would be. I've never seen the anime original, so have nothing to compare the move to. The plot is predictable but the pacing is good.

Also finished this afternoon Kei Miller's third novel Augustown. It is well written but the stock characters, including a flying preacher, a racist teacher, a well-meaning white school principal, a blind old woman who could smell the forthcoming autoclaps (disaster), preclude real emotional engagement.

About two weeks ago, I finished Gershom Scholem's biography Walter Benjamin: The story of a friendship. Respectful and loving, but by no means hagiographic. For Scholem, Benjamin was a mystic, even when he was a materialist. The little I've read of Benjamin suggests that Scholem is right. Scholem takes pains in his biography to list Benjamin's intellectual influences and contacts, the people and the books. Benjamin saw in Scholem "living Judaism."Scholem supported the idea that Benjamin committed suicide.

About Painting

I'm a sucker for movies about writers and artists. Always eager to learn some secret to success, I suppose. As if there is one. Local Color (2006), written and directed by George Gallo, is too simplistic and sentimental to be truly inspirational. The acting by Armin Mueller-Stahl (Nicholi Seroff, the older artist) and Trevor Morgan (John Talia, Jr., the younger artist) makes the film watchable.

*

I did not know David Hockney started out as an Abstract Expressionist at the Royal Academy. That was probably the greatest revelation of the Met show. In those early works, there was already a keen sense of color. The Room Tarzana (1967) is my favorite of the works on show, beating out all the swimming pools, glass-curtain buildings, Californian landscapes. It has this wonderful sense of coolness about its sexual heat. The most penetrating, psychologically, is "Henry Geldzahler & Christopher Scott" (1969), about the Met curator, ensconced on his throne, and his supplicant, the trench-coated boyfriend and artist.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

An outrageous satire that skewers race politics in the USA. I have to resort to a cliche: the book is unputdownable. I raced through the book, lapping up all the wonderful set-pieces and snappy one-liners. It made me laugh out loud quite a number of times. And you know what I used for a bookmark, my police report about my lost iPhone in Singapore. The opening sentence of the book: "This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I've never stolen anything." Uproarious! Finished it around Jan 3, only now blogging about it.

Conspiracy Theorists

1987: Singapore's Marxist Conspiracy 30 Years On, edited by Chng Suan Tze, Low Yit Leng and Teo Soh Lung.

A valuable collection of testimonies and memories by the detainees, their family members, their lawyers, the campaigners for their release, and other supporters. This is not the place to obtain a full historical understanding of Operation Spectrum, the detention of 22 people in May 1987 for allegedly conspiring as Marxists to overthrow the state of Singapore; the pieces here are too fragmented and personal to give a steady picture. This is the place, however, where an agonizing silence has been broken, as the different participants of the historical incident recount, explain, and wonder aloud. The two most penetrating insights to emerge are, one, the then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew might have ordered the detention to initiate the new generation of government leaders, including his son Lee Hsien Loong, the current Prime Minister, into the blood sport of politics. They found themselves having to accede to and explain the draconian and unjust action. The few who could not do so, such as S. Dhanabalan, ultimately quit politics. The second insight, which is also part of hindsight, is that Operation Spectrum set back civil society and social advocacy for 20 years. Singapore was not allowed to grow up.


The Art of Advocacy in Singapore, edited by Constance Singam and Margaret Thomas.

A valuable collection of the experiences of social advocates and activists in trying to change government policies and enlarge the space of civil society in Singapore. The remit of the different individuals representing different organizations is helpfully wide: Ageing, Animal Welfare, Health, Heritage and Environment, Human Rights, Literature and Theatre, Media, Migrant Workers, Sex Workers, and Women. It is clear that the most successful of the organizations have been those who back up their arguments with research, engage the authorities privately and publicly, and soften any confrontational language, in other words, they have abided by the rules of engagement set out by the authorities. This approach works best for issues against which the main forces of resistance are ignorance and prejudice. When the issue has to do with political power - as in the struggle for freedom of expression and other democratic liberties, this approach cannot work, for no amount of research, reasonableness, and outreach will persuade the government to give up its political controls. A sufficient political force must be mustered to contest the present dominance. Lacking such a force, to ask the current regime to give up its overwhelming power is like asking a lion to surrender its teeth.

