Posts

George Chauncey's GAY NEW YORK

 The full title of the book is  Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 . Subtle analysis combined with plenty of interesting detail makes this a terrific read. The style is not at all academic, and yet the rigor is so. The research into visual and textual documents held by a wide range of sources, such as purity movements, the police, local newspapers, doctors' reports, is impressive, and the documents themselves are read with sensitivity and insight. My biggest takeaways are (1) when the fairy, the emblem of the period, gives way to the gay, the view of queer men changed from being a gender status to a sexual identity, and (2) the notion of heterosexuality arose together with the notion of homosexuality, when the white middle-class men felt threatened by women's social progress and the fairies' increasing visibility. 

Straits Times Reviews SAMPLE AND LOOP

Image
  Thanks, Shawn Hoo, for this lovely review of SAMPLE AND LOOP in Singapore's broadsheet, the Straits Times. "His signature sensitivity for rhythm and metre propels the book forward and it swells to a climax in The Dying Nurse. Always the reinventor, Sample and Loop sees Koh create a form that feels unique and accommodates the world of diasporic feeling in its roaming, roving expansiveness." The book is available online in Singapore at wordimagesg/product-page/sample-and-loop . It's also available in the US on  Bookshop.org  and Amazon .

In That Strange Place

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Every year I teach sonnets to my Grade IX students, and so every year I teach  Claude McKay . A Jamaican, an Afro-Caribbean, a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, a Communist, a bisexual, he wrote not just poems of passion and protest, but also delightful novels about Black life in Jamaica ( Banana Bottom ) and America ( Home to Harlem ). One of my favorite poems of his is "The Harlem Dancer," where he finds himself in a highly pensive mood. Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway; Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes Blown by black players upon a picnic day. She sang and danced on gracefully and calm, The light gauze hanging loose about her form; To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm Grown lovelier for passing through a storm. Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise, The wine-flushed,

Didier Eribon's RETURNING TO REIMS

 Recommended by Henry Abelove, it's an excellent read. In this mix of memoir and critical analysis, French sociologist Didier Eribon asks why he had not written before about his working-class origins when he had written extensively on the also-stigmatized identity of being gay. The flight from Reims, where he grew up, to Paris is, on the one hand, a fulfillment of gay desire and, on the other, an abandonment of his class. Insightful analysis of how the social worlds and identities we are born into—including the worlds of work, education, sports, and "culture"—predetermine so much of our life. They show us what is possible; they also don't show us what is possible. It is a violence inflicted on both gay and working-class people, giving rise to an abiding feeling of shame that we can try to rework politically into pride and action, but we can never free ourselves from. Perhaps I am too influenced by the generic conventions of a memoir, but I would have liked to learn mo

Pomes in Blackbox Manifold

 I have 3 poems in Blackbox Manifold , published from the University of Sheffield, UK. Grateful thanks to editors Adam Piette and Alex Houen. "A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, they said and fled the violent neighborhood to burbs, who knew zilch of the miracle of the bush burning and not burning up...."

Magical Islands

Weekly Column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Yesterday I was asked by a student writer of the school's newspaper to recommend a recent read for an article about students' reading habits and preferences. This was what I wrote back to her: "I just finished reading Rachel Heng's novel  The Great Reclamation , and I loved it. It is a bildungsroman, but it is also an epic. The story follows Ah Boon from boyhood in a fishing village to adulthood in the government. In the process, it also traces the trajectory of Singapore from the last days of British rule to the heady times of the country's post-independence development. What is lost in the rush to modernize? What does modernization do to one's sense of self? These are questions that the novel explores with keen sympathy and insight. And with magical islands to boot." What I could have added to modernization but did not, was the question about what is lost in the rush to statehood.

Resolutions and Irresolutions

Column written for the weekly Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  As poetry editor of the Evergreen Review, I'm organizing the NYC-based journal's new year poetry celebration "Resolutions and Irresolutions," featuring Amber Atiya, Brad Vogel, and Katherine Swett, on Tuesday, Jan 16, 7 pm, at a Tribeca home (RSVP me at jkoh@singaporeunbound.org). Why that event name? I was thinking of the obligatory new year resolutions, certainly, but I was also thinking of the equally obligatory irresolutions of poets and poetry. The fiercer the pressure on poetry to be didactic and activist,  the harder I find myself resisting it in favor of indecision, ambiguity, questions, and irony. There is a gap, I have discovered, between being a citizen and a poet. They are related, but they are not the same. The citizen wants justice above all, the poet wants beauty. And an ideal society worthy of its name must find the space to accommodate the poet, its unreliable ally, its steadf