Poem: "winter trees"

winter trees
by the frozen reservoir--
a clean feeling

Poem: "winter trees"

winter trees
repeat for the deaf
the peace sign

Poem: "winter trees"

winter trees
grow all year round
on the moon

Poem: "winter trees"

from winter trees
long hungry mewing
do trees talk cat?

Poem: "winter trees"

winter trees
an empty driveway
to an empty house

Poem: "winter trees"

winter trees

you can see everything

except leaves

Postmodern American Poetry

I've been ploughing through the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, more out of a sense of obligation than anything. I am surprised, however, by the amount of pleasure I received. Sure, there were many things that I would not care to read again, but the poets that I would sue to know better were not a few.

I still think Charles Olson is over-rated. John Cage I read with anthropological interest rather than aesthetic delight. Robert Duncan's mysticism is too hand-wavy for me; I am more for Denise Levertov's "ecstatic Protestantism," as editor Paul Hoover puts it. "Illustrious Ancestors" and "Where Is the Angel?" bear re-reading. I am also drawn to Barbara Guest's lyricism. Her "Red Lilies" begins so practically: "Someone has remembered to dry the dishes;/they have taken the accident out of the stove," and ends with magical flight: "The paper folded like a napkin/other wings flew into the stone." Robert Creeley I find thin, despite of his musicality.

The New York School has weathered very well. They are fun to read. James Schuyler's "The Crystal Lithium" is a beautiful and convincing nature poem. "Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?" is terrific, as is "Korean Mums." Kenneth Koch is sharp and funny. Jack Spicer I find pretentious, but I did enjoy his re-writes of the tales of Arthur's knights, Gawain and Percival. Frank O'Hara is a joy. John Ashbery I don't get most of the time. He gives me the feeling that I have been had.

Larry Eigner's poetry is very spare, Japanese. He wrote what he observed from his wheelchair. Ed Dorn's "On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck" is very moving. Gregory Corso is a wild thing; witness "Last Night I Borrowed a Car." I have always liked Gary Snyder's "Riprap," and like here his homespun wisdom in "Hay for the Horses," "The Bath" and "Axe Handles." Amiri Baraka, who died this year, is all ideas.

I enjoyed Susan Howe's This That but the poems in this anthology, not as much. The extracts from Lyn Hejinian's My Life drift pleasantly but do not seize nor excite. Nothing to hold the attention from Joan Retallack to Wanda Coleman. Ron Silliman cannot forget that he is a critic even in his poetry. I got more out of re-reading Mei-mei Berssenbrugge than the first time.

The Language poets bore me to tears.

Bin Ramke's long poem "The Ruined World" is compelling. I'd like to read more of his work. I don't like Eileen Myle's way of breaking lines into one or two words. I enjoyed John Yau's cinematic poems, and was tickled to read his poem about Singlish called "ing Grish." Myung Mi Kim's poetry does nothing for me, does nothing to me, whereas Mark McMorris' does. I like the tone of intimacy in his Letters to Michael. Yes, he does talk about grammar and the torque of syntax, but his poems are one person speaking (or writing) or another: "The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit/is what exits from the wound it documents."

Of Kenneth Goldsmith and conceptual poetry, let me quote one avant-gardist against another. Drew Gardner, one of the "founders" of Flarf: "Conceptualism repeats gestures that were vetted and digested forty years ago in the art world and displays them in the poetry world virtually unchanged: it is a remake. Poetry is too out of it to notice. And thus Conceptualism hits an intellectual pitch. The intellectual pitch, it could be noted, of the art history professor" (in "Why Flarf Is Better Than Conceptualism").

I like what Elizabeth Willis wrote in her essay "The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric": "The language of progress tyrannizes poetry. . . . What's new is obsolete within seconds." Her poem "The Witch" is sexy, challenging and self-aware, permanent qualities of lyrical poetry. I hope she outlasts the noisy K. Silem Mohammad. Linh Dinh is another poet who turns his imagination to critical use. "Continuous Bullets Over Flattened Earth" is terrific, as are "Vocab Lab" and "Body Eats." They may sound didactic outwardly, but their inner voice is discovery.

And I certainly want to read more Eleni Sikelianos.

Christian Bök is one ingenious dude. Drew Gardner's Flarf poetry is good for a laugh, which is more than you can say for most of the poets in this anthology. "Chicks Dig War" is clever pastiche.

The Black Mountain poets have their Black Mountain college. The Language poets have their University of California, Berkeley and their SUNY-Buffalo. There is a coterie formed of the alumni of Brown University too. Now, every avant-garde must develop from a coterie, if only for mutual support and encouragement. But I prefer the coteries that are not based around institutions like universities and do not transmit their doctrines in a classroom, but are rather informal networks of friendships. Whether they are the New York School or the Flarf group, a ridiculous joie de vivre survives in their verse.

The Cathay Cinema Connection

GH and I have been watching a number of French gay movies. "Times Have Been Better" (2007), directed by Régis Musset and starring Bernard Le Coq, was one of the better ones. Gay son comes out to liberal parents, who freak out.

Watched last week Greta Garbo and John Gilbert smolder in "Flesh and the Devil" (1926), directed by Clarence Brown, with cinematography by William Daniels. The black-and-white silent film, based on Hermann Sudermann's novel The Undying Past, was completely absorbing. After seducing the John Gilbert character, Garbo marries his childhood friend, played by the very handsome Lars Hanson. When her husband finds the two of them in a compromising position, the men fight a duel. In an attempt to stop them, Garbo falls into the icy lake, in a memorable scene. A melodrama, sure, but very pretty.

Last evening, I watched quite a different movie, Yasujiro Ozu's "An Autumn Afternoon" (1962). The Japanese director's last film, it returns to the theme of "Late Spring." A father (Chishû Ryû) seeks to marry off a daughter before she becomes too old for marriage. Unlike the daughter in "Late Spring" who is contented to serve her father for the rest of her life, the daughter (Shima Iwashita) in "An Autumn Afternoon" has her eyes on a young man, but loses him, because she feels obligated to serve her father and younger brother.

The social canvas is much wider in the later film. It takes in the father's former classmates, all successful businessmen now, and their former teacher, whose poverty and reliance on his spinster-daughter serve the protagonist as warning. It also takes in the relationship between the older son and the son's wife, a young couple eager to own a modern convenience such as a refrigerator.

The war is also part of the film. In "Late Spring," it was the cause of the daughter's illness, and so, unfitness for marriage. In "An Autumn Afternoon," the father, who commanded a warship, runs into a crew member. Whereas the subordinate remembers the war fondly as a time of mission and discipline, the father remarks gently that perhaps it is better that Japan did not win the war. I learned from Wikipedia that Ozu was sent to Singapore during WWII to make a film with Chandra Bose. Stationed in Cathay Cinema, he had little inclination to work, but watched American films provided by the Army information corps. In my poem "Heads," I wrote about Japanese soldiers watching American films in Cathay Cinema. Little did I know that one of them was Ozu!