Living in a Time of Deception

Living in a Time of Deception by Poh Soo Kai (Singapore: Function 8 Ltd, 2016).

Dr. Poh Soo Kai was detained without trial for a total of 17 years on the false charge of being a communist out to subvert the state of Singapore. What he shows convincingly in this historical memoir is that, like many of his fellow detainees under Operation Coldstore, he was not a communist, but an anti-colonialist and socialist, in other words, a patriot. He was detained for so long because he refused to sign any statement that suggested otherwise. Such a powerfully principled person deserves a hearing at the very least. If you read this book and give him a hearing, as I did, you will make astonishing discoveries about Singapore's struggle for independence from the British, and the legacy of that struggle. After reading this book, I am outraged by the political chicanery for personal ends, but I am also inspired by the heroism of a few good men.

Star Attractions of Singapore

Star Attractions of Singapore: when will Parliament reverse the injustice that makes me a second-class citizen in my own country? Leaving Singapore tonight after giving away 33 out of 50 tank tops. Our biggest challenge is our (self-)imposed invisibility. Putting on an equality singlet is a small but significant way of saying, we're here, we're queer, get used to it. Looking forward to coming back for Pink Dot 2018 to join everyone in claiming and celebrating the right to love. #gaybutnotyetequal #singaporeunbound

Gay But Not Yet Equal 2

Gave out 27 tops altogether, yesterday at Artistry Cafe and today at Intermission Bar - at The Projector. Take a gander at these brave souls who wore their gay pride proudly. Thanks, everyone, for coming and taking a risk. Let’s stand up for gay equality! You make a difference.

Bare Life

Submitted three of my Harlem poems to The Bare Life Review, a journal devoted to publishing immigrant and refugee writers.

The Soloist

Yesterday, went for two readings. A reading by four poets at AAWW. Monica Sok's poetry stood out for its formal intelligence. She was also very articulate about her work. Then over to the the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, at the LGBT Community Center, to hear the contributors to the anthology Our Happy Hour: LGBT Voices from the Gay Bar. Ann Aptaker, who organized and emceed the reader, read with great energy and panache.

Tonight, watched the movie The Soloist (2009) about an LA Times columnist who befriended a homeless man who was trained in cello at Julliard. Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. turned in good performances. Directed by Joe Wright.

Jewish Mysticism

Last Monday, had dinner with Kevin Maxwell at Grand Szechuan, Chelsea. He had been with his friend Fahdi, who was dying of cancer. On Thursday, Kevin posted on FB that Fahdi had died. I met Fahdi only once, at a birthday dinner for Kevin. He was a psychologist or psychiatrist. He was into big biceps.

Tuesday, attended the second session of the Gershom Scholem course at the Center of Jewish History, taught by Izhak Lewis. The readings and discussion turned on Scholem's study of Jewish mysticism. Is there such a thing as mysticism across time and space, or is it constituted as an object by academic study?

Wednesday, had coffee with Matt from Shelf Awareness. Then dinner with Kim and Judy Luo, who was applying to be editorial intern with Gaudy Boy. Flora Chan joined us and showed us her cover designs for Malay Sketches.

Thursday, GH and I watched Annie Hall. Friday, we watched Beach Rats (2017), which suffered from bad writing but had a rather good Harris Dickinson as a druggie Brooklyn teenager who hooks up on-line with older men.

Endeavor

Worked on Snow at 5 PM from 5 am to 12:30 pm, with a break to get the paper and groceries and another break for brunch. Focused on pumping up the language and adding specific details.

Went for Bikram Yoga at Yogacare. Missed only 1 of the poses.

Watched the last episode of Endeavor Season Four, called "Harvest." Shaun Evans as the young constable Endeavor Morse and Roger Allam as his older colleague, Detective Inspector Fred Thursday.

