Song of a Reformed Headhunter

To the Tune of “This Is Home, Truly” I am a Good Class Bungalow, You are a No Class Flat.    I live and work among the shmos, a natural aristocrat. I am a Good Class Bungalow And not a No Class Flat. I’m rich in show and hung with dough, And yet no caveat. I am a Good Class Bungalow. Don’t say, I No Class Flat. Just one slip of the tongue, you know POFMA’ed you will get. I am a Good Class Bungalow Supporting No Class Flats. That fairy tale from long ago Better believe or—SPLAT! I am your Good Class Bungalows, I am your No Class Flats. I am your River sung and flow Through zilch and ziggurats.

 It's nice to have so many little details all in one place when I can only remember bits and pieces read from articles and other books about Auden. A useful reference. I think Carpenter is right to stress Auden's middle-class, Edwardian upbringing. His verse was innovative at all stages of his writing career, and he lived into the 1970s, but in his attitude to homosexuality, his longing for a settled, domestic life, and his return to the Christian fold, he showed the deep marks of home. Nevertheless Carpenter is alert to how Auden's travels and different habitations around the world influenced his writing. The biographer pays his subject the tribute of close attention.

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . "Art can activate the inert," I heard the Singaporean theater artist Ong Keng Sen say in his keynote lecture for last weekend's 6th biennial Singapore Literature Festival in NYC. "It can activate what is latent, what is potential." This is one of many gems that I will carry with me after the festival. Another is the story that  Ajoomma  writer-director He Shuming told about joining a group tour from Singapore to Korea to research the aunties for his film. Hearing that he was single, the ajoommas wanted to match him with their daughters, but on learning that he was a filmmaker, they stopped.  The stories were both funny and sobering. Filmmaker Dev Benegal shared his memory of sitting besides a famous film editor for four whole years in order to learn how to direct. Author and curator Simon Wu explained his urgent and joyful discovery of forgotten Asian American artists in NYC. Theater-mak...

 I had a lovely, wide-ranging conversation about my book SNOW AT 5 PM with poet Indran Amirthanayagam. Originally from Sri Lanka, which Indran still calls by its older name Ceylon, Indran is a naturalized American who used to work in the diplomatic corp. His own poetry is powerfully influenced by Whitman, O'Hara, and Lorca. 

 Flaubert's contemporaries praised Sentimental Education for taking the moral pulse of his generation. Reading it at this radical and reactionary time, I think it takes the moral pulse of my own generation. Here are the fanatical ideologues on the left and right, the cynical opportunists, the pure-hearted idealists, the private egos, the public facades, the loves, the lusts, the confusions, the contusions. After Frederic Moreau and his friend Deslauriers have gone through so much personal and social upheaval, how does one read the ending of this highly ironic yet deeply passionate novel? It's not simply nostalgic, that's for sure: They told one another the story at great length, each supplementing the other's recollections; and when they had finished:  'That was the best time we ever had,' said Frederic. 'Yes, perhaps you're right. That was the best time we ever had,' said Deslauriers. (translated by Robert Baldick and Geoffrey Wall)

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Do you play chess? I do, and I used to play it every day during recess in secondary school with a friend who was as keen on it as I was. As I knew from that young age, chess is a sport. It requires intense focus, discipline, and the will to beat your opponent. It is also an art, as I also knew, because it demands creativity, subtlety, and a love of beauty. The sacrifice of a rook to launch a mating sequence. The stark precision of an endgame with just the kings and four pawns. When I stood before the early Russian novels by Vladimir Nabokov in Eslite Bookstore in Kuala Lumpur, where I paid a short visit in August, it was an easy decision to pick up  The Luzhin Defense . I knew the Russian writer loved chess almost as much as butterflies. I wanted to know how he would deal with the game in a work of fiction. From his third novel written in Russian, translated by Michael Scammell, I learned that chess is...