LoveSingapore? Call It Hate Instead.

Over the weekend, proof was uncovered of a systematic campaign of hatred against LGBT people in Singapore. A secret guide, compiled and distributed by LoveSingapore, the proselytizing arm of Faith Community Baptist Church, calls for churches to form "Action Groups" to pressure the government to uphold Section 377A of the Penal Code. The infamous law, a legacy of the British colonial government, criminalizes sodomy, and so stands in the way of equal rights for all citizens of Singapore, straight and gay. Titled "Support 377A: a simple guide to giving feedback," the church document is astonishing in its deviousness, hypocrisy and self-deception.

Good Morning, Late Spring

The plot of Late Spring (1949) reminds me a little of The Golden Bowl. A daughter who loves her widowed father so much that parting, in the form of marriage, is such sweet sorrow. Setsuko Hara plays Noriko Samiya with real inwardness. Having just recovered from an illness during the war, she is seen at the age of 28 to be ripe for marriage. Her father (Chishû Ryû), knowing her attachment to him, and concern for his old age, tricks her into leaving him by pretending to contemplate marriage with a widow. I was thrilled to see Ryōan-ji in the film. The visit to the famous dry garden in Kyoto is the last trip that father and daughter take together, before she leaves the home to be married.

Set in suburban Tokyo, Good Morning (1959) is a humorous satire of postwar consumerism and adult mannerisms. Two boys, brothers, take a vow of silence when their parents refuse to buy them a TV. Their silence comments nicely on the use of small talk as a social lubricant in the adult world. The boys can't understand why the adults talk so much. They give greetings, gossip, carry tales, and, in the case of two young people (Chishû Ryû and Yoshiko Kuga), exchange pleasantries about the weather, instead of expressing their feelings for each other. Yasujirô Ozu drew sterling comic performances from all the child actors.

The Foucault Reader

After encountering the critical thought of Nietzsche, I have wondered how to apply it to social and political problems. Foucault shows one way of doing so, through the genealogical analysis of power relations in society.

From an interview in Power/Knowledge:

The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning. History has no "meaning," though it is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be susceptible to analysis down to the smallest detail--but this in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics....

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse....

From the essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History":

Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination....

From Discipline and Punish:

The perpetual penality that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institutions compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes....

Traditionally, power was what was seen, what was shown, and what was manifested and, paradoxically, found the principle of its force in the movement by which it deployed that force. Those on whom it was exercised could remain the shade; they received light only from that portion of power that was conceded to them, or from the reflection of it that for a moment they carried. Disciplinary power, on the other hand, is exercised through its invisibility; at the same time it imposes on those whom it subjects a principle of compulsory visibility. In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen....

The "Enlightenment,"which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines....

From an interview with Paul Rabinow, titled "Space, Knowledge and Power":

Liberty is a practice.... The liberty of men is never assured by the institutions and laws that are intended to guarantee them. This is why almost all of these laws and institutions are quite capable of being turned around. Not because they are ambiguous, but simply because "liberty" is what must be exercised.... The guarantee of freedom is freedom....

From The History of Sexuality, Volume I:

This new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversities and a new specification of individuals. As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology. Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the foot of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitely active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less a habitual sin than as a singular nature. We must not forget that the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized--Westphal's famous article of 1870 on "contrary sexual sensations" can stand as its date of birth--less by a type of sexual relation than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species....

From Preface to The History of Sexuality, Volume II:

But I reflected that, after all, it was best to sacrifice a definite program to a promising line of approach. I also reminded myself that it would probably not be worth the trouble of making books if they failed to teach the author something he hadn't known before, if they didn't lead to unforeseen places, and if they didn't disperse one toward a strange and new relation with himself. The pain and the pleasure of the book is to be an experience.

From Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics:

No! I'm not looking for an alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism....

I think the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger....

There were exercises in order to make one master of oneself. For Epictetus, you had to be able to look at a beautiful girl or a beautiful boy without having any desire for her or him. You have to become completely master of yourself.

Sexual austerity in Greek society was a trend or movement, a philosophical movement coming from very cultivated people in order to give their live much more intensity, much more beauty. In a way, it's the same in the twentieth century when people, in order to get a more beautiful life, tried to get ride of all the sexual repression of their society, of their childhood. Gide in Greece would have been an austere philosopher....

I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sarre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves--to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity--and not of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art....

From an interview with Paul Rabinow in May, 1984, about polemics, politics, and problemizations:

I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It's true that I don't like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism," I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things. I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the morality that concerns the search for the truth and the relation to the other. 

Poem: "storm warning"

storm warning
shops will receive Washington
on his birthday

Poem: "the snow unscrolls"

the snow unscrolls
for the personal seals
of children’s feet

Poem: "between snowfalls"

between snowfalls
he gives the final touch
to the twisty branch

A Separation

Watched last night "A Separation," a superb Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. A couple seeks a divorce because the wife wants to leave the country to give her daughter a better future whereas the husband wants to stay to look after his father suffering from Alzheimer's. The separation begins a chain of events that is completely involving in its human drama. The acting is uniformly strong: Peyman Moaadi as the husband Nader; Leila Hatami as the wife Simin; Sarina Farhadi as their daughter Termeh; Sareh Bayat as the hired help Razieh; Shahab Hosseini as Razieh's hot-tempered husband Hojjat. Even the minor characters such as Termeh's teacher and Razieh's young daughter are entirely believable.

*

This morning's haiku does not have anything to do with the film. Or does it?


what kind of birds
live in these nests of snow?
they must fly young

Poem: "in the snow"

in the snow
the stone sits on its shadow
a courtier on his robe

Poem: "red dot in snow"

red dot in snow
I go closer to the fence
a fallen leaf

Zen Landscapes

I'm still thinking about Zen Landscapes by Allen S. Weiss. The unity of Zen aesthetics in landscaping, flower-arrangement, ceramics and poetry, all ultimately informed by the tea ceremony. A stone on a bed of gravel may constitute a garden worthy of contemplation. Raked to represent waves, the gravel is thus both fixed and moving, permanent and transient. Flaws are part of the beauty of the contemplated object. I don't think W. H. Auden was into Zen, but he captured the sentiment in "And the crack in the tea-cup opens / A lane to the land of the dead."


again I passed
the garden without looking,
some snow, a stone

Missing Subject Line

Wrote a poem to thank Elsa for her Christmas present of Arthur Yap's Complete Poems. The poem "Missing Subject Line" is now published as part of a Singaporean collaboration with Prairie Schooner in the latter's Fusion series. Thanks, Alvin Pang, for editing the Singapore selection. Thanks, Kwame Dawes, for the brilliant idea behind Fusion.