East West Street

Revised the Preface and the Afterword to Snow at 5 PM.

Finished reading East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands, recommended by Henry Abelove. Very well researched, it reads like a detective novel. 

Watched Fire Song (2015), written and directed by Adam Garnet Jones, about a gay Anishinaabe teenager living in North Ontario and trying hard to get out of his small town. Andrew Martin, who plays the protagonist Shane, is a natural actor.

Last Vegas

I'm going to record my daily activities more faithfully on this blog. It is the main on-line repository of my memories.

I've been working on Snow at 5 PM this Thanksgiving break. Yesterday GH and I had brunch with Dan Liu at Maison Harlem. He shared about the way he catalogues his images. One useful tip was to keep hi-res assets on Dropbox, which can be accessed from any device. For Thanksgiving dinner, GH and I went to Barawine. I had good mussels and a passable Sancere. Then we came home and watched Last Vegas, a 2013 comedy starring Robert De Niro, Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, and directed by Jon Turteltaub. Good script and acting. The plot is so-so. The movie confirmed our prejudice against Las Vegas.

Philip Roth: the early novels

A colleague said condescendingly that Roth's humor is adolescent. Sure it it, but which of us have grown out of our adolescence so completely that we do not recognize its old growth in our selves? "Portnoy's Complaint" is superb in in its inventive humor. The anti-Nixon satire of "Our Gang" I find rather tiresome. The Kafkaesque "The Breast" is unexpectedly moving. I read the three novels in the Library of America edition.

Vladimir Nabokov's "Ada, or Ardor"

Philip Roth said in an interview that a novel must be read within a fortnight or else the experience would be much dissipated. I think Nabokov's Ada cannot be read so quickly. Each chapter, quite short but so dense with imagery, wordplay, and recondite allusions, must be read slowly, and then savored in the mind's mouth by turning off the spigot of liquid riches, by closing this most unusual family chronicle of incestuous love.

National Coming Out Day

I came out as a gay man 13 years ago. I trace the moment back to my first attending a meeting of GAPIMNY, the Gay Asian Pacific-Islander Men of New York. Since then I've been coming out, again and again, to family, friends, and strangers. Yes, there is such a thing as coming out to oneself, an internal understanding and acceptance of one's own sexual identity, but coming out of the closet is essentially a public act, of saying to others "Hi, I'm here and I'm queer."

Some in the LGBT community have argued that talk of coming-out reinforces the heterosexual norm and marginalizes ourselves. Straight people do not have to come out as straight. This argument has no force in Singapore, where heterosexuality is overpoweringly taken for grant, and so the act of coming out constitutes a challenge to that norm. Our bodies must be seen. Our demands must be heard. Our persons must be respected and treated equally as those of straight people.

It is true that gay liberation began in the US as a liberation movement, in solidarity with other political liberationist movements in the country and around the world, and not as a form of identity politics, which the rhetoric of coming-out seems to underpin. I think of that argument as an important caution that gay equality is not achieved until all other forms of inequality have been eradicated. Gay equality is only, but also, one part of equality for all. So coming out to others is important but is only the beginning of one's political education and action. Drawing strength and wisdom from our own experience, we must join the fight for women's rights, labor protections, and democratic freedoms, to name but a few issues, even as we insist that true equality must include equality for the LGBT community.

Photo by Yoshi Matsuzaki. Art Direction by Jaire Remy W.

Kei Miller's "The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion"

An expertly crafted book of poetry, full of heartfelt knowledge of a place that the author has left to reside elsewhere. The cartographer and the rastaman represent two different ways of knowledge, one rational and calculating, representing an imperialistic perspective, the other mystical and musical, representing a local resistance. If--even in the evidently sincere clash of views, perhaps expressing the conflict in the author--some of the poems feel overly explanatory (the Place Names poems, for instance, even though the explanations may be more invented than real), conceding too much to the ignorant curiosity of Western minds, the collection is still suffused with a strong sense of self-discovery and self-making, which asserts the autonomy of the post-colonial subject. My favorite poem, which does not explain too much, is the extremely moving "My Mother's Atlas of Dolls." Here, the author is not trying to justify himself, but attempting to do justice to one who has never left.