 I read Nabokov's third Russian novel The Luzhin Defence while on vacation in Penang, after picking up the book in Kuala Lumpur. The novel is very enjoyable. There is a deep paradox in Nabokov's treatment of his chess-playing protagonist: it is at once warm and cold. The warmth comes from the Bildungsroman mode, the loving recreation of a Russian setting, the tender analysis of exile, the sympathetic understanding of artistic passion. The cold comes from the art of fiction itself, since the author knows that his fictional creation cannot escape whatever fate he is designing for him. The logic of chess underlines, in this novel, the logic of fiction. Appropriately, I started reading Sandi Tan's novel Lurkers when I returned from Malaysia to Singapore. Appropriately because Sandi grew up in Singapore. Her first novel The Black Isle is obviously based on Singapore. It is nothing like any Singaporean novels that I have read. She has lived in Los Angeles county for many years n...

 This book of essays by Singaporean journalist and activist Kirsten Han is informative, clear-eyed, and nuanced. Every Singapore should read it.

A poem for the 70 individuals who walked to Singapore's Istana to deliver 140 letters to the PM on 2 Feb 2024, as part of the National Day of Solidarity with Palestine. 3 of them--Sobikun Nahar, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori, and Annamalai Kokila Parvathi--were ridiculously charged with disturbing public order by illegally organizing, or abetting with organizing, a public procession in a prohibited area. Walking to the Istana They do not need a head nor do they want a tail. They are all heads, all eyes, all mouths, all legs, all hands, umbrellas up against the onslaught of the sun. They are cool, and young as the crescent moon lighting up lovers' rendezvous and drinking parties and the unworldly debates of secret handshakes. They know of others who also walked such roads, when buses were divided into front and back, when a state was crossed to pick up a handful of salt. They understand they can easily be replaced by those coming up behind them, even younger, smarter, and stronger,...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Congratulations to  Rahad Abir  for winning the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction! We're so proud of you! Past winners include Malcolm Tariq, Ruby Lal, and Natasha Trethewey. The award citation reads: " Bengal Hound  is authentic and complex, and the storytelling skills on display here are impressive. At times the narrative becomes tight and abrupt, a mirror of what is happening with the protagonist. Overall, this is a vividly imagined, smartly edited novel. " At its very core a story of love and loss,  Bengal Hound  traces the turbulent years of East Pakistan that led to a mass revolution, eventually culminating in the creation of Bangladesh. Rahad Abir conjures up characters haunted by memory and trauma in a society reeling from the pains of the Partition of British India. A powerful exploration of the dynamics of nationalism, family, religion, and gender relat...

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .   Gaudy Boy is proud to publish this astonishing story collection  The Way You Want To Be Loved , by Aruni Kashyap. It is praised by Amitav Ghosh as "poignant, finely crafted." We think you will love it as much as we do. At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly-arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike’s Indian girlfriend.  In agile and frank prose,  The Way You Want to Be Loved  tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India’s Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village s...

 Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . The Straits Times, Singapore's main broadsheet,  reported  that some Singaporean parents are not sending their children to the US for college because of the ongoing campus protests. One student told the newspaper, "My parents dissuaded me from attending a university in the US because they felt I might get influenced by the culture to protest and get into trouble." A PSA to these parents: Your children do not have to leave Singapore to learn to engage responsibly with the world. Last Friday, 40 students and alumni of Singaporean institutes of higher learning delivered 40 letters to the Ministry of Home Affairs opposing the newly proposed Maintenance of Racial Harmony Bill.  Their letter , a model of reason and clarity even if you don't agree with their stance, deserves an answer from the Ministry. It also shows clearly how student activism around Israel/Gaza has broadened to a critique of cens...

 Written in Tamil by Jeyamohan, and translated into English by Priyamvada Ramkumar, these are stories of secular saints who burn with aram, or dharma. Even the religious ones among them are secular in the sense that their care and concern are for the people and animals of this world and not their own spirituality or the afterlife. Their idealism is enmeshed with their lived experience, both brought out so vividly through a passionate yet subtle art. Their stubbornness against adversity and opposition is informed by their knowledge of politics and literature. They give the lie to the idea that goodness is bland. It is, instead, a flaming sword. This is the first work by Jeyamohan that I've read, and I will be on the lookout for others. Please continue to translate him into English! 