Learning Japanese

I started learning conversational Japanese yesterday. Met Chisato, recommended by PB, at Panera Bread and looked at basic traveler's phrases. Pronunciation is not difficult. Memorization will take some effort.

I've been dipping into Buson's haikus for a month or two now. I do love the warmth and immediacy of his poetry. He makes me want to be a haiku poet. Never had that feeling when reading Basho and Issa. But it's hard to write haiku when the heart is in a state of agitation.

Bought Zen Landscape at the New Museum bookstore. Allen S. Weiss writes with genuine feeling about Japanese dry gardens, tea ceremony and ceramics. Wabi-sabi. Mono no aware. An aesthetics of simplicity, asymmetry, use value, old age and the seasons.

I'm really looking forward to our trip to Japan in August. I will launch the Japanese translation of The Pillow Book in Tokyo. GH and I are also thinking of visiting Kyoto, and a hot spring town between the two big cities.

Chikatetsu wa doko desu ka?

Yeng Pway Ngon's Poems of Rebellion

I must confess that I don't know any Singapore poetry written in languages other than English. Alvin Pang and Goh Beng Choo perform a signal service for me and others like me by translating Yeng Pway Ngon, an important poet who writes in Chinese. Born in 1947, Yeng has written not only poetry, but also essays, fiction, plays and literary criticism, 24 volumes so far. He was the editor and publisher of two literary magazines, Teahouse in the 1980s and Encounter in the 1990s. He has had a long and distinguished literary career. In 2003 he received Singapore's Cultural Medallion for Literature.

The pamphlet I bought from Books Actually last summer offers a selection of his early poems, published between 1967 and 1970. It is intended to be the first part of a series of translations of Yeng's poetry. Titled Poems 1 [Rebellion], the work is very much that of a young man, as he agonizes over his place in the world and lashes out at careerism and consumerism.

Steeped in the Anglo-American poetic tradition, I hear in these poems echoes of T. S. Eliot. The opening poem "Aria" begins with the image of a rose garden and goes on to describe how "the heart of each afternoon is thick with weeds." The second poem "Cafe," with its depiction of ennui, deploys a refrain similar to the one in "Prufrock," and urban images that resemble those in "Preludes." The third and longest poem is titled, in an allusion to the most famous image in "Prufrock," "On the Operating Table." And yes, it refers to a wasteland. These are poems of a young poet absorbing and finding a use for his poetic influences.

I hear a more original voice emerging in the next poem "Telephone Booth." Comparing the public telephone to a woman, the poem is witty and sexy. It develops the comparison in non-obvious ways, before reaping the rewards of directness.


all she does is fool around with chewing gum
standing between mirrors
calling her own name
falling in love with shifting colours on glass surfaces

still for her sake you lift the receiver
stroke her face
stick your piece of nickel into her

Roberto Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives"

Just finished reading The Savage Detectives this afternoon, and loved it for the poignant depiction of the loss of youthful hopes. The formal ambition is also thoroughly admirable. The first and third parts are written by a young visceral realist novitiate Juan Garcia Madero in the form of diary entires. The second, and largest part, consists of the stories of about 50 people whose lives crossed with those of the founders of visceral realism, Ulises Lima (based on Bolaño's friend Mario Santiago) and Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter ego). Written as if they are being interviewed, these stories show how impossible it is to pin down who the poets are; everyone has a different take on them. The parallel in the detective plot lies in the quixotic search by Lima and Belano for the stridentist poet Cesárea Tinajero, the mother of visceral realism.

Haruki Murakami's "Underground"

I'm planning to visit Japan in August and so when I found Haruki Murakami's work of journalism Underground at Kramerbooks in D.C., I bought it immediately, for who can resist a book subtitled "The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche"?

The first, and bigger, part of the book consists of interviews with the victims of the gas attacks, and the family of those who died. These interviews are ordered according to the subway lines on which the Aum attack on March 20, 1995, a Monday, took place. Dissatisfied with the presentation by the Japanese media of a collective image of "the innocent Japanese sufferer," Murakami wanted to discover and document the actual people behind the label of victims, to recognize that each person had, as he puts it, "a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas." Most interesting, and moving, are the interviews of the subway staff who had to respond to the emergency. Their interviews are suffused with pain, guilt, horror, self-justification, and, above all, bewilderment over unanswerable what-if questions.

Part Two of the book consists of interviews with former and present members of the Aum sect, though not with the attackers who were imprisoned or still on trial at the writing of the book. Most members interviewed have struggled with the meaning and purpose of life since young, while feeling alienated from the conformism and competition that they saw around them. They report their strong sense of relief when they became a renunciate and pledged themselves to follow Asahara, the leader of the sect, unconditionally. Even after the gas attack, they hold on to the idea that there is some good in the sect's teaching, and some try to locate a point in time when the organization went wrong.

Intriguing detail, from Akio Namimura's interview: when the police took him in for questioning, for being an Aum member, they asked him to trample on a photo of Shoko Asahara to prove that he had renounced his faith, "like it was in the Edo period when they made the Japanese Christians renounce their faith by stepping on a drawing of Jesus," Namimura comments.

In an essay that concludes Part One, Murakami reflects on what actually happened in the Tokyo Subway on that fateful day. Thinking about how Aum members actively sought to be controlled by Asahara, he wrote some perspicacious remarks about narrative:

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. 

Now a narrative is a story, not logic, not ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character." It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world.

Aum members, however, gave up the complications and confusions of their own narrative and accepted the simplified, junky, and cobbled-together narrative put out by Asahara. Murakami, however, turns the knife further and deeper, by asking the reader:

Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and had taken on a "narrative" in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of "insanity"? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's vision that could sooner or later turn into nightmare? 

Pure, Explicit, Invincible

Read three novels while visiting GH's family for Christmas. The first was a recommendation by his father, who is an avid reader. Calico Joe, published in 2012, is touted as John Grisham's first baseball novel. In my teens I used to tear through Grisham's legal thrillers, absorbed in the arcane world of courtroom drama. Baseball is just as arcane to me, but my ignorance was no barrier to enjoying this fast-paced novel. A boy is torn between his baseball idol and his baseball father, who play against each other in one fateful match. Grisham is a good storyteller, who knows how to put a story through its paces. What annoyed me was the times when he tried for some deeper meaning, and sounded pretentious instead. It's pretty obvious that the story is about the all-American hero and his evil twin. There is no need to hammer home the dualistic point. The characterization is not very complex, but the father comes off as the most interesting character because he was the most injured and the most injuring.