Diary

Had a really special afternoon with the daughters of my late junior-college English teacher Keith Wiltshire. It was lovely to meet Grace and Christine finally, and Grace's husband Pete. After torte, tea, and wine at Cafe Sabarsky, we walked over to Shepherd Gallery, where Christine's husband, Lin, an artist, works. We were given a little tour of the current show by the owners. Then more drinks--gin and tonic--and conversation. We miss you, Keith.

Shoot for Equality

 

""Shoot me, I asked the young bartender at Dorothy’s...," and Yoshi Matsuzaki did, on the rooftop of Singapore's People's Park Complex. Thanks, Yoshi, for the photography; Jaire Remy W for the art direction; Mark Yeo for the tee-shirt design; and Carolyn Oei and Marc Nair, for publishing the haiga at Mackerel.

14 Singaporeans React to That Gay Tank Top

Thanks, Dear Straight People, for publishing this article.

In this opinion piece, I hope to begin a national conversation by giving the responses of different Singaporeans to my tank top.

I met them in various public spaces, mostly cafés and restaurants, in the course of the week after my Facebook post about the complaint went viral.

They are not a representative sample of Singaporeans, but they can be trusted to give their honest response. In fact, when I asked them for their views, I told them that mixed feelings were welcomed. I think, in the current debate about gay equality, it is important to listen closely and understand one another before we reply. Read the reactions.

Get the Viral Tank Top!

4 tank tops to go to the 4 highest bidders! The tank top that got me into trouble with Singapore's SAFRA gym. Designed by Mark Yeo. Gently worn, freshly washed, lovingly ironed. Get a memento of the gay tank top affair. Wear it about proudly. It's a talking piece. Support gay equality. All proceeds benefit Singapore Unbound, a NY-based literary non-profit that champions freedom of expression and equal rights for all. Opening bid: USD50. Let the bidding begin. Please help to spread the word. Thanks!

Running with Strippers

Cake Theater's "Running with Strippers" last night was one of the most exhilarating pieces of theater I've seen in Singapore. It took great risks and brought them off beautifully. Director Natalie Hennedige selected her artist-performers carefully and then freed them to do what they wished in stunning sets specially created for their work. C.O.P. (Cult of Personality) had fantastic costumes and wonderfully synchronized movements. Rizamn Putra's "Trip the Light Fantastic," a romp through the artist's personal entanglements with dance, was funny and painful, shadowed by a blown-up drawing of an x-ray of his injured spine. I cried during Cyril Wong's "Disassembly" when he sang live to a recording of his own voice, and made us wonder which voice, if any, would survive us. When I reached Zul Mahmod's sound installation "March On," I found the dull thuds of the 16 solenoids on hanging sheets of white paper strangely consolatory. The artist meant to critique the harsh pace of society by recreating the drum beat of progress, but after Rizman and Cyril's performances, I was looking to the machines for salvation. Go see it. It's playing this weekend.

SU Fellowship Award Event Tonight

I'd gone back and forth about whether I should wear my gay tank top at tonight's Singapore Unbound Fellowship Award Event. Singapore Unbound is the NY-based literary non-profit I founded to build cultural exchange between Singapore and the USA. It is not solely about gay rights. Would I be misrepresenting the organization by wearing something with so personal a statement, and so informal as a tank top? Would I be identifying the organization too closely with me?

But the tagline that summarizes the values of Singapore Unbound is, after all, "Freedom of Expression. Equal Rights for All." It is echoed in the back of my shirt: "Equality for All" and in the act of wearing the shirt freely in public. Although Singapore Unbound is not solely about gay rights, it is about human rights. And the discrimination, including torture and murder, against LGBT people around the world is a very pressing global issue now, and must be fought with every weapon we have. Singapore Unbound is not just about freeing Singapore from oppression and inequities, but also releasing Singapore to be a champion of freedom and equality around the world. We can do so much more.