  May 15, 2024: A night of readings to commemorate 76 years of the Nakba and to stand in solidarity with Palestine. Nakba Then and Now: Refuse Silence invites you to raise your voice, amplify the Palestinian struggle for freedom, and demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Nakba Day marks the devastation of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 through ethnic cleansing and expulsion of a majority of Palestinian people. Nakba Day is about resisting expulsion and erasure. Today, as we are witnessing another Nakba, the world is also rising up on every continent. This event is part of the Publishers for Palestine coalition's Exist, Resist, Return: A Week of Action for Nakba Day (May 14-21).  Reading by Aidah Masoud, Ibtisam Azem, Najla Said, Huda Fakhredinne, Maaza Mengiste, Valérie Gruhn, Mona Eltahawy, Sean Jacobs, Emna Zghal, Suha Araj, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Christina Dhanuja, Zohra Saed, Christopher Stone, Suneela Mubayi, Hafsa Kanjwal, Omar Berrada, Anna Arabindan Kesson, Jee Leong Koh,...

  "Similarly, the poem, for all its labour and craft, is merely one person's understanding of another, possibly misjudged, and one that arguably says more about the writer than the subject. And though this current of self-critique runs through the entire collection, this project of portraiture in verse (in which both interviewer and interviewee curate the details that are meant to present an entire life in short verse) seems too important for the poems to abandon. The subtitle of the collection, 'A Simple History of Singaporeans in America', speaks to this confident ambivalence. Together, the verse portraits form a history of a community, but they remain "simple" – snapshots of particular lives in a particular place. It is a documentary and poetic project with inherent limitations, but nonetheless worthwhile." Thanks, Kristina Tom, for this perceptive review of SAMPLE AND LOOP: A SIMPLE HISTORY OF SINGAPOREANS IN AMERICA. And thanks, Yong Shu Hoong, for ...

 Raymond Willimas' Border Country is a superb novel. I'm surprised that it's not better known. How does one measure the lives of an individual and their community? Social science and theory render them abstract and general, like the mountaintop view of a farming valley, but a novel, such as this, can describe the minute but all-important particulars. The style is plain, as befits the "blunt truculence" of this Welsh village on the border with England, but it is always evocative; so much is said by not being said. The occasional lyricism takes off from the road and soar into the air. How does Matthew/Will Price go home after leaving it for London and a university lectureship? In his own words: "Only now it seems the end of exile. Not going back, but the feeling of exile ending. For the distance is measured, and that is what matters. By measuring the distance, we come home." The stories in Diane Oliver's Neighbors just got stronger and stronger as I r...

 It is an odd experience to read these two slim books one after another, Hervé Guibert's My Manservant and Me (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) and Augusto Monterroso's The Gold Seekers  (translated by Jessica Sequeira). Both books were written towards the end of the lives of the acclaimed authors. Both play with the conventions of a memoir, Guibert by fictionalization, Monterroso by fragmentation. There the similarities end. Whereas Guibert focuses on the decrepitude of age and the ambiguous help that youth can give, Monterroso searches for the origins of things in childhood and the influence of the adults at the beginning. Not just the contents but the ambitions differ too. My Manservant and Me aims to be a small masterpiece, but The Gold Seekers , which covers only the first fifteen years of its author's life, ends intentionally incomplete. Although both books contains surreal elements, yet their approach is very different. Guibert gives a surrealistic twist to life,...

 Grateful thanks to Mitali Chakravarty for reprinting "The Ceramicist" in the World Poetry Day edition of Borderless journal , along with many fine contributions on the theme of refugees and migrants. Very aptly the contributions span the world. 

 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. 

  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 .

 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,...

 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...

 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...."

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....

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...