My second book was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores. The protagonist, a newspaper columnist, turns ninety and decides to abandon all for a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. To his surprise, he falls in love with the girl and names her Delgadina. He is revived by love and its sufferings. This is a short novel, but it is full of lovingly observed detail, which renders the texture of an old man's experience so utterly believable. It makes me want to write a book about my beautiful porn star who died of an overdose of prescription medicine.

No One Writes to the Colonel, also by Marquez, is a collection of short stories. The title story is quite long, however, and is the most substantial of the lot. The eponymous colonel and his wife live in the most penurious circumstances while waiting for his government pension. They share the little that they have with a fighting cock, whom everyone in town believes will win the coming cock fights. The animal very quickly becomes the symbol of hope for a hopeless community. The colonel's wife tries to persuade him to sell the cock so that they could get some food. He relents but repents in time to retrieve the bird. The conclusion is powerfully poignant. He is asked by his wife about what they would eat in the meantime.

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years--the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute--to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: 

"Shit."

The other stories are all set in the same town of Macondo. My favorites are the heartbreaking "Tuesday Siesta" and the heartwarming "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon." The first is about the death of a thief, the second about the gift of a beautiful bird cage. In both, human emotions are "pure, explicit, invincible" too.

A Bibliography of Our Own

The first annotated and comprehensive bibliography of the entire body of “Singapore Literature in English." A magnificent achievement! Congrats to Prof Koh Tai Ann and her team!

Image from NTU webpage

John Berger's "Selected Essays"

It is astonishing to me how consistent John Berger was in over 30 years of art criticism. His judgment of an artist could become more developed and refined, more elaborated, but the underlying sense of the artist's purpose and value remained the same. This consistency of seeing came from a coherent philosophy of art criticism. As Berger puts it in his "Introduction" to Permanent Red, which is also aptly the introductory essay of this Selected Essays edited by Geoff Dyer, the art critic must first answer the question: What can art serve here and now? For Berger, the answer that drove his looking was another question: Does this work help or encourage men to know and claim their social rights?

Berger was not looking for Socialist propaganda, but saw his answer/question as the logic of his historical situation. In the second half of the twentieth century, the most important historical movements were the fights for national independence, civil rights, gender equality, and peace. And so the questions that were posed to artworks were those of the times. To the extent that an artwork reminded the viewer of his potentialities, it encouraged him to claim the social rights in his life. Those who claimed a different purpose for art were simply out of step with their times, or as Berger writes, "The hysteria with which many people today deny the present, inevitable social emphasis of art is simply due to the fact that they are denying their time. They would like to live in a period when they'd be right."

How ironic then that the times have changed, and Berger seems now to be the one out of step. The old confidence about social rights is gone, not just about the viability of securing them, but even the desirability of attaining them. We are more ambivalent, I think, about the value of the new nationalisms, for instance, and of the triumph of secularism. The early Berger essays refer to the uneven development of the world, with the confidence that the new and less-developed nations will climb on board the train of Western Enlightenment and espouse its ideals. A number of later essays, born of visits to Turkey, are less sure of this linear, stageist view of history.

The times have changed. We are more concerned with the rights of representation than with the social rights as defined by the West. So the imperative in contemporary art to be inclusive or to admit to its exclusivity, to its necessary subjectivity. It's a dilemma. How can one claim to represent anything except oneself? The problem is most acute in painting, of all the arts, because it is, finally, a single static framed object. It is little wonder that so many artists have migrated to film and installations, to motion and environment, in other words, since the problems of painting seem intractable.

Berger's later essays pay attention to the global power of capital. Everything everywhere is up for buying and selling. The point here, as I see it, is that all the movements for social rights played into the hands of capital. The newly independent nations are now free to buy and sell. Women are now potentially equal to men in purchasing power. The poor wants to be rich. Peace is good for business. The essential fight, it seems to me, is against capital, not on behalf of labor, but on behalf of humanity. We need to resist the commodification of everything. To do so, we have to find intellectual resources from anywhere we can find them, even in such unlikely places as John Berger's socialism.

Poem: "Top Ten Books of 2013"

Top Ten Books of 2013


10. Magritte at the MoMA, The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938

9. From the open-air market in Nice, fresh figs, goat cheese, baguette

8. The young astrophysicist in the hotel shower

7. The Seven Samurai

6. Splash Bar closing. Any reference to dancing in my writing is in part a reference to the dance floor at Splash.

5. Your excitement inside Cité radieuse in Marseilles

4. After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I saw an old man walk by with his grandson

3. The Talipot Palm flowering for the first and last time before it dies

2. Massage oil 

1. The garage mechanic in Tara Bergin’s This Is Yarrow and his black hands—“everywhere they touch will be evidence of him.”

Poem: "Gift Set"

Gift Set


Elsa, I’ve just received the package of bones you sent!
I’ve always wanted the complete set
to check if his throat cancer left a mark.

What fun to hold a familiar funny bone and hear
it speak of a painted scroll,
I know the stupid bird can never eat the stupid peach 

and another, smooth pebble, never seen before,
a pig is a very compact arrangement,
and wonder where it fits.

The bone for his friend Keith
keeps its silence about a word—

Alex Au, the blogger
facing charges of holding the courts in contempt,
guessed the word is gay,
Cyril (remember him?) reckons it goodness,
I fancy you—

and so the linguist speaks eternally.

Ha, ha! Arthur Yap, I have your bones all in one place,
as others do who cherish completeness
far from home, above the ground, and unquiet.

Thank you.

Poem: "An Argument Against An Objective Materialist Universe"

An Argument Against An Objective Materialist Universe


The wallpaper has a pattern of eyes,
life-sized, brown, with double eyelids.
I spin but cannot catch any one blinking.

When I change in the morning
to get ready for work,
they appraise me from all angles.

In the evening, after work,
when I’m masturbating in bed,
I swear a tear glistens at the corner of every eye.

Just before I fall asleep,
they look like the eyes of my boyfriend
who is away in Brazil.

I can’t get them to stop looking at me.
I can’t stop looking at them.
It’s the same way even if I write,

the wallpaper has a pattern of eggs. 

We have no wallpaper in our bedroom.
You’ll have to take my word for it.

Poem: "The Murderous Sky"

The Murderous Sky

after Magritte 


The sky has been raining dead birds all morning.
They strike the ground so hard that they bounce
up to the waist and disappear into the blue air,
not without leaving a blot of blood, a bull’s eye.
I try to avoid stepping on the red shots but there
are so many that it’s impossible not to cross
a firing line. Other people don’t seem to care,
not the schoolgirl thumbing her phone, not the
short pizza delivery man hurtling by on his bike.
In the distance, however, a woman is steering
her black stroller as if she is avoiding puddles.
A young man on a bench looks up from his book.