As writers and artists, we have a part to play in the fight. Tonight, when we come together to celebrate the award of the very first SU Fellowship to Nur Sabrina Binte Dzulkifli, I'm doing my small part by wearing my gay tank top. I'm additionally encouraged to do so in honor of Sabrina, who will be presenting an excerpt of a play that casts a light on lesbianism in the Malay Muslim community in Singapore, a topic seldom discussed in local theater and literature. Her fearless courage in dealing with hot-button issues, including race, religion, and post-natal depression, is one huge reason why she has been selected for the fellowship, to come to NYC for two weeks.

I very much doubt that any of tonight's guests, most of whom are artists and writers, will be put off by my tank top. The arts must stand for something beyond itself. The arts have the capacity to change society. I don't mean to try to change anyone's religious convictions or social values, but if we can all agree to develop the public realm as a pluralistic, welcoming, and respectful space, we would all have taken a big step forward.

And part of that step, I think, involves an agreement that 377A, the anti-sodomy law, discriminates unjustly against the LGBT community, and that it must be struck down in the interest of fairness. The state has no business interfering with the sexual relationship of two consenting adults. And society has no business to get the state to do so, to impose its own set of values on everyone. We can believe in what we believe in--freedom of conscience and worship is also a human right--but we cannot deprive others of their freedoms and rights when those freedoms and rights do not impinge on the freedoms and rights of others. To strike down the anti-sodomy law does not compel anyone to practice sodomy. To each their own.

Singapore Unbound wants to expand the space for everyone to be free and equal. Join us if you want the same. As for the tank top being too informal for an award event, why the need for formality? It's stuffy.

Cartoon and Reflections

I've inspired a cartoon! Lol. Wish I look like that. Thanks, toastwire!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BWotdzRDDmM/

My brief piece of reflection  on SAFRA's statement. Thanks, Sean Foo, for soliciting and publishing it on Dear Straight People.

SAFRA Responds

SAFRA came out for fairness. They did not give in to homophobia. Thank you, SAFRA! Your statement proves that Singapore is ready for diversity.

"In a statement sent to Channel NewsAsia, SAFRA said Mr Koh's attire did not contravene any of the gym's rules and regulations.

"We have also spoken to the gym users who gave the feedback. From our conversation with Mr Koh, we believe there was no intent to cause discomfort to other gym goers so we hope this can be resolved amicably," said SAFRA."

SAFRA Mount Faber

A few users of the SAFRA Mount Faber Club Gym complained about my tank top to the gym manager. They accused me of trying to change a sensitive social policy or issue. My tank top says, “Gay But Not Yet Equal” on the front, and “Equality For All” on the back. I learned of their complaint when I arrived at the gym this morning. I have been using this same gym when I visit Singapore every summer. On this trip back to Singapore, I had gone to the gym three times; today was my fourth visit only. The gym manager had tried to call me about the complaint but could not reach me. He spoke to me on the phone in the gym.

I asked him how many people complained. He repeated, some, and elaborated, more than one but not many. He also said that “the social issue” was sensitive nationally, and that SAFRA could not allow any social advocacy. I explained that I was not trying to change any social policy, but I was just wearing a tank top specially designed by a New York designer. I should have pointed out, but I didn’t at the time, that the tank top did not refer to Singapore at all. I should have also said that I wasn't standing by the water cooler and passing out flyers, I was just working on my pecs and butt, like the other gym users. I did say that the complainants were not objecting to social advocacy per se. They would not have complained if my tank top had promoted a national heart campaign. They were, in fact, complaining about my being gay.

The gym manager agreed that the complaint was subjective, but said that he still had to take it into account. I said that although a few people complained, the majority of the gym users did not complain, showing they had no problem with my tank top. The gym manager pointed out that the majority could be dissenting quietly. I replied that they could also be approving quietly. He said, and I agreed, that we were not about to take a poll.