Poem: "The Ideology of Aggressive Interior Attack"

The Ideology of Aggressive Interior Attack


The fire will climb from the 59th, that’s
how old I am, to the 86th floor observatory.
The fire engines are on their way.
One firefighter will lose his life trying
to rescue a woman in a bathroom.
He is 34, Irish and divorced. Sees his two daughters
on alternate weekends. About to be promoted.
I have read tomorrow’s papers by mistake.
The woman’s safe. The cause of the fire unknown.

Poem: "Getting Dressed"

Getting Dressed


After I pull down my pullover,
 the front collar of my t-shirt is too high. 
It is in fact the back collar.
I have my t-shirt on back to front.

Pulling off my pullover, I realize
my mistake is in fact a mistake,
I have my t-shirt on right.

The shirt must have ridden up
inside the pullover.

I pull my pullover over my head
and the knitted arms over my arms.
The front collar is riding high again.
I pull at it but it won’t go down

because it is the back collar.

I pull off my pullover again.
In fact I check the mirror.
I am wearing the t-shirt right.
The front collar is in front,
showing the collar of flesh below the neck,
except when it is the back.

Poem: "Who Wants To Know The Answer?"

Who Wants To Know The Answer?

I’m reading John Berger on Magritte.

On the radio, a young man has a question

about his Toyota Corolla Hatchback.

You’re from Eugene? the auto expert asks.

Eugene, Oregon.

There’s a liquid leaking from his dashboard.

Is it greasy? the auto expert asks.

Yes, it’s greasy.

A phone shrills in the studio.

Why isn’t anyone

attending to it?

That’s a problem, the auto expert says, when you’re out on a date.

Yeah, it’s a real problem. It was leaking

all over the floor, all over my good shoes.

I tried soaking it up with newspapers,

but it was hopeless, it was leaking so much.

The phone shrills and shrills.

Oh, it’s not in the studio

but nagging behind me, in the kitchen

of the house where I’m staying,

a wallphone hooked up above the microwave.

Should I answer it? It’s not for me.

It’s an unexpected call.

Nobody’s home.

Would John Berger answer it?

The phone shrills on.

Finally, the auto expert, for he is the expert,

picks it up

and asks in a voice falsely gruff,

hello, who is this?

Love, from the Beginning to the End

This year's thanksgiving was a time with family, friends and movies. We watched three movies with R and S, and then another movie when we got home last night. The Big Wedding (2013), directed by Justin Zackman who also co-wrote the screenplay, suffered from a lack of direction. The best thing, and the cutest thing, in it was Ben Barnes, who played the Columbian son adopted by white parents. When his religious biological mother came for his wedding, the family bent over backwards to hide the fact that dad and mum were divorced. It was a flimsy premise for a film, and it showed.

Bahz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013) more than made up for the disappointment. I loved the excess of it, the garish house, the lavish parties, the rap music, the over-the-top art direction. I was not looking for a faithful rendition of a great novel into film. I was looking for, from Luhrmann the director of Romeo and Juliet, and of Moulin Rouge, a re-envisioning of the world, and he gave us one, tarted up, and dared us to disavow it. Leonardo DiCaprio surprised me by depicting Jay Gatsby with sufficient complexity. Tobey Maguire was out of his depth as Nick Carraway. Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan was a fairy princess; we see her through Gatsby's eyes, as one who can wipe away the past and restart one's life at a pure beginning.

I also enjoyed The Way Way Back (2013), which we watched the next night. Directed and written by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the teen comedy had the distinction of not condescending to teenagers and not sentimentalizing them. Liam James played a shy 14-year-old Duncan, whose face was not so much blank as uncertain. The story had the expected happy ending, but James's acting lifted it above the ordinary.

Last night, we watched Be with Me, the 2005 film by Singapore director Eric Khoo. The film wove together three stories with beautiful cinematography and minimal dialogue. The parts were all played by non-professional actors. In the first, a lonely elderly shopkeeper fell in love with a blind and deaf woman when he read the story of her extraordinary life. The second story traced the love and then the break-up of a teenage lesbian couple. In the third, a security guard matched his obsession with food with his obsession with a woman in his building. One of them would die looking for love.

Monstrosity is the Untruth

TLS October 25 2013

from Jack Flam's review of T. J. Clark's Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica:

Although Clark takes a rather long and circuitous route to conclude that Picasso is a monist whose art is amoral--not from indifference, but from a reality principle (the world itself being amoral)--his discussion of parallels between Nietzsche and Picasso contributes to a better understanding of Picasso's uniqueness as a thinker as well as a painter. It also provides an implicit rebuke to Jung's expectation that great art be "good" as well as beautiful. Following Nietzsche, Clark maintains that the way monstrosity collapses normal terms of identity and difference can be a substitute for truth: "Monstrosity is the Untruth--the strangeness and extremity--inherent in everyday life".

Arthur Danto's "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"

In this work of philosophy, Danto wishes to define art, and to show why contemporary art, having attained self-consciousness, is asking the same questions as philosophy. His approach throughout the book is to compare artworks with what he calls mere real things, when both are indiscernibly alike. The two classes of things, as he argues, belong to different ontological realms, hence, the title of his book. The artist performs a transfiguration of the commonplace when he makes of his materials a work of art. Danto has been criticized for his belief in duality, underlined by the Christian or Catholic figure of transfiguration, and reiterated throughout the book in his references to the body and the soul. I am not sure if the two ontological realms are as separate as his tropes imply, for his argument proceeds by making nice distinctions between, first, a representation and an object, and, then, between a representation and an artistic representation. If the categories are finally different, they are also procedurally nested in one another.

Very roughly, if I understand him rightly, the difference between a representation and an object is that the former is intended. The difference between a representation and an artistic representation is that the latter is artistically intended, meaning, the artist, with his knowledge of the artworld and art history, intends to make a work of art. So Andy Warhol's Brillo Box is a different thing from the Brillo box in the supermarket even though they look indiscernibly the same. In order for the viewer to grasp the artistic intention behind the art work, the viewer must know or come to understand the meanings that the artist infused into the work. The structure of the artwork is thus very close to the structure of a metaphor.

So the artwork is constituted as a transfigurative representation rather than a representation tout court, and I think this is true of artworks, when representations, in general, whether this is achieved self-consciously, as in the arch work I have been discussing, or naively, when the artist simply happens to vest his subject with surprising yet penetrating attributes. To understand the artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is, I think, always there. (172)

Danto draws out many implications from the last statement, one of which has to do with the limits of art criticism:

The first is that if the structure of artworks is, or is very close to the structure of metaphors, then no paraphrase or summary of the artwork can engage the participatory mind in at all the ways that it can; and no critical account of the internal metaphor of the work can substitute for the work inasmuch as the description of a metaphor simply does not have the power of the metaphor it describes, just as a description of a cry of anguish does not activate the same response as the cry of anguish itself. (173)

The task of art criticism is not only to interpret the metaphor but to provide the viewer with the necessary information to respond to the artwork, information lost to time or unknown due to place.

Criticism then, which consists in interpreting metaphor in this extended sense, cannot be intended as a substitute for the work. Its function rather is to equip the reader or viewer with the information needed to respond to the work's power which, after all, can be lost as concepts change or be inaccessible because of the outward difficulties of the work, which the received cultural equipment is insufficient to accommodate. It is not just, as is so often said, that metaphors go stale; they go dead in a way that sometimes require scholarly resurrection. And it is the great value of such disciplines as the history of art and literature to make such works approachable again. (174)

The argument about art leads Danto to expound a view about man.

My view, in brief, is an expansion of the Peircian thesis that "the man is the sum total of his language, because man is a sign. . . . it is not merely what a man represents, but is the way in which he represents it, which has to be invoked to explain the structures of his mind. This way of representing whatever he does represent is what I have in mind by style. If a man is a system of representations, his style is the style of these. The style of a man is, to use the beautiful thought of Schopenhauer, "the physiognomy of the soul."

Frank Ching's "Ancestors"

It is a curious thing to me that I am non-curious about my ancestors. I read to discover literary ancestors--predecessors and mentors--who can give me help. I cannot imagine spending years of my life, as Frank Ching did, researching actual ancestors, as if they have anything to do with me but for the accident of blood. Would I feel different if I discover how illustrious my ancestors are, like Ching's list of top court officials, brilliant scholars, famous poets, noted failures, and even a notorious traitor?

Though illustrious, their lives in dynastic China followed the same basic pattern, which makes for dull reading. These men (for only scholar-class men had their lives recorded in government, city or clan histories) studied throughout their teens and twenties, and sometimes thirties and forties, for the civil-service examinations. When they passed them, they were posted to various government positions throughout the empire to carry out their various duties and effect their various reforms. The pattern was so unremittingly set that when one ancestor spurned the examinations in favor of a life of poetic solitude, he became a hero in this reader's eyes.

The founder of the clan was a poet. Qin Guan was one of the famous four disciples of the Sung Dynasty poet Su Dongbo. The story of how they met is charming. Hearing that the master poet was passing through Yangzhou, Qin Guan was sure that he would travel to Daming Monastery and visit Pingshan Hall, erected by Su's late mentor. To arouse Su's curiosity, Qin Guan wrote a poem in Su's style on a wall of Pingshan Hall. The famous poet recognized the homage and subsequently asked to meet the writer. The rest, as they say, is history. I wish there were more stories like this one in Ching's book, stories that reveal a cunning mind and a spirit of self-promotion. Instead, the ancestors are dug up from the graves of history and embalmed again in reverence.

Two Queer French Films

Dans la maison (In the House), 2012, directed by François Ozon, is many things. It is a story about a cynical teacher and a talented student. It is also a study of the sexual frustration of middle-class women, the art gallery owner married to the teacher, and the housewife married to a corporate hick. At the heart of the film is the voyeur in everyone of us, the student (compelling Ernst Umhauer) who wants to see what a perfect family looks like, the teacher (Fabrice Luchini), and his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas). It is an homage to Teorema by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which a stranger enters a home and seduces everyone in it, maid, son, mother, daughter, and father. And, most profoundly, the film is an allegory for the creative process. The fact that all these levels cannot be separated from one another easily as the film moves towards its unexpected ending is a testament to the skill and vision of the director. GH and I watched it last weekend, and we still felt its impact last night as we watched another French gayish movie.

Directed by Zabou Breitman, L'homme de sa vie (The Man of My Life), 2006, is a lesser film, but is nevertheless lifted above the average by its beautiful cinematography and the acting of its leads. Charles Berling plays Hugo, the gay man who walks into the life of married man Frédéric, who is played by Bernard Campan. The chemistry between the men was understated but powerful. Frédéric is attracted to the unconventional and articulate intellect in Hugo, and its promise of freedom and ecstasy. Hugo, whose attraction grows more slowly, is drawn to Frédéric's open sincerity, so different from his own dogmatic stance against marriage and relationships. Léa Drucker is wonderful as Frédéric's wife, realizing and then watching with anguish her husband falling in love with another. The minor characters were less well-integrated into the film than they could have been. The editing was somewhat choppy, and the surrealistic scenes were cheesy. The film is, however, persuasive in showing how a man, who has always taken his heterosexuality for granted, learns that he is capable of some other feeling.

Reading at Hunter College

Alison Park invited me to read to her Asian American Studies class at Hunter College last Wednesday. The class consisted of about 20 students, half of which were Asian American. There were a few more women than men. The students were taking the class to fulfill the requirement for pluralism in their studies, so not everyone there was an English major. In fact, someone there majored in Computer Science. They were a little quiet and shy at the beginning but warmed up soon.

I read them some family and New York poems from Equal to the Earth, stopped for questions, and then read from The Pillow Book as a lead-in to Sei Shonagon and her use of the list form. The students wrote their own list for "Things That Sound Beautiful," a topic suggested by the class. After they wrote down some ideas, I asked them to write them out again, this time aiming to elaborate, organize, paragraph, and delete. They came up with some great descriptions. I remember, in particular, wind chimes, a minor chord on a violin and the laughter of friends. I really enjoyed my time with them.

3 Poems in Axon

All three poems have epigraphs from Lee Tzu Pheng. Alvin Pang was the Consulting Editor for this issue of the Australian journal Axon. 

Vijay's Seshadri's "3 Sections"

Vijay's third collection, and it's well worth waiting for. The book is marvelous, constantly surprising. I enjoyed again the lacerating "Memoir" (which first appeared in The New Yorker) and the three apocalyptic visions of "This Morning" (which I first heard at a PSA reading). "Three Persons" is still a particular favorite. The theme of containing multitudes recurs in different guises throughout the book, culminating in the transformative ending of "Personal Essay," where the faces seen in a trance are themselves and more than themselves. I also love the memoir "Pacific Fishes of Canada" and will be sharing it with a colleague who teaches Moby Dick. The book takes many risks in its language--colloquial, mythic, sentimental, scientific--but rides the waves through the energy of its sentences.