I asked him what he would like me to do. He said he was not going to ban me from the gym but would ask me to be sensitive to other gym users. When I asked him what that meant, he repeated himself, and then said that as the gym manager he had to mediate between the complainants and me. I told him I understood he had a job to do. He and his staff were totally courteous and reasonable throughout the 15-minute interview. I was feeling very conspicuous at the front desk, and was surprised to find my hand holding the phone shaking a little, more from the desire to say the right thing than for any other reason. He told his staff to let me into the gym dressed in my tank top as usual.

I don’t think this is the end of it. I suspect that the complainants will complain to the gym manager again, and if he does not take stronger action against me, they will turn to his boss, the manager of the SAFRA Club. SAFRA stands for Singapore Armed Forces Reservist Association. They provide, among other benefits, recreational facilities for National Servicemen and their families. I have done my National Service and Reservist training: I finished as an infantry company commander with the rank of captain. I had not come out as gay then. The Armed Forces require all self-declared gay men to serve National Service, and so it would be wrong to deny these gay servicemen, self-declared or otherwise, any of the benefits afterwards.

It would be an injustice to stop me from using any of the facilities of the SAFRA Recreational Clubs just because a few members do not like my tank top. Or, to put it more bluntly, just because they do not like gay people. And if I’m not allowed to wear my tank top to the SAFRA gym, would I be allowed to wear it walking about Singapore, or would the same people who complained to the gym complain to the police about my “social advocacy on a sensitive social issue”? It’s a tank top, for goodness sake. Would you want to take me in for a tank top? Singapore would be a laughing stock to the world.

Singapore Diary

Saturday, conducted a Sing Lit Station workshop on revision with three participants. Andrea, an intern, made a valuable addition. Then attended the Migrant Poetry Evening at The Arts House in the tank top designed by Mark Yeo.

With Cyril Wong

With Annaliza Bakri

On Sunday, I heard Phillip Cheah perform at Victoria Memorial Hall (Dance Studio) with his collaborator and pianist Trudy Chan. They were terrific, as expected. Phillip is a good interpreter of art songs. I found the French tunes the most affecting in their combination of lightness and emotion. Many of Phillip's former teachers and classmates from RI came to support him. In the evening, I had dinner with YP and her family at Chapter 55, an Italian bistro in Tiong Bahru. The girls liked their presents. Hannah got an autographed copy of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. She is beginning to collect books signed by their authors. I found the perfect present for Liesel at the Asian Civilization Museum, a book of watercolor paintings of the flora and fauna of the Malay peninsula, commissioned by the first British Resident William Farquhar, and done by Chinese artists using a mix of Chinese and Western painting techniques. Liesel loves to draw. She just drew an ant for art class.

Diary

Strange limbo while waiting to fly to Singapore tonight. I've packed, now waiting for my order of tee-shirts, and then the airport shuttle. Last Thursday, celebrated KM's birthday by treating him to dinner at Chomp Chomp. He has taken early retirement because of Parkinson's, and will be released from work next month. On Saturday, we had the Calatayuds over for dinner. Conversation flowed back and forth. Everyone seemed to have had a great time. Sunday, we spent on Christopher Street pier and got sunburnt. Undeterred, we went to Rockaway Beach on 4th of July. Very crowded, but good fun. We now have an almost straight train there, the A.

Kirsten Tan's "Pop Aye"

With gentle yet probing wit, Kirsten Tan's film Pop Aye sounds the empty depths of human accomplishment and urban development. It brings us along with its protagonists, a disillusioned architect and a rescued elephant, on an unusual road trip to meet a string of colorful characters all coping with life's losses in different ways, the charismatic Thai countryside echoing the massive beauty of what the director called the "Brad Pitt" of elephants. The human actors hold their own. Astonishingly all but one are non-professional actors. Their strong and nuanced performances, drawn out by skillful directing, made the movie delightfully engaging, even affecting. Last night, at the opening night at Film Forum, I heard people expressing surprise that this was Kirsten's first feature film, so persuasive was its vision and assured its execution. She is definitively a filmmaker to watch. Catch Pop Aye in Film Forum before it moves to other cities. It plays only through Tuesday.