Old Work, New Work, Public Work

Shakespeare's Globe is in New York, and I was lucky to get two tickets to the production of Richard III at Belasco Theatre last Friday. Disconcertingly, Mark Rylance played Richard for laughs, and achieved a new horror. Liam Brennan was brilliant too as Clarence, as was Paul Chahidi as Hastings. The rest of the cast was below par. It was an all-male cast. Of the men playing the women, the strongest was Joseph Timms as Lady Grey. The scene in which Richard tried to persuade Lady Grey to give her daughter to him in marriage was both funny and heartbreaking. Rylance's comic timing, aided by a stutter, turned seemingly innocuous lines into bombshells of laughter.

Yesterday was a beautiful, brisk day for gallery-hopping. GH and I saw the new sculpture by Richard Serra. Inside Out (2013), a single work made out of two curved plates, was tremendous. You think you know Serra's signature monumental work, and will therefore be unmoved by it. But I was, yet again, at the Gagosian gallery on 21st Street. At the other Gagosian on 24th Street, GH loved the patina achieved on the standing slabs of weatherproof steel in Intervals (2013). I was taken by the simple mass of Grief and Reason (for Walter). Reason was, I think, a bigger cast-iron block supporting a smaller block. Grief, next to it, was a smaller block supporting a bigger one.

Sean Scully also had new work, exhibited at Cheim & Read. The additions to his on-going series Wall of Light I found less compelling than the earlier ones. Much stronger was a new series called Landline. According to the press release, Scully has been spending much time in the Bavarian countryside south of Munich, Germany. The winter-time palette of grays and whites has led to a"softening, almost metaphysical approach" to his work. Night and Day, a bigger canvas than anything else by Scully that I had ever seen, was powerfully rhythmic in its eight bands of grays, whites and blacks. My favorite was Landline Pink (2012) with its uncovered streaks of blue and red.

A wonderful example of public art was Sheep Station by Francois-Xavier Lalanne. On display were 25 of the epoxy stone and bronze 'Moutons' by the late French artist. Grass and sheep overran the former Getty filling station at the corner of 10th Avenue and 24th Street. A pastoral dream too good to be true, it was the inaugural exhibition of Getty Station, a new public art program by Michael Shvo, real estate developer and art collector, and Paul Kasmin Gallery. The photo was taken by GH.

Francois-Xavier Lalanne, Sheep Station

Tara Bergin's "This Is Yarrow"

I can't praise highly enough this first book of poems by Tara Bergin. I'm into my second reading, and it's even more compelling than the first round. Favorites, familiar from PN Review or from New Poetries V, are here--"Looking at Lucy's Painting of the Thames," "Himalayan Balsam for a Soldier," "The Undertaker's Tale of the Notebook," "This Is Yarrow"--but now set in the company of poems that deepen and broaden their resonance.

"Acting School" acknowledges the distance between art and life, but brilliantly concludes that "there is a sufficient amount of physical truth" in the former to approximate, and even vivify, the latter. That physical truth I find confirmed, again and again, in the musicality of the verse. It is not drinking water, but in drinking air, poetry comes close to life.

The contradictions and tensions in married life are conveyed with nervous, even harrowing, energy. I love the poem "At the Garage." I was reading the book in Central Park, and had to share that poem with GH, who does not read much poetry. He liked the poem immensely too. The idea, and image, of smearing with grease everything one touches. Being a hands-on kind of person, he could appreciate fully the comparison of ink in tins that etchers use.

Lines from Batu Ferringhi

QLRS has just published my essay on Goh Poh Seng's book-length poem Lines from Batu Ferringhi. Thanks, Hsien Min and Shu Hoong. (In the same issue also, my answers to Shu Hoong's Proust Questionnaire.) The essay will have done its work if it interests someone to re-issue this vital work of Singapore literature.

Batu Ferringhi is a beach area in the north of Penang Island in Malaysia. In the 16th century, Portuguese traders from India stopped at Batu Ferringhi to replenish their water supplies, and their visits gave the place its name. "Batu Ferringhi" means "Foreigner's Rock". At this liminal space between land and sea, one seeks the foreign in one's familiar self. In the 1970s it was famous as a hippie's hangout, as a place where foreigners came to swim "in the nude at the freshwater pools" (according to Wong Chun Wai's 'Life's a beach in Penang'). Goh was not a hippie. He was a married man with children, a doctor, a man-of-letters and, as the Chairman of the National Theatre Trust Board from 1967 to 1972, an arts administrator. Lines from Batu Ferringhi does not refer to this portfolio of public selves, except for one mention of his family. It was as a private man that Goh escaped to Batu Ferringhi in search of renewal and refreshment.  

 In July 1974, Goh stayed at Batu Ferringhi for seven days and celebrated his 38th birthday on the fourth day of his stay. This life-event thus took place in the exact middle of his stay. The symmetry of this division is reinforced by the organisation of his book. Lines from Batu Ferringhi is divided into 10 sections, each section recording a day. The birthday makes up the four middle sections – the heart of the book – flanked on each side by three day-sections. The graceful organisation is, however, only apparent on hindsight. Reading from the beginning of the book, one encounters each section in the same way as the speaker experiences the succession of days: linear, yet unpredictable, or, as Goh puts it, "unguessable". Read more. 

Set Honor in One Eye and Death i' th' Other

Saw the Donmar Julius Caesar at St. Ann's Warehouse last night. I liked the concept very much. The play-within-a-play was set in a women's prison. Two levels of meaning ran simultaneously through the play. Shakespeare's Roman world of ambition and betrayal. Also, the modern prison system, with its goal of reform and lust for spectacle. The women were Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Portia, Calpurnia and so on, but they were also tough broads, rightly or wrongly incarcerated.

In that criminal world, Harriet Walter playing Brutus seemed to come from a different sphere, or from a different play. Her noble poise and her classical training fitted awkwardly with the rest of the cast. Jenny Jules as Cassius took some warming to, but was the most sympathetic figure by the end of the play. I loved the originality of having Mark Anthony (Cush Jumbo) sprawling on the floor, surrounded by a gun-toting mob as he started on his famous funeral oration, but the speech quickly became predictable as he mastered completely the will of the Roman crowd. Clare Dunne was a sensitive yet courageous Portia. Jade Anouka, as Calpurnia, allowed her character's tenderness to show through her haughty bearing.

Three Meta-meta Questions

TLS September 27, 2013

from Kevin Mulligan's review of A. W. Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics:

Moore asks three central meta-metaphysical questions. There is the Transcendence Question: can we make sense of “transcendent” things? Then there is the Novelty Question: can we make sense of things in radically new ways? Finally there is the Creativity Question: can we be creative in our sense-making, perhaps in a way that admits of no distinction between being right or wrong, or are we limited to looking for the sense that things already make? Moore’s own view of metaphysics is that it is a “fundamentally creative exercise.” This is partly explained by distinguishing between “propositional” and “non-propositional” knowledge and understanding. Propositional knowledge is knowledge of truths or facts; non-propositional knowledge includes practical knowledge, and the kind of understanding provided by art which shows things it does not say. Metaphysics, he also thinks, should put normative philosophy first: “the most important and the most exciting” way in which metaphysics is able to make a difference to us is by “providing us with radically new concepts by which to live.” He holds that metaphysics is at its best when it employs a mode of expression which is closer to that of art than that of theory. As for necessary connections or truths philosophers have often sought to identify, Moore is attracted by a view he attributes to Wittgenstein: “For something to be a necessity is for our stating it to be an enunciation of one of our grammatical rules.” This deflationary account of necessity is just one of the many part of Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy that Moore finds compelling, and which serve as an object of comparison in many of his chapters.

singaporepoetry.com

After three weeks of fussing with WordPress, getting stuff together and asking people for permissions, today I launched Singapore Poetry, an e-gallery of all things poetic about Singapore, including poetry! Three people are following the website, after the first day. I am designing an email newsletter using MailChimp to reach out to my sign-up list.

The inaugural page of SP consists of 12 posts:

(1) Singapore Writers Festival
(2) Featured Image: Jason Wee's "Vanishing Distance 5"
(3) Featured Poem: Alvin Pang's "What It Means To Be Landless"
(4) Tan Pin Pin's new documentary To Singapore, with Love, about political exiles
(5) DesignTaxi
(6) Joshua Ip's new book of poems Making Love with Scrabble Tiles
(7) Loh Kah Seng's history book Squatters into Citizens
(8) Singapore's Favorite Poem: a student nominates Cyril Wong's "A Kind of Hush"
(9) new books from Math Paper Press
(10) a newish on-line paper, The Independent, Singapore
(11) Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, and
(12) a science article about how poetry is like music for the mind.

There are three threads so far. One called Featured Image, the other called Featured Poem, and the last called Singapore's Favorite Poem.

Here's what I wrote on the Welcome page:


Dear Reader,

Thank you for visiting Singapore Poetry. I’m a Singapore poet living in New York, and this website is about poetry by Singaporeans, and all things poetic about Singapore.

When I tell people that I grew up in Singapore, they usually start talking about how clean it is, or how good the street food tastes, or they ask me if bubble gum is really banned in the country. Yes, the pavements in Singapore are so clean that you can eat off them. Yes, the food courts and hawker centers are a paradise for the gourmand. No, you can chew as much bubble gum as you like; you just can’t import it. 

Until they meet me, even the well-traveled, well-read cosmopolitans that many New Yorkers are do not know of any Singapore writers. They may have read Derek Walcott, but they have not heard of Edwin Thumboo. They do not know that there is a continuous tradition of Singapore poetry written since Singapore became independent of the British in 1965.

What’s more, the tradition is very much alive and kicking in this still-new century. Small independent presses have grown up alongside the established outfits. Bookstores like Books Actually and Select Books champion local literature. The annual Singapore Writers Festival showcases Singaporean as well as international authors. Singapore writers travel all over the world to read at literary festivals.

These are the exciting developments that I hope to bring to your notice. If you love good literature, this website is for you. If you love Singapore, or are intrigued by it, having visited, lived or worked in the country, or know someone who has visited, lived or worked in the country, this website is also for you. 

Though the spotlight is on Singapore poetry, this website will also showcase all things poetic about Singapore. By poetic, I don’t just mean beautiful or lyrical; I also mean some quality that cannot be measured in economic terms, but is pursued for its own sake. These other forms of poetry may be found in the performing and fine arts, music, film, design, landscape, people and, yes, food. Singapore Poetry is especially interested in news of doings, happenings, and beings that travel off the beaten track, fly under the radar, and break new ground. Things not already supported by government agencies or public institutions.

So, send me news of all things poetic about Singapore. Or comment on what interests you about the website. Follow Singapore Poetry via email or Word Press. Forward what you like to family and friends. Tell me what your favorite Singapore poem is. In the old word association game, you hear a word and say the first word that comes to mind. Next time someone says Singapore to you, say Poetry.

Cheers,

Jee Leong Koh

Macedonia Brook State Park

Saturday was a glorious day for hiking. P and J rented a zipcar and drove us to Macedonia Brook State Park, near Kent and the village of Macedonia in Connecticut. We took the Blue Trail, which crossed Cobble Mountain and gave us beautiful views of the Catskills and Taconics. Halfway through the trail, we changed to the Green Trail, and walked back to the car along the eponymous brook. There was a bit of rock scrambling in the first half of the hike, but the second half was a leisurely walk on an old pebbled road, under the cathedral ceiling of pines. Yellow leaves floated down in front of us in slow motion. Our feet crunched the dry leaves below.

Then, to celebrate, we made our way to Millbrook Vineyards and Winery for wine-tasting. The winery was in the Hudson Valley region, but it was not too difficult to drive there from Macedonia. We walked about the vineyards--Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Chardonnay, and the vineyard specialty, Tocai Friulano--and picnicked by the small man-made lakes on the estate. The tasting was worth doing, although I would recommend the more expensive Reserve tasting for the discerning wine-drinker.

New Edition of "Payday Loans"

The cover for the new edition of my first book of poetry, Payday Loans. The design is by by Shellen Teh. It was a real pleasure working with Shellen and with Jocelyn, the editor. They are so professional, and so willing to listen and make adjustments. And of course Kenny Leck makes it all happen. Big thank-you to the Math Paper Press team.

If you magnify the image, you can read my synopsis on the back cover.

Leslie Chamberlain on Roman Jakobson

TLS September 20, 2013

from "Dreams of displaced men" by Leslie Chamberlain:

The flexible way with truth and personal identity that Jakobson learnt seemed to have entered his work both indrectly, in his treatment of encoded meanings in poetry, and indirectly, in his praise for the poetic lie. His essays of the 1920s and 30s celebrated the emotional lie that sustained the hear, and the literary forgery that sustained the nation. Poets, he felt, lived in their personal myth, which was a special kind of truth. . . . In his poetics he cherished the freedom of the word always to mean something else. As he puts it in "What is Poetry" (1933), "Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not as a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and inner form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality". 

... 

If Mayakovsky transcended his misery "in the form of a cycle of transformations undergone by the hero", then Pasternak's lyric prose was "a railway journey during which his excited hero experiences a change of locality . . . ". There Jakobson imagined the vertical axis of imagination and contrasted it with the horizontal, not as evidence of the different ways in which speech can become imparied, but reflecting how, to escape an impossibly shut-down reality, the creative self can still dream; or it can lose itself in displacement. Two fundamental possibilities of continuing self-expression, metaphor and metonym, were open to the soul under pressure.